Page 17 - Seniors Today - August 21 Issue
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Truth and fakery In any election campaign, 80% of the news
A lady whose family lied a lot was looking could be fake or misinformation. The fact
for a bride for her son. She tells the is that false news diffuses further, faster,
prospective daughter-in-law that one of deeper and more broadly than the truth in
the minarets of the Taj Mahal has fallen every category of information. In fact, false
into the Jamuna. In an instant, the young political news becomes more viral than any
woman replies: “Yes, Maaji, the water other type of false news.
splashed on me too.” The rise of fake news The question is, why does false news
and proliferation of doctored narratives travel so much further, faster, deeper and
spread by humans and online devices like more broadly than the truth? Do the people
Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc are a who spread fake news have more followers
challenge to society. At a time like this, or tweet more often or follow more people?
when there is so much of fake news, so Humans are by nature selfish, tribal and
much of fake video/ audio, we have come to gullible, and are more likely to be drawn to
a stage where we can’t tell what is real from the novelty of the false news over the truth.
what is fake, we are on the edge of reality Many studies have revealed that false news
and this is a very dangerous situation. would be 70 per cent more likely to be
Fake news and genocidal propaganda retweeted than the truth. Technology can
can disrupt society, trigger riots, crash the change everything – facial expression, lip
stock market, and influence elections and syncing, trick photography. What does the
public opinion. Today, one can do all this future hold? Will we be able to block the
and it is impossible to know the truth. By false narrative and allow the most accurate
the time the truth is known, it is often too information to prevail in the overall
late. A well-known example is when on ecosystem, or will the quality and veracity
April 23, 2013, newswire Associated Press of information online deteriorate to be
(AP) in the US put out the following tweet: able to spread unreliable and dangerously
“Two explosions at the White House and destabilising misinformation. We need to
President Barack Obama has been injured”. have a method to label news verified and
This was retweeted 4,000 times in a matter otherwise, like the calories on a packet that
of three minutes. Syrian hackers had you buy from a grocery store. This has its
infiltrated the AP handle and this caused own challenges who gets to decide what is
mayhem in the stockmarket that crashed true and what is false is it a government?
wiping out 200 billion dollars and of Facebook? Or an independent body of
course all other system and panic buttons fact-checkers? And who will check the fact-
that went into an automatic security mode. checkers?
SENIORS TODAY | ISSUE #26 | AUGUST 2021 17
