Well before anyone had ever heard of coronavirus/Covid-19 we were hearing about "fake news". It's not new either - it's probably been around since humans first started communicating with each other, but as communication channels have evolved, it's certainly become more visible.
Fake news is the sharing of misleading or downright wrong information, hoaxes for various purposes. At one end of the spectrum it might be for sensationalist headlines to attract news "consumers" (think tabloid headlines, especially of things like weather headlines. On Twitter I follow meteorologist Liam Dutton who regularly lambastes the Daily Express weather "columnists" about their sensationalist, and usually wholly inaccurate weather warnings which he argues are merely "clickbait" designed to get people clicking on the links to drive access to content. At the more amusing end of the scale are things like the football transfer silly season when X footballer is reported to have been seen at Y club. A vaguely personal example is of a relative of mine, Barbara Archer who starred in several films including as Rosie the bargain at the Black Swan Inn in the 1964 film 633 Squadron and the 1958 classic Dracula with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. She was once reported and photographed on a red top newspaper as driving a flashy American car and living the high life whilst her husband rode a bike and had to have fish and chips for his supper (or something like that), but according to my mum who was Barbara's cousin, she couldn't drive at the time and her husband didn't own a bike! The fish and chips bit might have been real!
Then there are the conspiracy stories. Man didn't actually and on the moon. The earth if flat, we're just being shield from that fact, the Queen's a lizard etc.
But there's a more serious side to this where media channels are manipulating the spread of disinformation for a much darker purpose, and the problem is that it's getting harder and harder to unravel the truth from the lies. The current President of the United States Donald Trump of course is a proponent of everything is fake news unless it come from him, although as we've seen, some of his information is clearly fake. Think bleach as a cure for coronavirus.
Yesterday some social media outlets had posts suggesting the first participant in the coronavirus vaccine trial had died a few days after having been administered the trial vaccine, when in fact she's fit and well. It appears this story emanated from people who are opposed to vaccines.
There's also much contention about what's being reported regarding the statistics around Covid-19, not just in the UK, but worldwide. It may well be that what's being reported is not wrong per se, but rather it's being manipulated to provide a specific message, or to avoid giving a specific answer to a specific question.
Who are our trustworthy news sources? All my life I've trusted the BBC. But there are clearly people that don't. Some argue the BBC is too supportive of the Government. Conversely some argue it's constantly attacking and undermining the Government. You can't win.
I'm sure that such a debate could (and probably) will go on for a very long time about fake news, and what can or can't be done to control it, or even whether it should be controlled (free speech and all that), but for the moment, the difficulty I and I suspect many others will have to continue to wrestle with, is, who do we believe?
If I'm not careful I'm going to go round in every decreasing circles with this post, so I'll just leave this here, but urge you - don't believe what you read without checking it.
Until tomorrow....
#isolationlife
#stayhomesavelives
No comments:
Post a Comment