The deadly fallout of fake news
Fake news is no laughing matter — it can erode democracy and be a matter of life and death, says Katie Johnson
FAKE news is the biggest threat we face as humankind”. This hyperbolic statement was made by Dr Claire Wardle, the founder of First Draft News at Harvard University, but is she is correct?
Fake news is becoming a much larger problem as news platforms are being made more available to the general community via social media, and this means that governments and authorities are finding it harder to patrol and check that what is being made available to the masses is truthful. It is becoming increasingly difficult to pick out the lies among the truth, and that can cause a lot of problems to democracy and governments.
Fake news has already caused problems in places like the US, and could cause those same problems in our Australian democratic system. When referring to democracy we mean everyone in a democratic community, because we all play a part in running our country by electing representatives that we believe will run our country as we want it run. Without active citizens a democracy cannot exist. So, the problems of fake news I will be covering can have an effect on everyone in the community. But what are these problems?
The first problem is that fake news poses a big risk to reliable media sources, such as newspapers, news programs and news sites. With technology playing a larger part in our lives, fake or not, the news is everywhere. A survey hosted by the Washington Post in January 2017 shows that many people now equally rely on technology for their news as they do newspapers, and with these changes comes the problem of working out which stories are true and which are fake.
People who want to force their opinion on others will create fake news stories to convince people they are right. Politicians often make up fake news to make people distrust the other side. This can make the politicians look bad and can even shift the vote. Fake news creates distrust in other media sources by making people less likely to believe the stories that they encounter in the newspaper, on TV or on news websites, even if they are, in fact, truthful.
Steven Spurr, the head of Edelman, an 18-year annual study of attitudes across 28 countries towards the four pillars of society, which includes business and the media, stated that “Year on year, the gloss has come off social media”. The organisation reports that, “Trust in social media has dropped from 28 per cent in 2017 to 23 per cent in Australia”. This poses a risk to reliable news outlets because people are less likely to believe and share the stories. It can also cause people to disengage with politics because they do not have the time to sort out the lies from the facts. This will lead people to make less educated decisions when it comes to voting and could end with Australia getting a leader we never wanted. It could also pose problems on the other end of the scale, with people getting faulty information and taking it as truth. These people may change their vote due to these lies. This is just a few of the ways in which fake news can pose significant problems for reliable news outlets, as well as politicians and other levels of democracy.
My next point is that fake news can have a negative impact on people’s lives. Fake news is spread about many harmless things (alien sightings, etc), but things can turn serious when people mess with things that they do not understand or try to make a funny joke that backfires. One example of this is the earthquakes that occurred on the island of Sulawesi in late September last year.
Fake news caused panic across the island with many untrue facts going around the island by word of mouth. These include the fake story that there was a bigger earthquake going to strike, and that a dam was expected to collapse. There were four people suspected of starting the rumours, and this is a perfect example of when fake news gets out of hand and, in this instance, even meant life or death to the people of Sulawesi. Another terrible repercussion of fake news happened during The Great Depression in the 1920s. Fake news was regularly spread that a certain bank was suspected of collapse, and thousands would take their money out of the bank in the space of a few hours and, in doing so, leave the bank broke and cause it to collapse, even if the rumours were not true in the first place. So, as you can see, fake news can have much more farreaching consequences to people’s lives than first thought, and these two examples only had the power of word of mouth to spread them.
With the relatively new invention of social media, a single account of fake news can travel the globe in minutes, and reach millions in the process, thereby greatly increasing the effect that fake news can have
on the world and its citizens.
In conclusion, fake news can make it incredibly hard for governments and other leaders of democracy to get a handle on things, and prove these stories to be fake, especially if it is a well thought out and seemingly factual news story. This also makes it harder for governments and officials to deliver possibly life-saving information in times of panic, due to people not knowing what to believe.
Fake news also creates problems for reliable news outlets and politicians and could have the power to shift the vote. So how much of a threat is fake news to democracy? A big one. Fake news divides us by our views, and when a country is divided democracy just does not work.
Many people overlook fake news as being silly and with no real consequences but failing to deal with this real pressing issue could see us reaping dire consequences as a country and a democracy.
Katelyn (Katie) Johnson, 13, is in Year 7 at MacKillop Catholic College. Her essay “How serious a threat is fake news to Australian democracy?” won the Hobart Rotary Club Civics for Citizenship Essay Competition, to be awarded today at Parliament House.