Can American Society Overcome the Fake News Phenomenon? â Mother Jones
Amy Webb
Itâs not as if fake news in America came into existence alongside the tide known as the Trump presidencyâthe hucksters  foreign propagandists  conspiracy theorists  and fabricators have always been hereâbut if ever there was a year when purposefully misleading or false stories hit their stride  2017 might have been it.  We  were told that an ISIS leader was captured at a US airport  and that Shariah law was instituted in Utah and other states. A study found that 25 million votes for Hillary Clinton were âcompletely fraudulent â and the Las Vegas massacre was carried out by antifa  or ISIS  or the Illuminati  or somehow all three. The lies went on and on  picking up where 2016âs catalogue of nonsense left off. (Remember Hillary Clintonâs child sex trafficking ring run out of a pizzeria  or Sarah Palin banning Muslims from âenteringâ her daughter? How about Alec Baldwin dying  and Trump winning the electoral vote and the popular vote?)
But now  we âre at the dawn of a fresh year  privy to the forces that seek to sow confusion and outrage. Can American society overcome the fake news phenomenon?
Wellâ¦ âThereâs probably a strong case to be made that  we  are chemically addicted to fake news â says  Amy Webb   an author and futurist who founded the Future Today Institute. âWhen youâre seeing your angers and fears and anxieties being validated externally  you get a shot of dopamine.â Thinking about the upcoming year and beyond   she  says   we  may have âa huge problem on  our  hands.â And though the propaganda is coming at  us  from all directionsâfrom Kremlin-backed misinformation campaigns and Twitter troll armies to publicity hounds and political malcontentsâfalling for it  and spreading it  is to some degree our own fault.
In the spring of 2017   Webb  wrote a piece for Mother Jones that detailed not only the manner of 21st-century fake news and the speed with which it travels  but also how we are all accomplices to its proliferation âas we click and repost without considering the storyâs source and its agenda.â  She  noted that the democratization of the internet back in the 1990s meant that âeveryone would get to participate regardless of their agendas.â Information became free and free-flowing. But  problematically  âwe didnât plan ahead as the internet matured â when consumers of information were left to contend with not only âhuman arbiters of factsâ but also code and algorithms that propel certain types of content to the fore  based on our own online behavior. Innocently sharing a cat video put out by Russia Today  a Kremlin-backed propaganda machine that elevates fringe âexpertsâ and attempts to sow distrust  means youâll see a lot more of their content in the future.
Complicating matters more is that in our politicized climate  the term fake news itself came to mean different things to different people. It had a literal meaning that  seemingly overnight  became a hashtag and an epithet to hurl at anything or anyone that one disagrees with. âIf we canât even come to some kind of convergence and talk about something as insidious and as threatening to our future as the spread of misinformationâotherwise known as fake news in the literal senseâthen donât we have sort of a catastrophically huge problem on our hands?â asks  Webb .
As someone who studies current and past trends to try to anticipate what the future may hold   Webb  likes to end these conversations with a reminder that  for however doomed things appear  âWe are not living in the middle of Westworldâthe future has not been preordained. There is something we can do in the year 2018 and beyond  and that is be smarter consumers of news.â
Itâs not as if fake news in America came into existence alongside the tide known as the Trump presidencyâthe hucksters  foreign propagandists  conspiracy theorists  and fabricators have always been hereâbut if ever there was a year when purposefully misleading or false stories hit their stride  2017 might have been it.  We  were told that an ISIS leader was captured at a US airport  and that Shariah law was instituted in Utah and other states. A study found that 25 million votes for Hillary Clinton were âcompletely fraudulent â and the Las Vegas massacre was carried out by antifa  or ISIS  or the Illuminati  or somehow all three. The lies went on and on  picking up where 2016âs catalogue of nonsense left off. (Remember Hillary Clintonâs child sex trafficking ring run out of a pizzeria  or Sarah Palin banning Muslims from âenteringâ her daughter? How about Alec Baldwin dying  and Trump winning the electoral vote and the popular vote?)
But now  we âre at the dawn of a fresh year  privy to the forces that seek to sow confusion and outrage. Can American society overcome the fake news phenomenon?
Wellâ¦ âThereâs probably a strong case to be made that  we  are chemically addicted to fake news â says   [TGT]    an author and futurist who founded the Future Today Institute. âWhen youâre seeing your angers and fears and anxieties being validated externally  you get a shot of dopamine.â Thinking about the upcoming year and beyond   she  says   we  may have âa huge problem on  our  hands.â And though the propaganda is coming at  us  from all directionsâfrom Kremlin-backed misinformation campaigns and Twitter troll armies to publicity hounds and political malcontentsâfalling for it  and spreading it  is to some degree our own fault.
In the spring of 2017   Webb  wrote a piece for Mother Jones that detailed not only the manner of 21st-century fake news and the speed with which it travels  but also how we are all accomplices to its proliferation âas we click and repost without considering the storyâs source and its agenda.â  She  noted that the democratization of the internet back in the 1990s meant that âeveryone would get to participate regardless of their agendas.â Information became free and free-flowing. But  problematically  âwe didnât plan ahead as the internet matured â when consumers of information were left to contend with not only âhuman arbiters of factsâ but also code and algorithms that propel certain types of content to the fore  based on our own online behavior. Innocently sharing a cat video put out by Russia Today  a Kremlin-backed propaganda machine that elevates fringe âexpertsâ and attempts to sow distrust  means youâll see a lot more of their content in the future.
Complicating matters more is that in our politicized climate  the term fake news itself came to mean different things to different people. It had a literal meaning that  seemingly overnight  became a hashtag and an epithet to hurl at anything or anyone that one disagrees with. âIf we canât even come to some kind of convergence and talk about something as insidious and as threatening to our future as the spread of misinformationâotherwise known as fake news in the literal senseâthen donât we have sort of a catastrophically huge problem on our hands?â asks  Webb .
As someone who studies current and past trends to try to anticipate what the future may hold   Webb  likes to end these conversations with a reminder that  for however doomed things appear  âWe are not living in the middle of Westworldâthe future has not been preordained. There is something we can do in the year 2018 and beyond  and that is be smarter consumers of news.â