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All courses Forums Discussion room: fake news Fake News Reply To: Fake News

  • Lucia

    Member
    August 2, 2021 at 12:18 pm

    This is my try of correction:

    My main source of news IS Social networks. I know: they are places full of terror and lies, but this is not completely correct: a lot of people use them in a very proficient way to spread information. A couple of exampleS of this are the Instagram account of spaghettipolitics and the Youtube channel Breaking Italy. The first one is an Italian student in THE Netherlands, that every week reports the “news of the week”, a sort of highlight of what has happened during the week, globally. The second one is a Youtube channel where a Sardinian man, analyzes some of the news that he and his team found particularly interesting that day (the show is daily for four days of the week) and he attaches ALL the sources of what he claims in the video, in such a way to give the watchers a WAY to going deeper inside the topics he talks about. Apart FROM them, the only newspaper I read is Il Post.

    SINCE the SOURCES I enlisted ARE transparent and givE the possibility to check on their sources I tend to TRUST THEM. ESPECIALLY CONSIDERING THAT the remaining part of the media in Italy are biased. They are of course politically biased, and they often are also old and boomer in the negative sense. To see this, it is sufficient TO SEE how a news STORY is told when there is a black person involved, or the way he femicides are described. Sensationalist and partial. Always.

    According to me, to understand if a news STORY is a fake one the first thing to check is to identify its root and the level of spreading. Even if the media are not completely trustworthy, of course THE news on a newspaper has a different dignity THAN the same news on Facebook. Moreover, usually, if something is too strange to be true, well… It isn’t true! In any case a quick research online can give you new information (trivially: if you look at a video saying “Dolphins have learnt to fly”, and it is true, searching “dolphins” is probably one of the first things you obtain on Google).

    I am fascinated and scared by fake news, in particular for the way they have changed the society and have shown the lack of digital (and not) education people have. They are the better example to explain WHY knowledge and education are important. I think that fake news’ root is double: people who want to demonstrate to be cleverER than others, and people that want to exercise power over others. And watching the public speeches of this lat years it is clear that the seconds are dangerously more than we expected.