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Paper Two:

Fake News and its Affects on Knowing the Truth

Kristopher Matthews

Comm 101

Professor Michel

February 21, 2023

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Fake News and its Affects on Knowing the Truth

In a world where social media is popular, fake news and false information are bound to

occur. Social media is not evil in and of itself, but it is very easy to use it for evil. This can be

seen very well in the United States. People in and outside of the country can use social media to

cause division and sow chaos. I want to focus on how fake news and misinformation can cause

division and how it can make the truth harder to find.

By using social media, evil people can separate us and cause division throughout our

communities. The documentary, Fake: Searching For Truth In The Age Of Misinformation, and

the article I found both talk about the dangers of fake news. Many points were made in the

documentary, but I want to focus on the types of fake news and how it is used to cause division.

When it comes to fake news, the documentary tells us that there is more than one. One of the

interviewees, Camille Francois, shed some light on the different types of fake news. She

classified them into three categories. The first category is the use of deceptive actors. This means

people falsify their identities on social media to promote false information or propaganda. The

second category is untrustworthy behavior. This is where some person amplifies their wrong

message to get more and more people to see it. The final type she goes through is when people

alter the content. This is when people change something about a piece of media and twist it to fit

their false narrative. An example of this would be when Alex Jones called a school shooting a

hoax. He took the information and twisted it to fit his narrative. This ended up causing problems

between Alex Jones and the parents of the kids who were killed in this school shooting. Instead

of bringing the country together over this tragedy, fake news allowed people like Alex Jones to

take away from the severity of the event.

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Fake news is so much more effective now because of the growth and development of

social media and technology. This allows misinformation to spread quickly because the

information is right at the tip of your fingers, even if it is false. The reason why fake news

spreads so quickly is explained by the article by USC News written by Pamala Madrid. The

article says,

“Surprisingly, the researchers found that users’ social media habits doubled and, in some

cases, tripled the amount of fake news they shared. Their habits were more influential in

sharing fake news than other factors, including political beliefs and lack of critical

reasoning”. (Medzerian)

This means that when people who regularly use social media come across fake news, they are

more likely to share it with other people. Another article by Christy Galletta Horner, Dennis

Galletta, Jennifer Crawford, and Abhijeet Shirsat says,

With our access to an unprecedented amount of information at our disposal, one might

expect that people would make better decisions. However, people are repeatedly and

constantly exposed to information that is slightly biased at best and blatantly false at

worst. In their reactions, people move on to repost, retweet, and re-energize pernicious

fake news items. We believe that two major forces have led to our current problem:

media factors and psychological factors. (Horner)

These two factors are how easy it is to access this information and emotions. The improvement

of social media has allowed people to find information easily, even if the information is false.

Emotions can also cloud our judgment, especially when it comes to arguments.

Another issue with fake news is that it causes division where there does not need to be. In

cases where it would be infinitely better to come together, misinformation can cause people to
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believe different things. With all the fake news floating around, convincing people of what is true

becomes increasingly tricky. An example of this is during the Covid-19 pandemic. There was a

lot of misinformation going around calling Covid-19 fake or a government hoax. This only

caused division among people and slowed down the progress of getting us through the pandemic.

An article by Oberiri Destiny Apuke and Bahiyah Omar talks more about this issue. They discuss

how the spread of misinformation has even caused more panic. Regarding fake news in relation

to Covid-19, they say,

“The authors also concluded that many believed the Chinese government had created the

virus. While others have also been made to understand that the US government created

the virus to undermine the Chinese government. This fake news proliferated, not only

create hate on the Chinese race but also put the health of people at risk as well as

undermine the efforts of government in implementing preventive measures”. (Apuke)

Several topics were discussed in this quote. The first thing discussed was how fake news would

cause people to disagree about the virus's origins. Fake news and misinformation even caused

people to mistrust the government and try to call out people who believed in what the

government was saying. This caused problems among many people. The fake news surrounding

Covid-19 especially affected people who were Asian. Because of fake news, people thought it

was the Asians' fault for the spread of the virus. This may seem ridiculous to some people, but

this shows the grip that fake news can have on people. Fake news can cause people to hate a

whole race for no reason. The last topic discussed in the quote was that fake news caused people

to try and undermine the government and the protective measures they were trying to implement.

The fact that fake news can cause that may become a real problem. Trying to undermine the

government is dangerous, and the fact that some faceless person on the internet could topple a
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government is scary. According to the article by Christy Galletta Horner, Dennis Galletta,

Jennifer Crawford, and Abhijeet Shirsat tells us that many other people think that fake news is a

problem in America. The article says,

According to a recent Pew survey, about half (50%) of Americans believe that fake news

is a serious problem today in the United States (US)–more so than climate change (46%),

racism (40%), and terrorism (34%). (Horner)

This shows that fake news is starting to become a bigger issue, and more people are becoming

aware of it. This begs the question, what are some effective and realistic ways to solve this

monumental problem.

