Innledning
In 2016 we saw one of the most publicly recognized fake news outbreaks in our lifetimes. Donald Trump’s presidential election is something a tremendous amount of people remember as pushing for fake news.
This was not the first time Donald Trump was behind fake news. In fact, according to The Washington Post, Donald Trump had stated 30.573 untruths at the end of his presidentship (Kessler, Rizzo, & Kelly, 2022)
He even told people to inject disinfectant into their blood to kill the coronavirus, which is deadly. Unfortunately, he is far from the only one spreading fake news.
Utdrag
What do people gain from spreading fake news? We see news that appears to be dishonest all day, every day. It would be naïve to believe that people do it just for fun, considering how much work it takes.
Some people may do it for fun, but considering how much traction fake news gets, there may be another reason.
It is certainly not fame, because the authors of such texts are rarely mentioned considering they would be marked as fake news authors.
I think there are mainly two reasons why fake news exists: money and ignorance. Advertisers we see on such pages pay the creator by the number of clicks their website has.
Fake news tends to gain a lot of attention, so there is much money to make. Just look at this fake research paper in Eavisa.no I found. It states that people driving Audi have little penises. (Eavisa.no, 2017)
As controversial as this is, it is doomed to spread like wildfire through the grass on the internet. And that despite most people’s common sense.
Ignorance leads people to spread and write stories about things they think they know but does not. This leads me to my next question.
What does fake news do to people, and our society? Even though there are many ways to identify fake news, like source criticism, research, and trusted sources, it is not always easy to recognize it all. Nowadays, we see fake news everywhere.
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