I have seen recent "fake news" headlines from articles that have since been deleted saying:
“Ireland is officially accepting ‘Trump refugees’ from the US.”
“Huge unprecedented spike in tremors recorded near Yellowstone supervolcano.”
“New deadly spider spreads across America – Five people have died this week."
Sigh.
The world of 2018 finds itself up to its waist in a rising tide of fake news nonsense. Unfortunately, many people don’t mind this, bathing comfortably in a tub of agreeable lies as they hit the like button on every outrageous new article on their social media feeds, while legitimate journalists are harangued for attempting to publish the simple, though often bitter, truth.
The solution to combat fake news is education. Education will ensure people can better decipher which news is fake and which is not.
Fake news is everybody’s business. In the past, it has been used to hurt minorities such as Jews and African Americans. As Politico writes in “The Long and Brutal History of Fake News,” falsehoods circulated in Europe from the 12th century onward about Jews drinking the blood of children. Additionally, the Antebellum South fabricated racist stories of slave uprisings and “stories of African-Americans spontaneously turning white.”
All of these stories were only meant to continue the marginalization of the populations they referenced. The stories were, unfortunately, very effective at generating anger and violence against these people.
So if history has anything to say about it, fake news is everyone’s responsibility to fix. It has polarized the country and the world, and even today, it has led to violence — remember the guy who fired shots in a pizza restaurant because he read a story on how John Podesta was leading a child sex ring there? Luckily he did not injure anyone, but things could have gone wrong very quickly.
Maybe we could make laws prohibiting fake news, but this is dangerous. Consider that President Donald Trump has begun using the term “fake news” to refer to any information about him he doesn’t like, even if that information is true.
Although our constitution protects us from laws that would restrict the press, other authoritarian countries are incorporating Trump’s extended definition of the term “fake news” into their own arbitrary definitions of what news should be prohibited.
This has already begun to happen. A journalist in one of these countries who publishes true information could possibly be arrested and prosecuted if the facts they present are not favorable to the government (by revealing corruption, human rights violations, etc.). That is not something we would like to see in the U.S., so laws on the press should not be our solution to the problem. It’s too vague and too slippery.
This is why it must be left up to individuals through education.
Social media and the onslaught of information through the internet are still quite new to the world, so we need to improve students’ ability to search and read that information critically. They need to ask how they know something is true and why something might not be. In fact, students should be taught to question not only what they learn on the Internet, but also what they read in the textbook and what comes out of the teacher’s mouth.
In addition to teaching students how to ask questions, we need to teach students how to find answers. That is why we should ramp up our instruction of logic and argument, which will help students learn to reach rational dispassionate conclusions in a dispassionate way. We should show how to form a logical argument as well as identify logical fallacies. These discussions are essential if we want children to learn how to find true information and engage in rational debates.
So the main point to teach is that you can’t believe something just because it is comfortable to believe, and that goes for both sides of the political spectrum. Whether something you read sits well or not, you have to go in and investigate.
Above all, the remedy for fake news comes from the citizens themselves, and the way we foster good, clear-thinking citizenship is through education.