Often when people are presented with information in their daily life, they do not know

how to check to see if it is real. This is shown in a study done by Kirill Bryanov and Victoria

Vziatysheva. Upon completion of their research, they found that people believe in fake news and

misinformation for three key reasons. They reported,

“The study identifies three broad groups of factors contributing to individuals’ belief in

fake news. Firstly, message characteristics—such as belief consistency and presentation

cues—can drive people’s belief in misinformation. Secondly, susceptibility to fake news

can be determined by individual factors, including people’s cognitive styles,

predispositions, and differences in news and information literacy. Finally,

accuracy-promoting interventions such as warnings or nudges priming individuals to

think about information veracity can impact judgements about fake news credibility”.

(Bryanov)

This means that the way that misinformation is presented greatly affects how believable it is to

people. Another factor contributing to how believable fake news can be is how people think.
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People’s inclinations, whether political or otherwise, can make them more susceptible to aspects

of fake news that would appeal to them.

As social media and fake news grows, there have been several attempts to slow the rate

that fake news is consumed and spread. One of the solutions that I wanted to focus on is some of

the positives and negatives of the solution that Facebook came up with during the 2016

presidential election. An article by Katherine Clayton, Spencer Blair, and others tells us,

This study evaluates the effectiveness of strategies that could be used by Facebook and

other social media to counter false stories. Results from a pre-registered experiment

indicate that false headlines are perceived as less accurate when people receive a general

warning about misleading information on social media or when specific headlines are

accompanied by a “Disputed” or “Rated false” tag. (Clayton)

In this article, they talk about how Facebook decided to tackle this issue. On some political

articles, Facebook would tag “Disputed” or “Rated false.” This would let the reader know that

the information that they are reading may not be completely true or it was not true at all. This

seems like a good solution, but there are problems with it. While these tags did reduce the

numbers of people being tricked by fake news and misinformation, the tag “Disputed” was too

inconclusive to help. The article says,

However, tags warning that a claim is “Disputed” may not be sufciently direct. We

therefore evaluate the efect of a specifc warning directly stating that a false news headline

is untrue in an additional condition. A warning of this nature, though not yet used by

Facebook, might convey a stronger message than the inconclusive terminology of the

“Disputed” warning. (Clayton)

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This is not the only problem with Facebook’s solution to the fake news problem. The tags

actually called people to believe the true articles less. Katherine Clayton and the other authors

say this about this issue,

Finally, though exposure to the “Disputed” or “Rated false” tags did not affect the

perceived accuracy of unlabeled false or true headlines, exposure to a general warning

decreased belief in the accuracy of true headlines, suggesting the need for further

research into how to most effectively counter false news without distorting belief in true

information. (Clayton)

While Facebook had a good solution to combat fake news, it was not complete enough.

In conclusion, fake news on social media can be very dangerous and is a problem in the

United States. This should not be ignored because, if left unchecked, it can become a very

serious problem. While coming up with a solution may be difficult, it is not impossible. It will

take time, but society will be better off in the long run if we deal with the fake news and

misinformation now.
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References

Apuke, & Omar, B. (2021). Fake news and COVID-19: modelling the predictors of fake news

sharing among social media users. Telematics and Informatics, 56, 101475–101475.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2020.101475

Bryanov, & Vziatysheva, V. (2021). Determinants of individuals’ belief in fake news: A

scoping review determinants of belief in fake news. PloS One, 16(6), e0253717–e0253717.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253717

Medzerian, D. (2023, January 17). Study reveals key reason why fake news spreads on

social media. USC News. Retrieved February 10, 2023, from

https://news.usc.edu/204782/usc-study-reveals-the-key-reason-why-fake-news-spreads-on-

social-media/

Horner, Galletta, D., Crawford, J., & Shirsat, A. (2021). Emotions: The Unexplored Fuel of

Fake News on Social Media. Journal of Management Information Systems, 38(4),

1039–1066. https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2021.1990610

(2020, February 14). Fake: Searching For Truth In The Age Of Misinformation | Full

Documentary |. Connecticut Public. Retrieved February 10, 2023, from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMv4Mbdf9HA

Clayton, Blair, S., Busam, J. A., Forstner, S., Glance, J., Green, G., Kawata, A., Kovvuri,

A., Martin, J., Morgan, E., Sandhu, M., Sang, R., Scholz-Bright, R., Welch, A. T., Wolff,

A. G., Zhou, A., & Nyhan, B. (2020). Real Solutions for Fake News? Measuring the

Effectiveness of General Warnings and Fact-Check Tags in Reducing Belief in False

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Stories on Social Media. Political Behavior, 42(4), 1073–1095.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-019-09533-0