Fake News in the Philippines

Fake news is one of the common problem of other media worldwide, and it also reaches here in the
Philippines with growing of happenings within this. But before we discuss about this topic, let’s get to know what is fake
news. Fake news is a type of yellow journalism or propaganda that consists of deliberate disinformation or hoaxes spread
via traditional print and broadcast news media or online social media. Meaning, fake news is created to misinform the
readers. Usually, these stories are created either influence people’s views, push a political agenda or cause confusion and
can often be a profitable business for online publishers. Fake news stories can deceive people by looking like trusted
websites or using similar names and web address to reputable news organizations. And according to the Media Literacy
Expert, there are three elements of this kind of situations of fake news and it is Mistrust, Misinformation, and
Manipulation. Meaning, it deliberately misleading the audiences to promote biased point of view or particular political
cause or agenda. And one of this is the Misleading Headings, these spread quickly on social media sites where only
headlines and small snippets of the full article are displayed on audience newsfeeds.

Fake news has seriously caught on. It has greatly influenced the way media platforms operate, the public’s
perception of information, and even how governments confront its proliferation. The internet radically changed the way
news is published. Much like the invention of the printing press, the internet allowed more people to publish their
thoughts and chipped away at the news from publishing giants. Fake news had always been around, but nowadays, the
main differences lie in the way it is being spread and read. In addition to this, images are making it even more believable-
the better the image, the more convincing the story is. Perception can be constantly manipulated to make it better and
believable. And according to Ces Drilon, one of the reasons why fake news can be very convincing is that massive
amounts of it could make it believable. The sheer volume of content about one specific rumor makes it even more
convincing to the public eye. The effects of fake news can be very destructive to both on a social and economical way. If
even just one person would say one bad thing about a certain product, to make it sound true, he or she would need another
person to comment or agree.

Now, the floods of fake news in the Philippines is becoming alarming to the social status or economic status
of the country. Fake news are spreading across the country because of the citizen living with the current time in the
country does not know yet on how to analyze of what is right and what is wrong with the news. There are still many
people who doesn’t know about biases and wrong headlines of any news people encountered and read. As it has around
the world, the internet in the Philippines has become morass of fake news and conspiracy theories, harassment and
bullying. This has muddied public discourse and cultivated a populist attitude toward democracy. Even though the
majority of the Filipino communities are aware of how bad this problem was, the minority of the population still doesn’t
know how to read a misleading headlines making them to engage and jumping to conclusions, believing in the news
without further information, spreading rumors of this and that, making the group in the state of ignorance. It has rapidly
become a catch-all term to discredit all kinds of stories and articles.