The Future of Fake News

How is fake news affecting people today? How will fake news affect people in the future?

Fake news is messing around with people’s minds. They make people believe one thing but see something else totally different. In my opinion I don’t think fake news will change in the future, but I do think people will be more aware.

After I did some research I found an article that Facebook’s news leader, Adam Mosseri on The Verge saying Facebook is now going to pay fact-checking organizations to spot and take away fake news articles that are advertised on people’s news feeds. I thought this was very interesting because at first I did not think fake news was going to change in the future at all.

Going further down in this article I found that Facebook is already partners with organizations that do check fake news articles like “Snopes” and “Politifacts”. But they do not know if they are actually paying them yet.

Fake news has dramatically gone up since this last presidential election and it’s nice to see that Facebook is one step ahead in trying to make a change for the future of fake news

Will this continue?

“Fake news will continue to exist, and it’s up to the individuals to distinguish between fake and real news.” says Mahesh
In the article, What Do You Think Will Happen With Fake News In The Future? Laura Tucker interviews people about their opinion on this issue.  Fake news has been around for centuries and it will continue to grow in the future.

"In the not too distant future, technology giants will decide what news sources we are allowed to consult, and alternative voices will be silenced." by Writer Jonathan Albright." Fake news has been real since we’ve had the capability to communicate language and tell stories. "  Marsha Blackburn, an American congresswoman, has gone so far as to imply that internet service providers should be held responsible for taking down fake news, saying: “If anyone is putting fake news out there, the ISPs have the obligation to in some way get that off the web.”

Another individual Laura Tucker interviewed was Jeffry, he claims “One person can manufacture the fake news, and another will gladly hit the forward button without bothering to check its validity.” Jeffry believes fake news will continue to prosper and it will not stop anytime soon.


There are incentives to put an end to fake news but it will take time and effort to stop it. It is up to the people to decide the legitimacy of the information in front of them.

Future of Fake News or No Future at All.

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.

Will fake news haunt the future?

Fake news today can literally be found anywhere throughout the internet. On any page on Facebook or Twitter most of the time the user can find fake news. It’s becoming such a big problem with many people believing it.

Social media like Facebook is trying to help put an end to this. On a Facebook post, posted by CEO and cofounder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, he said that they take misinformation seriously and that they are trying to better their technical systems to detect what people will flag as false before they do it themselves.  Facebook is launching a resource to help you spot fake news and misleading information that spreads throughout its service.

But apart from Facebook and other social medias trying to combat fake news people are only going to find different ways to produce it in a way that makes it harder to spot if it's fake. The future of fake news could even get a lot scarier once people start manipulating audio and video. On the video shown below you can see how a simple webcam can help produce a video to be manipulated and with doing that this can be a powerful weapon to create even more believable fake news.

Adobe, an American multinational computer software company, especially known for their programs like, Photoshop and After Effects have shown a program nicknamed "Photoshop for audio." Nick
Bilton, a writer for vanity fair says, "The product allows users to feed ten to 20 minutes of someone's voice into the application and then allows them to type words that are expressed in that exact voice.

The more people get their hands on programs that allow them to manipulate such things the harder it'll be to stop fake news from spreading and the easier that people will fall victims to it.

Many people are making money from spreading fake news. Scott Shane, from The New York Times, wrote an article about a 23 year old named Cameron Harris and how he made $1000 from people clicking his website and reading fake news that he produced.

It's such a scary thing to think but many people have created a job for themselves through the spread of fake news.

Fake news will never end and will only become more difficult to put an end to or even to spot, but it can be avoided. There are many actions being taken to help the spread of fake news, but the best thing anybody can do is to take the right steps and research what they are reading to see whether it is real or not.

Pseudo Fate

Fake news has been around for centuries. In the "Long and Brutal History of Fake News,"  Jacob Soll  explains that fake news has been around since Gutenberg invited the printing press in 1439. Soll goes on through the centuries and explains that as printing grew, so did fake news. "as real news recedes, fake news will grow," states Soll. 


If one Google searches, "will fake news go away?," every single result that pops up says something along the lines of "fake news isn't going away," "how to handle fake news," etc. These headlines are correct. I do not think that fake news will go away. People like to spread rumors and start drama and what makes it even worse is that they can get paid for doing it. Why give that up? 

