Fake news seems to be the big story at the moment, but what exactly is fake news? My understanding is that it is a piece of information made to look like a mainstream report posted on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. which purports to disclose a shocking fact about something or someone.
I think we have all seen the one about artificial sweeteners which says that they are very bad for your health and that they will give you cancer, malaria, herpes, tennis elbow etc. etc. This one has been doing the rounds for years despite the fact that it can be easily checked and discredited. There are always a new batch of believers!
The worst kind of fake news though is the stuff that’s almost believable or that a section of the community wants to believe. We have seen this here in Bahrain over the years when the Press report that an MP has tabled a motion to ban alcohol or to ban expats from driving or to ban all cars older than 10 years. These are only motions proposed and usually have no chance of making it into law and this is how it is reported in the Press. The next thing we know there are huge scare stories on Facebook and Twitter reporting the proposals as law and then spread virally by the gullible who have made no attempt to check the truth.
Another type of fake news is when something is reported one way, and later reported as the opposite. An example of this was just before the US election when the FBI reported that they were opening a new investigation into Hillary’s emails. Two days later they reported that she had done nothing wrong. Too late, by then they had planted the seed in a lot of voters’ minds that she had done something wrong, and so they voted for Trump. Simple question would Hillary have won if the FBI had not made the first announcement? Fake news!
Fake news is now being decried by Western politicians and we are being told that it is the agent that will bring down civilisation as we know it. I doubt that, but we do need to be more careful in what we pass on. Before the Internet and social media, we had the professional media, TV, radio and newspapers. They were staffed with real and proper journalists who made sure that their stories were checked, and double checked for accuracy. This is why we did not really have a fake news problem then. Sure we had the odd ones that were bad apples or simply got it wrong, but it was not an endemic problem.
The Internet and social media are great at keeping in touch with cousins or finding a long-lost school friend, but it is not a reliable source of news. As for the mainstream media, many of them are presenting a political agenda. Fox, CNN, Al Jazeera, none of them are trusted by everybody. Even the BBC is accused of being left wing, but since the left wing accuse it of being fascist then perhaps that is the news source that we should trust.