Today’s Ted Talk was about how false information on the internet can cause major disruptions in our society. For instance, when some Syrian hackers hacked into verified press and fabricated an extremely surprising story about a bomb hurting the president. This fake news was instantly retweeted about 4,000 times in about 5 minutes. Many major companies were fooled by this tweet and ran their company according to a world in were the president was hurt, which therefore made the stock market crash by almost 139 billion dollars in just a single day.
Because our technology is so advanced, adroit, and enhanced compared to olden days, it is much easier to create photos, videos, tweets, articles, etc that look and sound very authentic. There are many AI automatons and apps who are battling other AI apps who are trying to find the make out if the photo or article is real, or is a concoction of made-up stories. To add on, lots of people are avid social media users, who check social media many times a day. In which spreads the false news and information even faster.
This has been very damaging to the society as from the president example, we can see that the stock market has lost a big fortune. In a foreign country, spreading false information will cause you to become a felon and spent 6 years in prison. Many people do this because they want to cause harm to something or someone, often spreading false stories of them doing horrific things. The other reason is to gain attention and for people to notice them.
In this video, the speaker talked about many ways to stop us from being cajoled into believing the false news. One of the easiest ways is to be vigilant. Another way is to look at other articles about the same situation and see if it is telling the same thing. The last one is to use common sense. There could be small nuances that could just not make sense, or the whole thing could just seem as if the writer is a rudimentary in writing. Whichever way you chose, always be careful about rumors and things on the internet since you never know what’s real or what’s fake.