A.7.

1 How we can protect truth in the age of

misinformation
Fake news can be also be defined as new stories which is fabricated and have no
credibility that can brought misleading and misinformation and can ruin a reputation to someone
and create misunderstanding to the people. Fake news is potentially risky because of the power it
holds that can manipulate and mess up someone mind. But how can we prevent the spread of
fake news in all over the platforms? What are the things that gives power to fake news?
According to Aral (2020), fake news diffuse further, faster, deeper, and broader than
the truth. Fake news has the ability to spread so much faster than the truth because of its novelty
that drawn human attention to one’s story. Aral also said that False-news spreaders had fewer
followers, less active, less often verified, and had been on twitter in a short period of time. I
agree to what Aral is pointing out because I do have the same experience when an account ,that
just join on twitter, accuse someone with meticulous rumor and it made viral on twitter which
makes the people throw hate and disgust the guy that just got accused with something that is not
true. I admit that I am one of the people who got fool and believe in such rumor. Just like what I
mention before, fake news has a power to make the people believe to something that is not true
because of its sentimental story.
Aral mentioned on the video that they made an experiment and they found out that
bots accelerates the spread of false news and true news at approximately the same rate which
concludes that the bots have nothing to do with the difference on how true news and false news
was diffuse, instead, us human are the one responsible for the spread of the fake news. Fake
news is extremely dangerous because we cannot tell whether it is true or false information. But
Aral said that technology is not solution, instead, we can identify what is real from what is fake
by ethics and philosophy.
This age is truly full of misinformation but Aral advised 5 paths on how we can
address the spread of fake news in our time. These are the labelling, incentives, social media
regulation, transparency, and algorithms/machine learning. Among these 5, in my assumption,
labeling is the best among the 5 which can protect the truth during these day because in labeling,
we can identify the truth by what it includes in the information, whether the information is
credible or not, where does the information collect from, etc. With labeling, we can easily tell if
the information in one’s story or news holds credibility and if it is from experts or professionals.
We can protect the truth, depends on how we act and understanding on one’s story.
It is better to have an ethics and philosophy before we unloose an information in order to protect
the truth by the danger of the fake news brought to each people in our society.
References:
Aral (2020). Retrived from
https://www.ted.com/talks/sinan_aral_how_we_can_protect_truth_in_the_age_of_misinformatio
n/transcript
“Fake News,” Lies and Propaganda: How to sort Fact from Fiction. (2020) Retrived from
https://guides.lib.umich.edu/fakenews