Sunny Youth Journal

As technology further progresses and evolves, creating and spreading fake news becomes a lot easier. Fake news is able to spread very quickly across social media platforms, and it is very hard to stop the spread of this news. Fake news will also become more and more close to real news, which could lead to nobody really knowing the truth.

The problem with fake news is the sheer impact it can have on society. A single tweet the the White House was bombed and the US president was injured was retweeted thousands of time and caused the US lose 139 billion dollars in a day. Another problem is that as technology progresses, the harder it is to discern real news from fake news. In a few years, people will be able to create fake audio and video clips that are nearly identical to real video and audio clips. If this happens, the effect would be immeasurable, and nobody will be able to tell what is true and what is not.

In order to stop the spread of fake news, governments are demanding that social media platforms be transparent in how data is collected, distributed, and used. The problem is that if that happens, the data will not be secure anymore, which is also very important to people. This is called the transparency paradox, and is why we can’t have companies being transparent. However, it is still possible to keep data secure while having companies be transparent, however hard it might be.

One way that this might happen is that the social media platforms share their data with only the government, which is pretty much the most trustworthy source there is. That way the government can stop fake news from spreading, while not giving the data to everybody, which would keep it secure while preventing fake news from spreading. The problems with this is that this would give more power to the government, which would allow it to have more control about what we know. Another problem is that there is no way to keep the government silent with our data, which means we would again just be giving the government more power.

“When the novel coronavirus roared into the U.S., mental health took a back seat to physical health. The number one priority was making sure hospitals wouldn’t be overwhelmed and that as many lives as possible could be saved.” (https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-pandemic-mental-health-toll.html) This means that when the coronavirus started in the US, physical health was valued a lot more than mental health. But as Schools closed, remote work became the norm, restaurants shuttered, getting together with friends was no longer possible, news stories containing many coronavirus deaths, and unemployment levels soaring, people should realize that mental health during this pandemic is just as important as physical health. People might be worrying about making sure the most amount of lives can be saved right now, but sooner or later, people should also know that with all the things going on, mental health is just as important as physical health.

In 2020, research shows that people are 8 times as likely to screen positive for serious mental issues than compared to 2018, and “70% met criteria for moderate to serious mental illness, compared with 22% in 2018.” (https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-pandemic-mental-health-toll.html)

Even though currently, physical health might seem more important than ever, you need to know that mental health is very important, too. There has been much more stress, with parents trying to care for their children at home. (because the children can’t be sent to camp) And young adults struggling to find new jobs after restaurants closed.

Having said that, even though at the start of the pandemic, physical health was the most important thing, now, as people are trying to get back to their regular lives, mental health is starting to regain it’s importance.

Sinan Aral and his team discovered an interesting fact about fake news: it travels much faster than real news. For example, an article about Barack Obama possibly being injured was shared many more times than real news about this former president. This is because fake news is always much more surprising than real news, and people feel that they have been given a secret, urging them to send it to someone else. Aral gives several solutions to this. However, they all have their bad effects. 

I believe one of the most important ones is labeling types of media. For example, much of the food we eat is labeled with details, but when it comes to the information we take in, not much is. When information is specified, it can tell us if the source is credible or where the source came from. Knowing this data, people can detect if something is real or false more easily. On the other hand, one big question is: who gets to decide what the labels are? Nevertheless, I believe that we should at least try this technique when trying to solve this issue. 

Another solution to this problem is to use technology to figure out which news is fake, and which is not. Artificial Intelligence has a good reputation, such as Alexa from Amazon or Google Home. Using machine learning could slow down how fast these news are being spread much better than us humans could. Although this solution may seem almost faultless, there is one huge mistake in this. Machines do not know the ethics and philosophy of what is truth and what are lies. 

I think that we, as humans, should try harder to find more solutions to implement in order to prevent fake news, which can create national disruption, such as the false news about President Obama being injured. 

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a fun and famous short story written by James Thurber. In this story, a man named Walter Mitty has trouble facing reality so he resorts to daydreaming constantly. Mitty has daydreams about being a hero and an extremely successful man. A major theme portrayed in this story is escapism from the dull everyday reality. This is a main theme, as Walter Mitty relies on his daydreaming to get by with his average life and nagging wife.

I personally do not agree with how Walter Mitty avoids his everyday lifestyle, as of many reasons. First of all, Walter is putting himself out as a brave hero that has a perfect life. This is wrong, since his dream life does not exist. To elaborate, if Walter Mitty was to continue living in his fantasies, he would not be able to face real life hardships. Another reason why Walter should face reality, is that he would overlook hard work, and lose the quality of working to success.

All in all, I can conclude that Walter Mitty should not indulge in his fantasies. This is shown in the story by Walter Mitty dreaming himself up as a successful and heroic man. When Walter would do this, he was creating a fake fantasy where he got what he wanted without hard work or pain. In conclusion, even though one can easily live in a dream world by escaping reality, they will lose the main aspects of life.

In the Ted talk of Misinformation, one person talked about how misinformation affects society and how they are trying to stop it.

One time, there was a tweet about how the White House was bombed and President Barack Obama was injured from the bombing. There were over four thousand retweets on this within less than five minutes. This was tweeted by serial hackers. The stock market was hit, wiping out 139 billion dollars with a single day.

The false news travel much deeper, faster, and farther than what truth news would. They wondered why it would travel much more. They thought it was because the people who tweeted the false news had more followers or followed more people. In fact, it was the total opposite. They had fewer followers, followed fewer people, were less active on the social media, and were on the media for much less time than people who sent the truth out to people. Despite these things, false and fake news had a better chance of being retweeted than the true news.

