Consequences of Fake News (Term Paper Sample)

Consequences of Fake News
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Consequences of Fake News
Since Trump took over power, fake news has morphed from a rarely used vocabulary to America’s greatest threat to democracy. So great is the threat presently that the term emerged as 2017’s word of the year due to prevalent usage. The proliferation of social media and news sites creates the quandary that is fake news. A survey by Carson unearthed that out of the 65 surveyed nations, 33 of them had pro-government media while 30 had paid pro-government commentators (Carson, 2017) (see Appendix A). The magnanimity of the issue supersedes conversations about such critical issues as climate change, hunger and terrorism. Fake news refers to items of news released from various quarters to spread misinformation either for or against a certain issue or subject to attain a specified agenda. Fake news creates uncertainty and raises doubt in the existing informational infrastructure, doubts this infrastructure’s aptitude to detect informational bias and affects the authority of knowledge not only from the media but also in other fields such as science.
In Fake News and the Future of Journalism, Pablo Boczkowski writes that fake news has existed “for as long as truthful” news (Boczkowski). As such, it creates “ambivalence” in the existing media and informational infrastructure due to unlimited laws of speech and its wide reach (Boczkowski). The “scale, scope and horizontality” of the contemporary information flow is unprecedented (Boczkowski). Social media and news sites reach billions of people daily, which undermines the gains made to legitimize journalism. Fake news is fueled by the freedoms of expression and speech as they permit people to almost limitlessly express and speak their minds (Boczkowski). People not only consume news content but also they create it more so with the ubiquity of social media sites. Secondly, Boczkowski writes that fake news raises question about journalism’s ability to detect bias, especially with the spread of algorithmic editing. The algorithms utilized by such sites as Google and Facebook are human-programmed, which exposes them to potential conscious and unconscious bias (Boczkowski). With the proliferation of fake news, more questions about algorithmic editing and how it identifies and dissipates bias in reporting further dilute the credibility of truthful journalism.
Thirdly, Boczkowski writes that the former two consequences of fake news birth a before unseen “cultural authority of knowledge” (Boczkowski). More disheartening is the spread of this knowledge authority questionability to conventionally authoritative subjects, such as sciences and medicine. For instance, fake news on the effects of vaccines have culminated in people questioning their role in the contraction of autism (Carson, 2017). Despite accredited experts in these fields make vehement on such issues to the contrary, fake news creates mass hysteria, concern and doubt. Albeit unfounded, fake news undermines such institutions’ credibility profoundly and retrogresses social and academia gains in these fields. Owing to all these perception consequences, Boczkowski feels that drastic changes in the short-term are premature not unless consequential perception is changed (Boczkowski). Nonetheless, he is optimistic with alterations in algorithmic sifting of fake news and journalism organizations demonstrating and defending the veracity of news.
The prime contributor to fake news in America are digital communication tools that provide a platform for the spread of such news. These tools avail a wide audience and spread doubt, hatred, misconstrued and biased perception for the public to imbibe (Newton, 2018). Fake news creates disunity in America by dividing the populace between believes and doubters of fake news. As such, it destabilizes and disharmonizes American institutions and democracy. Finally, fake news also influences American politics by availing a platform to sensitize the public a