Task 10: Fake news

Fake news. Post-truth. Alternative facts.

  • Lying, and the art of doing it well are almost required if you want to be a politician these days. 
  • In the last election in the UK, every party was found to be doing it, some more than others.
  • However, it didn't used to be like that. Yes, Churchill dressed up the Dunkirk evacuation publicly as a great victory. In private, he called it Britain's greatest military defeat. Though the fall of Singapore a few months later to the Japanese was even worse. But that lie felt necessary to galvanise a nation on its knees. Nowadays some politicians lie so often that they forget what's true and what's not.
  • And what we hear, and now more likely to 'see', are such bare-faced lies, that it's a wonder the people telling them can keep a straight face.
  • However, convincing the other side is usually not the purpose of such fire pants lying. Usually, it's designed to keep your side angry. And the angrier a voter, the more likely they are to go out and vote. Though in the case of Russia, fake news is designed to make you doubt the truth of anything that you hear.
  • One particularly unsavoury fake story during the 2016 US presidential election, nicknamed #pizzagate, stated that Hilary Clinton was a paedophile who molested children in a basement under a pizza restaurant in Washington. One man was so incensed that he travelled hundreds of miles to shoot up the restaurant only to find out that it didn't even have a basement!
  • Democracy dies if people stop believing what they are told.
  • As the next generation, you will be exposed to more deepfakes and take news stories than any previous generation.

Plan for this week:

  • The following short videos and articles provide you with the background for fake news, and also, positively, some solutions to it.
  • I particularly liked the idea about 'vaccinating' people against fake news by teaching them how to do it themselves thereby teaching them how to spot it out in the wild of social media. Perhaps something like this should be on school syllabuses?
  • Instead of purely asking you to read them I would like you to have a go at answering these three questions (your answers do not need to be long):
  1. If you had to, how would you go about spreading fake news?
  2. What do you think would help to neutralise the effects of fake news?
  3. Research an example of fake news and briefly summarise it. Things to include might be the background to the fake story; Where it originated? How it was exposed? Why people believed it? etc.