Week 9 - 'The rise and rise of fake news'

'The rise and rise of fake news'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-37846860

Social media has meant that real and fiction stories are presented in such similar ways that it is difficult to tell the two apart

• Winston Churchill - "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on"
• Increasing population of US adults get their news from social media - therefore how do we know what to trust 
• The National Report advertises itself as "America's Number 1 Independent News Source" and was set up by Allen Montgomery, who thinks that "There are highs that you get from watching traffic spikes and kind of baiting people into the story. I just find it to be a lot of fun."
• One of the stories was a scare about a US town being cordoned off with a deadly disease
• There is big money to be made from sites by The National Report which host web advertising, and these potentially huge rewards entice website owners to move away from funny satirical jokes and towards more believable content because it is likely to be more widely shared
• Snopes, one of the largest fact checking websites which fights online misinformation
"A recent study of local TV stations in the US conducted by Adornato revealed that that nearly 40% of their editorial policies did not include any guidelines on how to verify information from social media, yet news managers at the TV stations admitted that at least a third of their news bulletins had reported information from social media that later was revealed to be false or inaccurate"

This shows the problematic cause of social media and news online. This idea of news stories being fake shows that the information online cannot be trusted and therefore the news that we receive should solely come from trusted and reliable quality news sources. I think due to the efficiency of social media and news being so accessible through applications like Twitter, it makes it easier for audiences to consume fake news or misleading news stories without even planning to find them; this shows the power of the social media and the negative impacts of it on journalism.