BREAKING NEWS: Britain has just sunk under the waves! BREAKING NEWS: Donald Trump has just declared war on Australia! These titles are all titles of fake news.
In this Ted Talk, Sinai Aral talks about how we can protect truth in the midst of misinformation. Fake news can sway elections and pulverize economies in our everyday life. Aral clarifies how it spreads so quickly and identifies strategies to help untangle the the net between true and false.
I believe Sinai Aral’s ways to separate the truth from fake news are correct. Right now, there are lots of examples of fake news spreading. For example, in the 2016 election, Russian hackers literally changed the results of the polls, just by spreading misinformation. Another example is when Syrian hackers hacked into twitter accounts, posting that at the White House, explosions took place and the president at the current time, Barrack Obama, was injured. That tweet was retweeted thousands of times in minutes. This didn’t only affect people’s feelings, though. It also changed investors minds. They started selling their stocks at an alarming rate. Billions of dollars worth of stock were sold and money lost, just because of fake news. His ideas, were that ‘events’ that caused disgust and surprise were more likely to be fake than to be real, whereas real news had joy, happiness, and so on. Real news were more positive, where fake news have more of a negative or shocking effect. I can certainly agree on this, like when I saw this ad on an article I was reading, it said: ‘The Golden Gate Bridge has fallen down, 50 people missing or dead’. That really has an effect on me, because I don’t expect a bridge that has been fine for decades has just suddenly collapsed. Fortunately, I had some training on fake news so I checked, and fortunately, the people who generated the fake photos didn’t do a very good job, and I saw overlapping images, and parts of the photo where it was blurrier, and so on. I also agree on his idea of regulation. He believes that the computer algorithms should be given to the public, so that they can also check if something’s right or wrong.
In conclusion, Aral’s philosophy is correct, and I firmly agree with him. There is still lots to do to counter misinformation. If we do not take strong action, soon we will not know if Mexico has been destroyed by earthquakes, or if Moscow has turned into a space city. People will keep feeding the public these confusing blogs until we take aggressive action and stop this at once.