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Joe Routhier, Mackenzie Morton-Kevlin, Nyiem Brown
Creators of fake news know exactly what they are doing when they are making this content. The general motivation behind gossip is to bring the target down a peg, to blacken their reputation in the community, and to reduce their standing in the eyes of others. More often then not, fake news is targeted at a large group of people who haven’t done anything wrong. The epidemic is actually so bad that mega companies like Google and Facebook are getting involved to stop the madness of fake news.
The deciding factor that made these large corporations step in was the accusation that that they were swinging voters in favor of President Donald Trump during the election through misleading, and outright wrong news stories that were being spread through their sites. In an attempt to combat this facebook has clarified their ad policy to try and filter out fake ads. Google has made changes to their adsense system that extends some of their policies to prohibit misrepresentative content to the websites it’s advertisements run on, making it harder for people to make money off of the spreading of fake news.
Sometimes the most innocent people are targeted by fake news. For example, in Washington state, a small business local pizzeria was targeted in a fake news article that said that Hilary Clinton abused and trafficked children in one of the back rooms. The owner saw a huge drop in Instagram followers and was receiving threatening messages such as “I will kill you personally” from dm’s of Facebook and Twitter. Of course none of this was true and the business took a huge hit from it and they just happened to be mentioned in some fake article.
One very large figure in today’s society that has overwhelmingly been targeted and used the term ‘fake news’ is Donald Trump. He has specifically called out different news stations and accused them of putting out ‘fake news’ on him and others. He has made it into a casual term that doesn’t reflect the accurate meaning of what fake news really is. By him spreading false awareness of fake news it has caused the epidemic to get increasingly worse.
Works Cited. http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/08/politics/trump-huckabee-fake/index.html
Barber, Nigel. “Fake News Has a Real Audience.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 2 Feb. 2017, www.huffingtonpost.com/nigel-barber/fake-news-has-a-real-audi_b_14575564.html.
Kang, Cecilia. “Fake News Onslaught Targets Pizzeria as Nest of Child-Trafficking.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 21 Nov. 2016,
Nick Wingfield, Mike Isaac and Katie Benner. “Google and Facebook Take Aim at Fake News Sites.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 14 Nov. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/technology/google-will-ban-websites-that-host-fake-news-from-using-its-ad-service.html.