The Internet Can't Be Trusted Anymore

More than ever, don’t believe (and share) what you read on the internet before looking at the website and its sources. I came across this article "How the Internet Disrupted the Truth" from the Guardian entitled  which prompted me to make this post. It's quite a long read but I'll just copy snippets here which will help me prove my point. The article discusses how information was used in campaigns for or against Brext in the UK.

Here are some quotes for the article which I feel are important to get to my point. These are snippets form different parts of the article so they may not be fluid but the points that I want to convey are there.

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“Social media has swallowed the news – threatening the funding of public-interest reporting and ushering in an era when everyone has their own facts. But the consequences go far beyond journalism”

“When a fact begins to resemble whatever you feel is true, it becomes very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and “facts” that are not.”

“It was taking an American-style media approach,” said Banks. “What they said early on was ‘Facts don’t work’, and that’s it. The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”

“Algorithms such as the one that powers Facebook’s news feed are designed to give us more of what they think we want – which means that the version of the world we encounter every day in our own personal stream has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs.”

“Our news ecosystem has changed more dramatically in the past five years,” she wrote in March, “than perhaps at any time in the past 500.” The future of publishing is being put into the “hands of the few, who now control the destiny of the many”. News publishers have lost control over the distribution of their journalism, which for many readers is now “filtered through algorithms and platforms which are opaque and unpredictable”. This means that social media companies have become overwhelmingly powerful in determining what we read – and enormously profitable from the monetisation of other people’s work. As Bell notes: “There is a far greater concentration of power in this respect than there has ever been in the past.”

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Given what was written above I can relate this story to what happened here in the last election. Here's a screenshot from Rappler's 10 Takeaways from Duterte's Digital Campaign. 

President Rody's team had an overpowering advantage in social media when spreading good things about him and bad things about the opponents. The elections are over but I see this type of propaganda continues with websites which may have been created due to the last election.

It's easily seen on social media where sites like pinoytrendingnews.net are shared easily. While for most part these sites just copy and paste news but sometimes these are used to destroy people or are used for propaganda. It just takes a few clicks to read the 'About Us' page or look at the "Disclaimer' to be able to judge the credibility of these sites. Here's a screenshot from this particular sites 'Disclaimer' tab:

This would definitely destroy the credibility of a website unless you dig deeper and look at the source of the story which people would not likely do.

It's easy for people to criticize mainstream media for being biased and this is when we use our brains. The fact that we have the opinion that it is biased we know how to take their news. Obviously people will have their biases too and they will spread news based on their opinion - where these sites will thrive. When sharing or spreading news at least look for a credible source from a reputable publisher or person. That's the least you can do with the ease of information available check the sources. 

If Brexit proves itself to be a tragedy or if Trump suddenly wins the US elections the truth would have unfortunately lost the battle online and the world would have the worst of it.