I found this week’s topic very interesting as I feel like all of us have been affected by fake news or clickbait at some point in our life. I was surprised to find that from August 2016 till the election day on 8th of November 2016 the total Facebook engagement for fake news was greater in comparison to the mainstream news by 1.4 million. Which made me question whether Facebook is doing anything to combat the spread of fake news.
While reading Megan’s blog I came across a comment made by Mark Zuckerberg which addressed the problem of fake news and what the Facebook team is doing to tackle the problem. While prioritizing trustworthy news may help, I feel like it creates filter bubbles thus the steps taken by the Facebook team seem counterintuitive. Also, Iarina’s comment on my post regarding the false accusation of three Romanian citizens for distributing weapons across Europe by Sky News made me question the integrity of the mainstream news outlets (Bird and VdovÎi, 2017). While the probability of Sky News making the same mistake is very low, it does make you question the credibility of the so-called trustworthy news outlets.
Ryan’s post brought my attention to clickbait and why it is so successful. I initiated a discussion on Ryan’s post asking whether we can deter content creators from creating clickbait. Ryan’s reply made a fair point that people are financially driven so, the best way to counteract the click bait problem is to improve our digital literacy.
In conclusion, what I’ve gained from reading my peers’ blogs and their comments is that the best solution for tackling the problem of digital credibility is to improve my digital literacy. Being able to assess the credibility of a source is the key to getting reliable and authentic information.
My comment on Megan’s Blog.
My comment on Ryan’s Blog.
Word Count: 300
Bird, M. and VDOVÎI, L. (2018) Theblacksea.eu: The Fix-Up: How Sky News broadcasts false content about east Europe. Available from: https://theblacksea.eu/sky-news/ [Accessed 19 March 2018].