![]() ![]() So too can people simply wanting to create havoc. Shareholder activism can generate (or utilise) media scrutiny, and therefore, be at the whim of intentional news manipulation. Amid the growing crisis of trust, it can at least help provide a viable business model for credible, newsroom-based journalism that some fear is dying.” 4 Trust in quality journalism is going up – as are the subscriptions from people shelling out to guarantee access to unbiased information.īut bots and actors intent on interfering on a world stage won’t limit their manipulation to politics – business will also be seen as fair game. As Michael Stutchbury of The Australian Financial Review, points out, “Fake news can make old media great again. Moreover, the recent proliferation in fake news has led to an increased interest in quality journalism and publishing integrity. Do we live in a social media echo chamber where our confirmation bias is always confirmed? The jury is out on the extent, 3 but that society is asking the question is a step in the right direction. A renewed interest in the transparency of communication channels is not a bad thing. It might be tempting to ignore fake news as a political problem in which the impacts are restricted to echelons higher than the world of business.Īnd in some ways, fake news has had a positive influence. ![]() 2 It isn’t that people want to spread rumours, more that our human nature can make us more susceptible to believing juicier content. A study by MIT found that tweets containing misinformation go viral more than factually correct tweets, in some cases spreading six times faster and reaching tens to hundreds of thousands more. False news spreads faster than the truth, but it isn’t necessarily due to nefarious intentions. Third, we have unintentionally fake news. Propaganda and biased news is the result of unscrupulous reporting, or politically-aligned publishers. This is not new in any way, shape or form. The second type is not so much ‘fake’ as it is misleading or serving an agenda. 1 It isn’t new, but has greater reach in a hyper-connected world. This is the kind that has been disseminated on social media to change election outcomes. This is the spreading of intentionally incorrect information (by bots or otherwise) with the goal of changing a societal outcome. The first type, what we’ll call ‘deliberate fake news’, is arguably the most ‘fake’. Broadly speaking, there are three main types of fake news, and all need to be tackled in different ways, by society and business alike. It seems like a simple question, but actually, the first thing to know about fake news is that there’s no one kind. Why then has this time around changed the entire conversation? What is Its ilk has been carved on temple walls, printed on coins and permeated the radio airwaves. It’s a favoured subject of newspapers, social media, politicians, governments and media outlets, and it seems to have come out of nowhere.Ī year or two ago, the term would be unfamiliar to most of us, but as a concept, ‘fake’ news has been around since humans began writing things down (and undoubtedly, even before that). Normally we’d start an article like this with a quip about the topic being “in the headlines,” but when it comes to fake news in the current day, that’s redundant. ![]()
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