The words surprise, anger, disgust, and fear all share one obvious quality: they are words to describe human emotions. Not only that, but these feelings are powerful; they rile us up and make us anxious to act. In today’s world that is dictated by the spread of information through the Internet, these sensations can be evoked easier than ever, through false knowledge, or fake news. As technological advances continue to drive forward, it is more than important that no one is turning lies into fact for society and that reality stays intact through this age of misinformation.
In a perfect world, the truth would appeal to everyone more than lies. However, the human brain is simply not wired to work in that manner. A research study published by Science found that the emotions of surprise, fear, anger, and disgust were more prominent in fake news than in factual reportings. This is to be expected, as usually forged media is aimed at a certain agenda – whether it is to incite people, push a political objective, or manipulate minds. Our minds are prone to more arousal via higher dopamine releases, which is easily created through excitement from the above emotions caused by this type of information. This is the reason why when on a news website, many article headlines are designed to be shocking, eye-catching, or otherwise negative, for the sake of clicks. This urge causes increased sharing among people, and eventually spreads to many places real news cannot.
Human-created synthetic content is not the highest on the list of worries, however. Autonomy has made it all the more easier to facilitate and produce this kind of content. One instance of this would be the “generative adversarial network,” which is basically a program that loops a piece of fabricated media through an algorithm until it cannot distinguish the media from fact. This combined with the programs social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter that tend to advance fake news makes it easy for fake news to be made and delivered to the home page of people’s social applications.
It is not difficult to understand the implications of an increased amount of false information. In the TED talk, one example showed the economy spike downwards after an inaccurate tweet from the hacked Associated Press Twitter account went public, and subsequently, viral. Fake news has also infiltrated its way into our government, compromising this country’s integrity as a democracy.
In this world of information and misinformation, it is getting harder and harder to distinguish fact from fiction, and it will only get more difficult from now on.