In Our Opinion
If you paid any attention to Facebook during this election, you most likely saw at least one fake news article on your feed on any given day, whether you realized it or not. The problem with these articles is that people will share these falsehoods without doing any research on their own time.
Some people blamed Facebook for the outcome of the election because of the epidemic of fake news, but in reality the people are the reason why those stories were being spread. Facebook was not created to share political news to your friends and family. It was created to share your family vacation pictures and network with people.
Five out of our six editorial board members have a Facebook and agreed that even if you hate the website, you still find yourself scrolling through your news feed. We all saw the widespread sharing of political posts on social media. Members even had to unfollow people because of the political garbage that was posted and only limited their posts to those from fact checker sites to eliminate the fake news spreading.
Another problem that causes fake news to spread is that people just do not seem to care anymore about verifying content. People will read a far-fetched headline and share the story without even reading it. These people do not realize that some writers create “click-bait” headlines but then the story does not even match the headlines. Readers need to start looking for sources and attributions in stories to make sure the news they are reading is legitimate instead of falling victim to a false headline.
News has now moved into the corporate umbrella of entertainment. We gain access to stories so quickly of that we do not even take the time to digest what we are reading. News is not about being accurate anymore, but it is about reporting it first, which is one the roots of the problem.
As for the election, the main issue was that people wanted to get the election over with and not learn about it. There was so much negativity with the campaigning that people did not want anything to do with it.
Donald Trump would say things that you wanted to hear and that is how the mainstream media works now. People want to believe the fake headlines surrounding Trump and Hillary Clinton and would fully believe in them without doing any second of research. As Mark Twain once said it, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
If we had focused more on the issues that each candidate brought to the table instead of the “he said, she said” junior high behavior, the whole campaign would have been different. Fake news did not give Trump the election, the people did.
We need to go back to the concept behind Facebook, which was to be a fun platform to share our lives. Let’s go back to when we shared pictures of meals instead of political posts. It leaves the news to the professionals and takes it away from the Facebookers fearlessly posting behind a screen and keyboard.
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