It’s up to us: The fate of the battle for truth
(NOTE: This article is for my school requirement.)
There’s more destructive ongoing pandemic than Covid-19, the spread of fake news.
The internet has done a great impact in the current status of our information ecosystem. The online media made the information dissemination to work like the speed of lightning. Where in just one click, you can already make a data to spread like wildfire. Online media made info-sharing to be accessible to everyone easily and efficiently. And that’s where a big problem occur.
The diversity created by the modern way of sharing of information is very vulnerable on disinformation. Due to that info-sharing is cannot be filtered, anyone can provide and manipulate data weather it is true or fake news that’s why it’s hard to gather true information because online media is like a sea of information, manipulated and purely true — floating in the same platforms and category. And if one is not vigilant enough, he will fall into the trap and will be a victim of misleading information.
How to fight disinformation?
One should be vigilant to fight disinformation. You can easily identify fake news through being a wide reader. Spotting fake news is can be done through cross-research. To validate infos, we should not just stick in one source. Stumbling on multiple sources will give you different angles and styles on posting that would provide different contexts. So, if you’ll compare the information you gained to other sources and it doesn’t match, it means that info is possibly manipulated or fake.
Another way to fight the spread of wrong information is to learn to verify the credibility of the source. Online media outlets have been battling with fake pages using or carrying the name of their site. These fake pages usually post some memes in journalistic way, which has the aim to upload satirical contents. But because of its similarity to the real media entities, some folks used to be confused with identifying who’s credible between this satirical pages and the legitimate media outlets. That is why we should always read the full content from the content itself to its source. Usually, satirical pages’ names are quite similar to the media outlets, but it has quite differences on the spelling.
Lastly, never be a spreader of those fake information. It can create a great impact on people’s lives. It can destruct names of personalities or even institutions. It can mislead the public and make the people not to rely on public information anymore. Like what the Nobel Laureate and esteemed journalist, Maria Ressa said, “Without facts, you can’t truth. Without truth, you can’t have trust.”
In the time of internet era, where the information ecosystem has become a wide sea with seems no limitations and has diverse contents — where fake/manipulated data and facts are floating on same platforms on the same time, the burden to know the truth are on all of us. It’s also the duty of everyone to be responsible on what they share on social media. Read carefully, verify, and identify what’s the truth from the several bluffs.