The human brain is drawn to new, surprising, and scarier news. Bots were not behind the false news, but humans. This is all the good news about the misinformation.

There is a generator network and a discriminator network. The generator is the noise source of the the media. There is a generator example and a real example. The generator example is the false example. The discriminator network shows which tweet is real or fake. The generator example is trying to fool the discriminator into thinking the fake is real.

An example is that a news reporter is making it look like that the White House intern. They removed frames from this video in order to make it seem very real. Stunt men and woman did this all the time in movies to make it realistic.

There are five different paths to try and address the difficult problems. The first one is labeling. In a grocery store, the products have labels to see how many calories and many more things about it. We don’t know where this information was gathered so it could be fake or real so we are consuming information.

What we don’t know is that who decides which tweet is fake and which is real. People can get advertising dollars for this and the serial hackers can be doing this for money, but we don’t know. We don’t know the dangers of this.

Malaysia created a law where if you were to tweet false and fake news, you were to be put in jail for six whole years. We are trying to end this, but it the best way is by humans not doing this.

By the false news rising and with us not knowing which is fake and which is real, this could be the end of reality with not knowing the knowledge of good and bad and fake and real.

This ted talk was really nice and it tought me a lot of stuff. The first time I heard about fake news was when my friends told me, it was by/from Donald Trump. At that time i knew what fake news meant. Because just put the fake in front of news easy. That was the first time I heard about fake news.

Then again now we saw it again. wow. Fake news of Obama and other stuff. AT first i thought they sent fake news to get more followers. But actually they get less. So it can’t be that. The rest i Don’t know sad. I think this is too short is it.

Have you ever met or had a friend that daydreams and thinks their someone that their not. Come on, everyone does. You might be wondering no I have not seen anyone who’s daydreaming, or no I have never daydreamed before. However, it turned out that nearly everyone, daydreams on a regular basis, studies also indicate that as many as 96% of adults daydreams every day. But have you ever wondered why do I daydream or why don’t I know that I’m thinking daydreaming? It turned out that types of daydreams also affects how much you forget. according to Delaney and colleagues’ research. “When people working on a task were asked to daydream about their childhood home, the older subjects forgot more of the interrupted task than the younger subjects did.” Therefore this also showed that daydreams also depended on age and what you “dream” about. There are two reasons why that have happened.

Though some people may think of daydreaming as something they do unintentionally, research shows that people sometimes zone out on purpose. Research also showed that the people that have unintentionally daydream, have a different dream than someone that zone out “on purpose”.(according to findings published in March 2016 in the journal Psychological Science.) Researchers said they think that people intentionally let their minds wander during easy tasks, however, it only happens when the person knows that is an easy task or when then already know they will get a good outcome.

Moreover, people can still just wander off just because of constantly blinking and looking in one spot. They also have found that people that are doing a problem or just thanking during the moments when their minds wandered blinks more compared with the moments in which they were more focused on the task. Also ff you are stuck on a problem, letting your mind wander for a bit may help you get unstuck. this is what I call resetting the brain, it is a way of having a break from constantly thinking. It is also a way for your brain to refresh it’s thinking and review what it was doing.

In the end, daydreaming are not always bad and sometimes you need some od your own “brain space” to work things out.

Some people wonder, “What do people mean what Facebook should do?” Don’t worry, I will explain what it means. There was a video of Sinan Aral saying that Facebook and the other social media websites “should lock everything down and make sure everything is secure.” They did that because fake news is being trusted too much. But they then said that if they wanted to change how much people are believing fake news, “They should open the kimono and show us the inner working of how Facebook is working. And if we want to know social media’s affect on society, we need scientists, researchers, and others to have access to this kind of information. So what should Facebook do?

Well, Facebook and the other social media websites probably doesn’t know which one to choose, after all, it is a pretty hard choice. One choice can lead to disaster or might not lead to disaster and the other won’t lead to disaster right away but soon will because people are making tech better and better. “Some people might be scratching your head wondering what does tech have to do with anything?” Well, some people are making new tech that can make fake news, fake images, and fake videos more believable and more realistic or making real news more crazy.

So Facebook and the other social media websites should only let the scientists they want to look at the data and information look at the data and information. They should do that because then, no one else will see the information. “Yes, you might say hackers may get into it.” But hackers can also get into it even if you don’t let anyone look at it and lock it so it’s better to solve it then let it get worse. That is what Facebook and the other social media websites should do.

I’m going to be writing about the article in the New Yorker about Ealter Mitty. So Walter Mitty is a person who daydreams at the worst possible times. Like at first he was daydreaming about being on a ship and sailing on a crew while he was driving, and then, while he was daydreaming he was speeding on the highway. And then after he drops off his wife at the hair thing to get her hair done, he starts daydreaming again! Now he dreams about being the doctor at a place and doing surgery and being popular and stuff. And then he wakes up and almost runs into another car and dies. After that, he starts thinking about what he forgot to buy at the grocery store. Then he starts daydreaming once again, about killing somebody with a gun. And then, he talks to himself about puppy biscuits and gets humiliated by a women who was passing by. After he gets humiliated, he sits in a chair at the hotel and starts daydreaming once again. This time he dreams about flying something in war or something like that. After his wife wakes him up, he walks with his wife out of the hotel. His wife forgot something at the hotel, and then he starts smoking by the drug store and starts daydreaming again. This time about getting executed by a bunch of people. Now, why was he daydreaming? Because his life is boring and his wife sucks. All she does his boss him around and he doesn’t do anything in his life.