In this modern society, social media is the main source of sharing and spreading information in the fastest way. Especially, news. News able to travel from one place to another place through social media faster than the story began. People can share news to another people anytime and anywhere they want. Social media platforms have been using by huge amount of people, one-in-three people in the world population, which mean around 3.5 bullion of online user in total. Facebook is the biggest social media platform, estimate around 2.4 billion users. Also, YouTube and WhatsApp have more than a billion user (Ospina, 2019). Currently, those most famous social media such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter allow its user to register and use the platform for free. As a result, these platforms has received enormous number of support and later became relevant for sharing information. In fact, not only relevant news was posted, number of unreliable news also shared thought those social media.
The reason why I choose to write this topic is mainly to send an awareness message to any social media users from the spread of false information on the platform. Also, to show the reader how to spot the fake news and how to prevent it.
Additionally, the spread of fake news is very common and it indeed happened every where. There are various of threatening from this effect to the user. Since social media able user to fake their identity, bad people usually take this opportunity to share false information, usually to get advantage form himself or to attack on other people’s reputation. Most common topic is relating to government and business. Top six type of fake news usually prefer to clickbait, propaganda, satire/parody, sloppy journalist, misleading headline, biased/slanted news. There are also six steps to find fake news such as:
- STEP 1: taking a closer look into source or the website of the article
- STEP 2: look beyond the headline which sometime writer made a clickbaid that the headline is not relating to the full meaning of the article
- STEP 3: checking other reliable source to confirm that this news does not only happen on a single source
- STEP 4: check the fact of the date and location
- STEP 5: check our biases by using our own knowledge that should we judge or believe the news or not
- STEP 6: check if the article is a joke (Webwise,2019)
On other hand, bots also contribute in creating fake news and boost the number of fake news on social medial. Millions of fake accounts have been created by bots which originally created by anonymous human that are considered as professional in using computer, spreading fake new across the world on social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. As research found that, there are 8.5% of 23 million bots on twitter. 140 million on Facebook and 27 million on Instagram (Cits, 2020). The fake reporter sometime driving the social going overwhelming after the false information has been spread and trust by the users on the social media. For instance, there is an out breaking of the Corona Virus from China. Along the story, there are mixed of false and reliable news relating to this virus on Facebook. Last week, there was a fake article rising on everyone’s home page regarding to the spread of Corona Virus in one of the city in Cambodia. This news has scared our people, some decided to leave their home to another city on the next day. Later, our government has announced that non of Corona Virus’s victim found. Even though the government’s announcement has been public on both social media and Television, some people still believed that the fake news is real.
Consequently, some people on social media confuse to believe the fake news and refuse to believe the real news. Consequently, the use of social media should be well considering for us as user before judging any information.
There are a lot of important from taking an awareness from this article and use it social media such as:
- It helps people spot the fake news that usually occur on social media
- Most of information on social media should not consider as a reliable information
- Prevent people from consume false news via social media
- Identify type of fake news
- The impact of fake news to us and our social
- Example of fake news
List of Reference:
- Ospina, O.E. (2019). The rise of social media. Our World In Data. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media
- Cits. (2020). How is Fake News Spread? Bots, People like You, Trolls, and Microtargeting. Cits. Retrieved from: https://www.cits.ucsb.edu/fake-news/spread
- Webwise. (2019). Explained what is fake news? Webwise. Retrieved from: https://www.webwise.ie/teachers/what-is-fake-news/
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