What can the reasons be for spreading fake news ?

CHI

Flora

1G4

What can the reasons be for spreading fake news ?

Do you think it can sometimes be acceptable ?

Nowadays, there are many ways to be informed of what is going on in the world. We have access to the news on national TV channels, newspapers, and on the media. More and more people are getting informed via social media.

On social media, information is easily accessible by everyone, and diffused very quickly : that’s what we call the spreading of a piece of information. However, information we read is not always verified, reliable and can be false, like fake news.

I think the purpose of fake news is to grab attention, be noticed by people, and it deforms the accuracy of a piece of information, provides misinformation, lies. On TV, the media, particularly on social media, the spreading of fake news is increased because of the speed of diffusion of news.

We can define “acceptable” as something legitimate and tolerated. In my opinion, fake news isn’t acceptable because it can lead to hate. For instance, in France, a teacher was killed, and some deformed information that provided hate participated in his death. Fake news also misleads, misinforms people who read it. For example, in a tweet written by Paul James, his purpose was to tell his vision of the truth about crisis actors, even if it wasn’t very accurate. It had indeed been proved by fact-checking websites (like Snopes), that David Hogg, accused to be an actor hired by the media was a real witness to those two events, told in James Paul’s tweet.

Even though sometimes the purpose of a piece of fake news isn’t meant to misinform people, it can have the opposite impact. For instance, in January 2019, the Yes Men Group of leftist activists, created a fake newspaper that was looking the same as a Washington Post newspaper. Their main goal was to warn people about how to make the difference between real and fake news, but it can be counterintuitive because people are getting suspicious and that’s another obstacle that can distrust the media.

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