Jay's Expose

In an age where you can’t trust anyone, how can you know where to turn? This is the problem a lot of people face today. We could see in the last US Presidential election that the circulation of fake news was extremely prevalent in a wide variety of sources from social media sites, to news stations to newspapers. As time has gone on, people have started to realize that they are being fed a lot of misinformation. Social media is one platform where it is painfully noticeable that individual feeds are becoming echo chambers where opposing opinions from the user’s own go to die. An echo chamber is essentially a place where the same ideas are amplified or agreed upon and the opposing views aren’t displayed. The effects of something like this could be, for example, if someone is only seeing facebook posts that are in line with what they believe and then they get the idea that most, if not all, of their friends agree with what they’re saying. One idea that has been floating around in attempts to ease this situation of a fake news epidemic is to have all political ads be labeled with the organization that is paying for it. The idea behind this is that although people tend to be influenced heavily by what they see even when they don’t realize that if the people know who is influencing them they can be more discerning in what they believe versus what they don’t.

Even with more transparency with advertisements, we have a long way to go in terms of consumer manipulation. It is hard to be trusting of the news that is delivered when things like fake news, subtle advertising, and psychological manipulation exist. Something that struck me was an advertising tactic that involves using a person’s face and morphing it with someone else’s face to trick the consumer into trusting the information delivered. This causes them to feel a familiarity with the new face, but not to recognize who it is. It is a sneaky method of advertising that sounds like a wave of the future, but that is already upon us. It is one thing for companies that are trying to get ahead and get consumers’ attention, but it is over the line when campaigners start to use the same methods in order to gain votes in a republic. It takes away the value of having people vote for someone whose values align their own and turns the whole thing into a game. As Bruce Schneier of the Guardian well put it, “You want to vote for the candidates you think are best for the country; not the ones with the most effective psychological tricks.”

So if you can’t turn to social media to get the cold hard facts, where can you go? There are big name sources, like the New York Times or the Washington Journal. Additionally, there are the multiple user information corroboration sites, like Reddit, Quora, or Wikipedia. They bring information in different ways. While big name journals have biases based on the authors and editors who bring all of the content together, the websites that use algorithms to decide which posts to show based on popular opinion can be equally as biased. The main idea is that these days when it comes to news, you have to receive information with a grain of salt. It takes a careful hand to sift through and cross reference information to come to the truth. It would be so wonderful and utopianistic if everything we all read online was true, but that unfortunately isn’t the reality. The first step towards getting to the truth is acknowledging that there is fake news out there- and a lot of it.