As years go by, fake news seems to be growing stronger, weakening the real, truthful news. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and even Instagram make fake news easier to access because people can post whatever they want on these media outlets. 

Many websites, such as Google, are starting to incorporate a fact checking component to their search results to help dissipate fake news. "The company plans to reserve the label for search results about addressable public claims of fact, rather than opinion," states Bergen, the author of, "Google Brings Fake News Fact Checking to Search Results."

In an article written by Lee Rainie, Janna Anderson, and Jonathan Albright, statistics are given for what the public thinks will happen in the next decade to social media and fake news. "46% of respondents indicated that they expect “no major change” in online social climate in the coming decade and 39% said they expect the online future will be “more shaped” by negative activities."

Predicting what the consequences of fake news continuing will be should be relatively easy, considering we are living those consequences right now. Fake news has wormed its way into our current lives, leaving behind rumors and messes for people that know the truth to clean up. If people don't start paying closer attention to what they are reading, and sharing on the internet, this issue is going to grow tremendously in the next couple of years, and we will have a big problem on our hands regarding other countries. If the United States of America happens to have a false story going around about another country and that country hears or reads it, they could decide to take action and fight back. 



Its obvious fake news is not good news, and all it does is cause trouble, therefore if fake news is in our future, so is trouble.

The Future of Fake News

The term "fake news" has been used for many years in social media and in the news. A lot of people usually find it on different sources, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. But it wasn't until 2016 when it began to impact the presidential election that it became more prevalent. Fake news will not stop any time soon. "Fake news stories have been around for as long as truthful ones," according to the article Fake news and the future of journalism. I do not know when it will go away, but what I do know is that it will influence people's opinions.


Last year, Pew Research Center and Elon University together did some academic and government research and asked one question which was "In the next decade, will public discourse online become more or less shaped by bad actors, harassment, trolls, and an overall tone of griping, distrust, and disgust?" The Future of Free Speech, Trolls, Anonymity and Fake News Online. The answers to this question were that "Some 39% of these respondents opted for the prediction that online activity would be more shaped by negative activities, while some 41% chose the option that they expect no major change in tone in online interaction." 


Fake news doesn't seem like it is going to go away in the future. It might get even more popular within the next decade or so. Sometimes I like to read the news, but I usually stay away from news that is false. And that is a good thing for me because I always like to read news that is truthful.

Looking at the Future for Fake News

The term "fake news" has been used for many years in the social media and news world. 44% of U.S. adults get their news from Facebook, 10% from Youtube, and 9% from Twitter, according to a poll done by Pew study in 2016 mentioned in the How Mark Zuckerberg Handles Fake News Will Determine The Future of Facebook article. It was not until couple years ago that it became even a bigger problem, especially during the election times this past year. Fake news will not go away any time soon. As much as some countries or websites can do to block "fake news", it will not be completely gone. It will interfere with people's freedom of speech.

Pew Research Center and Elon University asked 1,537 scholars and technology experts one huge question which was along the lines of " will public discourse online become more or less shaped by bad actors, harassment...." The Future of Free Speech, Trolls, Anonymity and Fake News Online. In response to the question, 42% said they expect no major changes in the coming decade and 39% said they expect the future to be more shaped by negative activities". As the article continues, it starts talking about freedom of speech in the online world. It says that people misuse that with harassing others and proving false news, which a lot of people end up believing. Although websites such as Facebook are trying to detect false news on their website, it can be controversial because how far can they go to tell someone to not post something until they come between the First Amendment. 

Fake news does not seem like it is going away. It seems like it might even get bigger as the years go on. People now a days have strong opinions towards controversial issues such as gun control or abortion and they are driven by how many "likes" on Facebook they get or how many retweets on twitter they get. People will say just about anything in order to get some retweets. For example, an individual may post something about crime that happened but the individual did not get the right facts about it before posting it. Because of the post, it got others to retweet it and talk about it even though it is not even true.  Twitter and Facebook are two of the biggest websites at the moment and news travels fast on those websites. The future for fake news is just beginning.