Hi guys! This is Jason and this time, my blog post is about Fake news as it says on the title. You all probably know what fake news is. It’s news that is fake. However, as I am about to tell you, fake news is quite dangerous. The main reason why is because nowadays, because social media is very advanced and tons of people around the world use it, if someone posts a fake story on there, tons of people would see it. If the trouble ended there, it would have been fine, but the real problem is that when these people see these fake stories, they start retweeting the news to all their friends and family and their friends and family will do the same until almost everyone has seen it. Since one single post that is fake can be seen by so much people, this can be used badly by spreading false rumors that can even affect presidential elections. For example, someone could post falsely that the president who is campaigning has committed a serious crime and because tons of people saw this and re-tweeted it to their friends, the president lost the election.
Then how might fake news be stopped? Well, another problem with fake news is that it is almost impossible to try and prevent. By the time that someone realizes that this news is false, tons of people would have seen it and it would already have influenced the people. Also, it is really hard to try and persuade everyone who has heard the news that the news that they saw was actually false. Putting administrators on social media sites would also not work because then you would need a lot of admins to prevent it because they would have to watch over everything people saw. So, I think that the most realistic solution is for people to try and figure out which news is fake. This seems pretty hard to figure out if a realistic seeming article is false or not, but it is quite simple. First of all, when you see a post on social media, check for a link to a credible news source. Average people will likely not be posting stuff without major news agencies knowing. If the link is trustable this means that the news is true because unlike ordinary people, if a news agency posts fake news, then people would stop trusting their agency and their business will be in danger so they probably won’t do that. Secondly, ask yourself “Why am I sending this link to everyone else?” This doesn’t mean that you should stop sending anything, this means that you should rethink whether you should actually be sending this post to tons of other people. With these steps, fake news could be reduced greatly. I think that social media nowadays is really good if you use it well, but it can be really bad if it is used badly. Bye!
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