We live in this generational era that is called digital age where everyone one what to be the source of information and most times the information that is been sent to the masses is false. In this age lies are considered to be the new truth and they reach a massive number of people faster and further the real news. Fake news are deliberate form of news that are spread intentionally by unreliable sources most time to tarnish other people’s name (Barclay, 2018).
These type of news are spread though digital and social media, distributed by professional media practitioners and journalist push certain agenda, I will not forget to include the people in general who gossip and share what they read and not knowing that it is false. According to Walters (2017:116), Fake news is not good news at all because it mislead the innocent people, more especial the poor older citizens whom cannot differentiate between what is real and what is not real and the young who just read and anything in there sight.
The influence of fake news in different communication contexts.
The spread of fake news is really killing the credibility of professional of media practitioners and slowly they are being overwhelmed by these news but also some of the corporate communication companies and media house has joined the club of distributing fake news so to mislead and give people fabricated information. In 2017, Times Lives reported that Bell Pottinger constructed ways of hide the Gupta family secrets, this shows that even the big names of the media industry are not to be trusted. As a reader or receiver of information, one must check if the fact does not favour certain individuals (Walters, 2017).
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Social media is fuelling more and more in this deceptive thing of fake news. Communication practitioners and the people in general uses platforms like Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to distributed these false news because they know that everything happen fast there and people do not check if it is true or not, life is fast with social media there is not time to evaluate, check for credibility and bias fact. The only thing people do is to share and move on with their lives (Barclay, 2018).
Consequence of fake news
First of all the corporate and media industry will lose a massive number of viewers, listeners and readers because information is on their finger-tips. Secondly people will have wrong information about certain things and lies will be the new truth (Vilakazi, 2017). And lastly people who committed crime may get away with it and blame fake news, politician who account for their wrong doings.
In conclusion, to fight the spread of fake news people have to interpret the information they receive, check if the story is not one sided. We are the only ones who can make a decision about everything that affect us (McIntyre, 2018), and we can fight this fake news thing by first understanding it and we must start look for evidences in a story or information we receive.
Reference
- Barclay, D.A. 2018. Fake news propaganda and plain old lies. London: Rowman and Littlefield.
- McIntyre, L. 2018. Post-truth. 1st ed. Cambridge, Messachusetts: The MIT Press.
- Vilakazi, M. 2017. The Guptas, Bell Pottinger and fake propaganga machine. Timeslive, 4 Sep. https://www.timeslive.co.za/south-africa/2017-09-04/the-guptas-bell-pottinger-and-fake-propaganga-machine/ Date of access: 29 Apr. 2019.
- Walters, R. M. 2017. How to tell a fake: fight back against fake news on the front lines of social media. Texas review of law and politics, 23(1): 121-158.
