Fake News

hello everyone,

It’s Marcus back here again and I am looking forward to writing my 8th blog for you guys to dive into. It has been a crazy past couple of weeks with Covid-19 taking over pretty much the entire world, so it is good to take a step back and be able to write about something else
Today’s blog is about the notion of fake news in the digital landscape and how it plays a part in our world. I am also going to dive into the idea on why people are not as savvy or interested in the online content that comes out today. To build off of that, what can we do to help educate them on that content because it is important. The last piece of information I want to take a look at and write about is the idea of how do we stay informed in reality even with a world with fake news?
Most certainly lots of interestings things to think about and I am here to give my opinion while giving you more information on the content through my class discussions and readings.
A tweet was posted by someone named Van Applegate and the tweet wrote “Friend of mine said she was handed a FAKE @washingtonpost paper at Union Station this morning. Dated May 1, 2019. Said it was printed on real paper stock. Someone spent some coin producing this.“ THE NPR continued to write that this article was being distributed outside of the White House. It doesn’t get more serious than that in terms of spreading fake news in front of the White House. This is an example on how fake news can affect the general population and it needs to be limited as much as possible.
When it comes to digital media savviness, pew research center talks a lot about the digital media and how nowadays it takes a certain savviness to keep up with it. The article says, “Those with high political awareness, those who are very digitally savvy and those who place high levels of trust in the news media are better able than others to accurately identify news-related statements as factual or opinion.” the more knowledgeable you become, the more aware you are when it comes to the information being thrown at you on a daily basis, and knowing whether it is real or not.
A statistic provided from the pew research center says, “36% of Americans with high levels of political awareness (those who are knowledgeable about politics and regularly get political news) correctly identified all five factual news statements, compared with about half as many (17%) of those with low political awareness”.
This quote shows how the percentages differentiates when it comes to the awareness and savviness of the general population in regards to the media being released.
The way we become aware of fake news is trusting the correct sources releasing the information. Having a mindset of not believing everything you see on the internet as well. Another way of becoming more aware is if you know it is fake news, spread that information to others to limit that flame from spreading throughout many people.

fake news is a real thing and we the people need to become more aware, savvy, honest and authentic because intelligence about what is going on in the world is a powerful thing and false power only divides us more.