Gabby Miller
19 April 2018
English 112
Argumentative Essay
Does the Truth Really Matter?
When we were kids and just starting to truly understand what we were saying, we were taught that there is nothing more important than the truth, but as we got older, the truth started to slip away and it became easier to tell lies. Today, lies and fake news go hand in hand, and we need to go back to when the truth was the thing that mattered most. Technology and social media have paved the way for false information to be spread. In order to solve the problems that come with telling lies, and mixing the truth, the public needs to actively check the news we read before we hit share.
But why does the truth matter? Media channels, news outlets, magazines and newspapers’ number one goal is to grab the audience’s attention and keep their attention so that they will either buy it or continuing watching. In order to grab our attention, they can create a header that is not totally a lie but close, in other words the more extreme it is, the more likely we are to read it. Fake news articles and real articles can look the exact same and each will still have a significant amount of comments and shares to give off the appeal that it is real. Every time someone shares a fake article we are giving it the opportunity to have a negative impact on the world. Hypothetically, let’s say there was an article posted and it said that Japan was planning to launch a nuclear bomb and there was a good chance that it was going to hit the United States. Now given that something similar happened in World War II, we are more likely to believe this story and jump right into ways to take down Japan, in other words the start of World War III.
While Japan bombing the United States is a little out there, there are in fact examples in our everyday life such as the 2016 election. Each party was responsible for spreading fake news. The Democrats would spread quotes about Donald Trump while the Republicans would post that the FBI found something in Hillary Clinton’s emails. Each party would say whatever was necessary to prove their point that one candidate was better than the other, regardless of if the information was true or not. By telling half-truths and misleading interpretations, they gave the supporters what they wanted to hear, but not necessarily what they need to decide who to vote for (Solan.) If the public had been given the truth rather than what people thought they wanted to hear, the outcome of the 2016 election may have been different (Menczer.)
Back when the news was first invented, there were not a whole lot of ways for people to receive recent news besides the newspaper and a few magazines. Now the news is everywhere which makes it hard to figure out what is true and what is not. Most things seem truthful but in most cases, they are not, in which case people need to know how to figure out if what they are looking at is true. There are a ton of ways to check information. The first one is rather simple and it is to simply “Pay Attention to the domain and URL,” look for things like .com.co because most legitimate sites will own their own domain (Davis.) Another one is to look for quotes in the article. “Most publication have multiple sources in each story who are professionals and have expertise in the fields they talk about” (Davis.) Another way to find the truth is to search the information on the site and the author on Google. By doing this we are making sure that the author’s name is linked with articles that have been true and honest in the past.
In all seriousness, the truth is something that people should strive to obtain, and more people should hold it to a higher standard like we did when we were younger. Since many people do not check the information before sharing it, fake news is spreading like a wildfire and eventually will cause damage to the world we live in. To stop the spreading of fake news, people to need to check the facts before they share it with others.
Works Cited
Davis, Wynne. “Fake or Real? How to Self-Check the News and Get The Facts." NPR, 5 Dec. 2016, http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/12/05/503581220/fake-or-real-how-to-self-check-the-news-and-get-the-facts. Accessed 18 Apr 2018.
Menczer, Filippo. “Why Fake News Is So Incredibly Effective.” Time, 28 Nov. 2016, http://time.com/4583475/fake-news-effective/. Accessed 18 Apr 2018
Solon, Olivia. “Facebook’s Failure: Did Fake News and Polarized Politics Get Trump Elected?” The Guardian. 10 Nov. 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/10/facebook-fake-news-election-conspiracy-theories. Accessed 18 Apr 2018.