How big
a problem do you think confirmation bias is in terms of helping to make
fake news effective? How can we fight
against fake news and our own tendencies to believe what we would like to believe,
or to react in anger? Do you think fake
news is or could be a factor in inciting violence-- in Slovakia as well as
India? Can fact-checking websites help?
Fake news is currently discussed quite often and could definitely be considered as one of the trendiest topics. As internet becomes more and more popular and available, even in less developed countries like India or Pakistan that did not have access to it before, it also becomes the main source of information.
ReplyDeleteAnytime you want to know or prove something, you simply google it, and believe the answer google shows you. Often when you’re arguing with your friend about a certain issue, you let google decide which one of you was right. You never think or doubt what google shows you. Instead you just take it as the general truth. This is the main reason why we are the victims of viral fake news. The majority of people doesn’t question an internet source, they even believe it over their common sense.
The internet together with all its advantages, often brings us to its dangerous side including hoaxes and fake information. This is why choosing reliable sources is important, and why we should determine between what is real and what is fake. It however isn’t as easy as it might seem. Confirmation bias, as mentioned in the recording, is a manipulative psychological way of tricking ordinary people into believing information that aren’t by any means true. It might be difficult to overcome this tool or even ignore it, and really distinguish between reliable information.
I feel like younger generations, like us for example, are often taught at school how to use and choose reliable information from reliable sources. In the modern era this is very useful and comes in handy. It evokes critical thinking as well, and lowers the risks of believing something fake. However, the older generations didn’t have such advantage several years ago, and therefore this is the group most vulnerable to fake news.
By Rio
ReplyDeleteInternet was once a hope among people as a new platform that can finally enable the democratization of information, however, in reality, it is progressing in the opposite direction. A democratic society should be a place in which different people with different values can debate based on facts with respect and tolerance, although, the internet today seems to be threatening this basis. People on the internet nowadays have the tendency to hide inside their own echo chamber or filter bubble, immerse in biased information, and spread hate speeches depending on their own values. As the recording states, this tendency, or in other words, people's confirmation bias have led to the birth of fake news.
However, this does not mean that our confirmation bias was the biggest factor that contributed to the advent of fake news on the internet, although it was just an initiator. In fact, the problem of confirmation bias was already visible from decades ago, when our main source of information was still televisions and newspapers. From that time, people were already measuring the credibility of information based on their own values, and of course, there were several media who already had done something similar as what we call now as fake news. So how did fake news become such a problem on the internet and why? In my opinion, fake news has explosively increased on the internet due to the easiness to proliferate information. A research team in Washington State University conducted an experiment which analyzed the difference in the total number of shares between an article published by the Washington Post and an article that is confirmed to be fake news. Compared to the fake news article having more than 580 thousand shares, the Washington Post article had only 38 thousand shares within the same time. By one person clicking the share button on the top right corner of the website, the information is going to spread around the internet in an unpredictable speed, misleading people’s mind before the truth is known.
It is impossible for us to completely cut out our confirmation bias, and it is always going to influence us unconsciously. Hence, in my opinion, the most suitable method to prevent or exterminate fake news from the internet is by technology. Ås the recording stated, fact-checking sites can be used to warn the users from reading fake news, however, this is just an emergency measure. At last, the only way for us to fully exterminate fake news is by setting regulations and penalties in social media. In Facebook, accounts, groups, or pages linked to fake news media have been deleted by the company. In the case of WhatsApp, the company itself have already created a system in which a link can only be shared for 5 times consecutively, and when exceeded, it is going to show a pop-up message stating the unreliability of the source. Of course, companies are not allowed to fully control and monetize the users, however, it is required for us to have a tougher posture towards fake news in order to end this social problem that is circulating the world.