The consistently booming global population relies on major channels such as news agencies, search engines, and social media platforms for information. With the increasing user base on social media platforms, misreading of facts and tailoring news to personal agendas is no more a surprise. In the event of the recent circulation of fake news such as the Pope supporting Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton was about to prosecute, and similar news have developed concerns regarding preservation of the integrity of news.
Pope Francis encouraged Donald Trump; Hillary Clinton was going to be arraigned: the fight over the fake news is warming up after the battle of White House in which the deception business may have swung the result of the vote. A week ago, Google and Facebook moved to trim down ad revenues to the counterfeit news sites. However, media watchers are suggesting some more powerful initiative wipe out such intense phenomenon as it possesses a greater risk to the democracy itself.
The hoaxes of the 2016 US-President election like “Did the Clintons do Murder?” are purely created to drive revenues from clicks and ads. The following of such risky and viral news which have no authenticity at all, are creating more panic situation among people and social media users and their outcomes truly shocking. Well, the victory of Donald Trump as the USA’s President-elect is one of the worst upshots of such hoaxes.
And since the unexpected success of Trump happened, investigations have uncovered the dark side of the sting operations which is said to be running from Macedonia to California. The reports also suggest that publishing such bogus and fake news has turned out to be the way of making easy money. According to a recent statistics issued by BuzzFeed News, Facebook only has received over 8.7 million “shares” from the 20 top-performing fake and fabricated stories from fraud websites while stories of the main news websites got 7.4 million shares on the same site, three months before the US president election.
With entirely fictitious stories, under highlighted and eye-catching headlines like “Look at Sick Thing He Just Did to STAB Trump in the Back,” some ad publication sites are intended to drive clicks and revenues, which in other ways are hurting the democracy directly.
News has served the vital purpose of communication in varying contexts. Starting from technology, politics, and entertainment, News has ventured into a wide range of applications. However, the authentic news could provide the necessary impetus to social progress whereas falsified information tends to lower down credibility. The influence of fake news over the official ones is found to be more dominant in the society and hence is needed to be wiping out soon.
