Cartoon by Victor Santander
It is easy to feel any emotion on demand thanks to the World Wide Web. All it takes is following the right (or wrong) content aggregator. Happiness or rage are both only a click away.
On Facebook and Twitter people share falsified stories and statistics that fit their own worldview. A Republican presidential candidate recently retweeted an image stating false numbers of homicides between whites and blacks. The source, Crime Statistics Bureau – San Francisco, is not even a real organization. Its image originated from a Twitter account belonging to a United Kingdom white supremacist group.
False information spreads like wildfire on the Internet and people need to be careful about who they trust if they do not want to get caught in the blaze.
Websites get their revenue from selling advertising on their pages and they work to attract the most views to maximize revenue.
These sites, known as “clickbait,” feature articles made to generate traffic and are ushering in a new age of yellow journalism.
When print media was finding its bearings in the United States in the 1880s, a circulation war broke out between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Heart’s New York Journal. Both newspapers resorted to sensationalism, falsified sources and on scandal in order to sell as many issues as possible.
Eventually people got sick of the dishonesty that became synonymous with print media. In 1902, a group of concerned journalists and publishers organized a movement to change the news.
It took the efforts of the Sigma Delta Chi, now known as the Society of Professional Journalists, to convince many of the country’s largest publications to strive for accuracy in their reporting.
Today, America is again facing an epidemic of misinformation. Websites like Upworthy and Buzzfeed popularized tactics that have become the common strategy of clickbait websites. They bait readers with interesting taglines or inflammatory statements, but the reporting involved is minimal at best. It is not uncommon for clickbait sites to rehash another source’s stories to fit their own agendas.
Some of these sites earn money by distributing lies to an audience that does not understand that the source is satire or parody. They go on to share these stories to their friends and followers, ignorant to the inherent mistruth they are participating in.
The Onion is the most famous satirical news site, and while its articles are comedy-based, the messages behind their stories are all too real. Although there might still be a few people who get upset at The Onion for some of their more ridiculous stories, by now most people with Internet experience know the truth.
The Onion has created a parody clickbait site called “Clickhole.” Like its parent site, stories on Clickhole are obviously false, created for entertainment value. Their stories almost feel true despite not being based on actual events, such as an article about some aspect of human nature or society that would be impossible to write in reality. The blog post “I Was Never Able To Accept My Son’s Autism Until I Monetized It Through Blogging,” is a perfect example of their style of creating articles that shine a light on certain subjects without having the sources behind it.
This is a new era of propaganda, but people now have the freedom to choose which propaganda they want to explore. Although credible research shows that there is no link between vaccinations and autism, many people cherry-pick and use the one or two sites that claim the opposite. Diseases that had disappeared are now resurfacing thanks to paranoid parents choosing to risk their children’s lives because of false things they read on the Internet.
This system is toxic to the human brain and the profusion of sites that promote racist, sexist or ableist ideologies is frightening. Reading these websites poisons the minds of unsuspecting people and causes individuals to take up arms against innocent people because they have been convinced that the world is against them and the only thing they can trust is the Second Amendment.
Although Fox News is the most watched source of falsified information, CNN and MSNBC have also made ethical missteps. CNN is owned by Time Warner Inc., a corporation that contributed more than $500,000 to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Since huge corporations own all the major news networks, their credibility in reporting information that affects their owner is questionable.
While individual reporters might not share the same biases as the company they work for, they willingly participate in the media circus that distracts the public from the real issues.
It has become difficult to find news that is actually fair and balanced without it just being a trademarked slogan.
Truth is not subjective.
Brainwashing is not as simple and direct as it appears in fiction. Propaganda can be subtle, but the effects can be violent.
There is more information available to people than at any other time in human history and much of it is useful, much of it is not. Americans have to be pickier than ever about what they read, lest they pick up an electronic brain disease.
