Research Podcast

After searching for a podcast that related to online communication, I found WIRED Business's podcast entitled, Facebook Finally Gets Real about Fighting Fake News. Due to the transformation of the online landscape, fake news as become wide-spread issue. The dissemination of news has allowed fake news to spread at rapid rates, leading to misinformation spreading, influencing public opinion and spreading false ideas to the public.

By creating fake news, many businesses and people brought in large amounts of revenue. According to the video, Here's How Fake News Works, a man in 2016 began writing fake articles about the 2016 presidential election, which gained tons of traffic. He was able to bring in 16,000 thousands dollars of revenue in only a few short months from his best-selling article. The uprise of fake news can largely be associated with our incessant use of social media. It can come in forms of video, photo, and audio. But how do we know what is real and what is fake? According to Spot the DeepFake, one way to know the difference is that deepfakes usually trigger emotions while real news targets the brain. Fake news has become prominent across the social media platform Facebook. The podcast by WIRED Business talks about ways Facebook is cracking down on this phenomenon. They plan of facing this problem by crowdsourcing, relying on third party fact checkers, and using financial disincentives. Users will also be able to mark and post they deem as fake, which will then be sent to researches to access(WIRED Business 2016). Fake news presents a real threat to the future, and the use of social media does not help to contain the situation, it only allows for ideas to spread faster. Facebook is trying to limit the spread of fake news, however, it is important for any user to thoroughly fact check what they read.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5G9wmgArPC1mj8G9Si2WVs?si=3afe2f6ea02b40b6