What the Experts Say II

 How can governments, companies, etc. tackle fake news?

Dr Christian von der Weth and Professor Mohan Kankanhalli wrote an article about how to prevent fake news in social media which I found very interesting and would like to share with you.

 

Firstly, there is mentioned that social media has become, for many people, the main source of news. The problem is it is designed to encourage users to share whatever they want just by clicking a button. There are no rules about fact-checking or using evidence as it used to be with traditional newspapers and people are more likely to engage and share emotionally charged content.

 

What Dr von der Weth and Professor Kankanhalli suggest to tackle the problem of fake news is blocking accounts operated by bots as many of them are programmed to spread misinformation. They even say that “existing studies claim that 9–15 per cent of Twitter accounts, and around 60 million Facebook accounts, are bots” (von der Weth & Kankanhalli, 2019, para. 6). I had no idea about so many accounts being run by bots, but I fully agree to enable them to post. They also think that children should be educated from a young age and taught to think critically. This would help them later in life with recognizing fake news. This I think would be the most useful because even though I don’t think it is possible to stop misinformation from spreading, I have high hopes in educating people about it so they can protect themselves from believing fake news. It’s the reason why I chose to create this blog in the first place, to help others to detect fake news. In the article, it is also mentioned that social media should take more responsibility. For example, the algorithms should be adjusted to prevent fake news from appearing on one’s feed (von der Weth & Kankanhalli, 2019). This would be great and would definitely stop a good amount of fake news from spreading but as I said earlier, I think the most important is for people to know how to recognise misinformation when they see it.

 

For all of this to work, huge companies, governments, and other institutions would need to do something about it. Regular social media users don’t have the power to change the company’s regulations and therefore, they shouldn't rely on someone else and start with what's in their power first.

To get to the original article click here: https://news.nus.edu.sg/research/fake-news-and-social-media

(von der Weth & Kankanhalli, 2019)

Reference List:

von der Weth, C., & Kankanhalli, M. (2019, May 27). Fake News and Social Media. NUS News. Retrieved December 5, 2021, from https://news.nus.edu.sg/research/fake-news-and-social-media