Blog Post #2.5

Freewriting

As I am reading “The Real Fake News Crisis” I keep thinking about how reliable the authors sources. She keeps making the reader feel like fake news is a huge ordeal and is 99% of what we read online, which may be, but how does she know the difference between real and fake news herself? If fake news is so huge, how does she know that the information she gathers for her article is not fake itself? Also, how do we know that we as readers can trust this author and believe that what she states isn’t fake news? something that really stuck with me was the realization of how easy it is to put fake news out for a large audience. Everyone I know has Facebook including my mom, my dad, even my grandma. social media is universal, especially Facebook which caters to all ages. This leads me to think about the age disagreements in our society and what it could mean for fake news. If a “millennial” reads an article and brings up the topic to a member of an older generation, he or she is already predisposed to argue their position. Unfortunately for the fighting pair, that arguments outcome doesn’t matter because what does is now that an argument made people talk about the fake news and the article states,”If you’ve seen something before, ‘your brain subconsciously uses that as an indication that it’s true.’” One of the authors main ideas was to shame people who share or feed into fake news. at the moment, I am not sure what position to take on this idea. I agree that it could be useful in getting people thinking, but can also just lead to arguments which feed into the problem. Before I can make up my mind on this situation, I would want to know how much actual fake news is out there or seen, and how big of a “crisis” it actually is.