Bullen 1

Max Bullen

Mrs. Nisbett

English 102

February 6th, 2019

Rhetorical Analysis: Fake News Challenges and Opportunities

“Fake News: Challenges and Opportunities” by Figueira, Álvaro and Luciana Oliveira, is

an article about how Fake News is really taking off through social media in todays time. With so

many social media websites Fake News can really spread like a wild fire from just one post.

Anyone can share a news article and millions of people can see it within minutes. This article

talks about ways to determine whether certain news articles are true or not via algorithms and

artificial Intelligences, while bringing forth an argument on why news articles should be checked

for their authenticity and truthfulness. The authors effectively portrayed an argument without

appearing bias and using lack of emotion to their advantage.

This article was very bland and boring to read, but that is exactly what makes this article

credible. Fake News today is a very touchy topic one can immediately sound bias just by

mentioning it, but the lack of emotion in this article helps towards credibility. I can tell just by

the tone of this article that the authors are not bias and are really addressing the topic in a factual

matter. The authors brought up real time events and relevant cases citing the 2016 presidential

election talking about a Fake News situation that took flight involving the Pope saying that the

Pope endorsed Donald Trump for being president “among other fake news campaigns one of the

most popular ones was the endorsement of Donald trump by Pope Francis”. This later was
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proven to be totally false and the use of real time events and the use of legitimate examples helps

the overall credibility of this article.

Now like I said earlier this article was very boring to read and lacked emotion. It was just

a bland, and straightforward article. This helps for the target audience of this article. The main

people who will be reading this are most likely going to be your middle to upper aged adults that

are into politics or those who watch/read the news regularly and want authentic information.

With that being said this audience is not going to want a rant or something with emotional

appeal. Instead they want something written professionally with just the facts, no opinions or

emotional bias just the straight facts. That is another reason why the authors effectively proved

their point. Any emotion in an article like this immediately leans towards a bias of some sort, but

you cannot pin that on these authors because the facts are there and that is all that the authors

used.

Another thing the authors do to help the credibility of their article is refer to the common

methods an average person does on social media. This is not a bias but rather a fact. Social

Media is a “click share” environment meaning that people see something interesting and share it

without even checking to see if it was true or not. That is an easy way for fake news to

eventually spread and be all over the place in minutes. This is where the authors bring in the use

of artificial intelligences. Using references from top social media and computer companies who

are trying to develop an AI for fake news detection. They talk about how social media networks

like “Facebook” are on board and how computer companies like “IBM” have in fact developed
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an AI like the Watson platform to seek out and prove fake news incorrect. The authors use good,

credible examples thus helping the overall credibility of the article.

Another thing that supports the authors is that they did not just talk about the good things

that would come out of using an AI for authenticating post, they also pointed out the bad

referring to evasion of privacy and also talking about the many problems an AI would have

trying to debunk fake news posts because at the end of the day a fake news detecting AI cannot

detect everything, that is impossible and because the authors noted the cons of such a system it

completely eliminates any bias.

The authors also covered the steps of developing such a system very well going into

details on the various developmental problems and tasks. The authors covered every single

aspect of using an AI to detect fake news from the development to finished product. They went

into detail on different company’s ideas like touching on fakebook’s experimental algorithm, and

IBM’s prototype fake news detection AI. They covered all topics of development while going

over the pros and cons of all, and made sure the reason for the need of these AI’s and algorithms

remained clear. They never went off topic on a rant or strayed away from the genera point of the

article it was a constant on topic article about the use of AI’s and algorithms to combat fake

news, and thee authors did a good job and staying true to that.

The authors also went into detail on the various processes and AI would have to make in

authenticating a news article. Again, staying on the general topic, they talked about all the
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complications an AI could run into to the initial analyzing process to running certain key words

through large “data libraries” to determine if that one piece of information was true or not.

In conclusion the authors of this article wrote a quality article conveying their argument

in an effective way going into detail on various aspects of their topic. They did not run off and

they stayed on topic, and they did all of this without any emotional appeal in return pulled in

their favor for writing a good and credible article. The key factor in this article was leaving

emotional appeal out of the article for that is really the only way someone could write an article

on this topic without appearing bias.

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Works Cited

Figueira, Álvaro and Luciana Oliveira. "The Current State of Fake News: Challenges and Opportunities."

Procedia Computer Science, vol. 121, 2017, pp. 817-825.