Welcome to the year of 2016 where social media rules the world, or at least most of it. Just 10 years ago when I was younger my mother would watch the news channel or get the newspaper to get the facts about what was going on in the world. Now you just go to Facebook or Twitter and can get a status or tweet telling you the news but with their own opinion attached to it. The worst part is most of the news I see on social media is fake! This is a big problem with how fast it can travel on social media. Misinform and mislead people could be a problem for us in the future.
From when we first start school we learn the the basics of learning. As we get older and move up higher grade levels and even college we start to learn more and more of how to do certain things. One being that we make sure we have credible sources when we get information and how to cite them. But what about the young generation who hasn't learned that just yet? The young children who have social media but can't differ a worthy site from fake one? Or the ones who can type in google a question and have it answer a question for them? The future doesn't look good for history class or even school at that matter. Maybe our future doesn't have school in it. Kids can learn everything they need to know from the internet. They can learn there history from google like who is our first black President? I never googled this until I read Richard Gray's article and wondered to myself how many people really believed this. These are the same ones who have social media and can get these fake news articles and run with it instead of checking out one of the reliable news cite. Getting more and more people to believe it. Why is this we might ask? In Pablo Boczkowski's article why our future of fake news is a problem, he states that most people trust there contacts on their social media more than the original news site due to their biased opinion.
When we first heard of the fake news article that members of the Democratic Party were having a phedophile camp in the basement of a pizza shop in Washington D.C. it led to a man unloading a assault rifle into the pizza shop. No-one was hurt in this but it could have been a much worse scene. Or even Robert Dear Jr. who killed 3 people and wounded 9 others because he believed Planned Parenthood were killing baby fetuses and selling their baby parts. Fake news could have played a big part in this shooting.
Its not just social media that puts out the fake news, its done by all types of websites which end up spreading quickly through social media. Also its not just news that is questioned these days from readers who believe what they want. It has also been seen with medicine and the people who started the theory of vaccines causing autism in kids. If fake news continues and people keep believing it, we might not trust the education system, we might not trust vaccines that could keep us healthy. That could mean no future at all.
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