Fake News & Bullshit

There is one thing we can all agree on: there’s a lot of fake news and bullshit around these days. Research shows that over 60% of Americans access news through social media compared to traditional newspaper and magazines. That means that they often don’t know the origin of the news they consume, or don’t care as long as it supports their existing views.

Research also shows that false political information tends to spread three times faster than other false news. On Twitter, false tweets have a much higher chance of being retweeted than truthful tweets. What travels fastest is news that is novel or surprising and that evokes feeling of fear and disgust.

Journalists have identified that the platforms like Google or Meta profit from the distribution of fake news because they increase advertising revenue. There are even some websites that specialise in fake news just for the advertising it draws in.

One respected survey showed that nearly two thirds of us can no longer tell the difference between good journalism and falsehood. Around the same are finding it harder to tell if a piece of news was produced by a respected news organisation. So that’s a huge number adults—never mind kids or teenagers—in the dark about who to believe.

Teenagers mainly get their news from social media channels --- Instagram, Reddit, TikTok. No one wants to pay for news these days.

So how do we counter this epidemic? One proposal is to introduce Media Literacy into schools as a specific subject. Demark and Swedwn iare two of several countries to go this way. If the UK were to introduce such a subject what would you teach kids to help them spot fake news?

Another idea is to ‘innoculate’ the public by flooding the Web with genuine news so the fake news doesn’t get a look in.

A great cause for worry is the decline in people referring to mainstream media as no one seems to want to pay for news these days which reduces the resources available to good investigative journalism. We will therefore start off our discussion by a straw poll on what papers and websites as use as sources of news and, more importantly, WHY you trust these sources. I’m sure we all trust Emily Maitlis, Amal Rajan, and David Attenborough and, of course the whole of the BBC. Trust has become the big issue. So WHO do we trust these days?