“Are we at a crisis point with the level of fake news that come out. If so, what are the potential damaging outcomes?” Alexander Yang
In a world where the media has become an essential part of our lives, we have easy access to information everywhere we go. It also means that it is easy for someone to put out fake news to the public. I believe that we are at a crisis point where the amount of fake news in the media is high which can result in damaging effects to the community.
According to an article on recode.net, two-thirds of the American population gets their news from some type of social media. Media outlets include Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram. According to niemanlab.org, 67% of the population who get news from social media are Facebook users with the next social media outlet being YouTube followed by LinkedIn. Given the large population of people who use social media to gain access to information in the news, the production of fake news has allowed us to distort our perception of what is actually going on.
According to CNBC, nearly 70% of people express themselves with fake news being used as a tool. That being said, technology has made it easy for those to manipulate information and distort our perception of events going on in the news. Some of the damaging effects of fake news having a presence in our society are that it could result in the misleading of information that is distributed to the public. The production of fake news is also an easy target towards the uninformed. In other words, it can influence the perceptions of those who do not follow news on the media as often as others within the U.S. population.
With media becoming more prevalent in our daily lives, information about what is going on in the world via the news has become much easier to access for our media centric society. As a result of the rise of media outlets, fake news can becomes more prevalent distorting the perceptions of the uninformed as this particular group of people have not developed the skepticism that other people have when listening to the news or viewing fake news that is distributed to the public via social media. With that in mind, I do believe we are at a crisis point with the amount of fake news released in the media.