Essay on Fake News Spread Faster than Truth: Rhetorical Strategies to Persuade Audience

Introduction

The author uses rhetorical strategies to persuade the audience that fake news spread faster than the truth using social media platforms (Chadwick, 2018). He does this by recognizing that social media users are human beings who need the platform to engage with each other. The author notes fake stories are more likely to excite the audience compare to accurate information which triggers sadness. The use of simple and easy language to pass the argument on the way fake news moves fast than the truth makes readers more interested in understanding the author's reasoning. For instance, the author uses explicit examples to demonstrate his position through realistic occurrences in the world. The US intelligence agencies have brought to the public attention the negative effect of social media on presidential elections (Chadwick, 2018). The agencies note that the online platform allows people to distort information that disrupts the spread and attitude citizens have towards the truth both in the short-term and in the long-term.

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The primary audience of the article is members of the public, most of whom prefer getting information The Guardian and some of them are social media users who need to understand the active role they play to pass information. The development of technology and the internet has attracted millions of users. The emergence of social media platforms that are free and easy to register has given people in large masses to open pages online for interaction. Any event taking place in the country is openly discussed online which means distortion of information is easy (Chadwick, 2018). Spread of fake news becomes fast despite the existence of artificial intelligence algorithm. The author calls for immediate intervention programs to help reduce the menace that has affected the factors that influence human judgment. This is because people are no longer using their critical thinking skills to evaluate a piece of information they access on the social media channels before they spread it to others.

Section Three: Argument

Any form of information circulating on social media is seen by millions of people due to the many users online at any single time of the day. Members of the public anticipate news from the mainstream media houses which informs them of the current events taking place in the country (Kim et al., 2018; Shao et al., 2017). Hence, people anticipate such kind of information to circulate and may have little or no attention to the news. However, any type of fake news tends to excite people due to the contradiction and popularity it creates amongst the crowds. Most of the fake news represents some of the information that does not get the attention of the mainstream media. Fake news may represent the popular views which most people have even though the idea might not be logical enough to be implemented or embraced for the benefit of all persons (Shu et al., 2017). For instance, during political events like presidential elections, contestants always have the media searching for any information about their private lives, most of which paints a negative image to the public. Opponents of such contestants may take this opportunity to distort the information by spreading fake news.

College students, who are part of the millions of online users, play a direct role in spreading fake news. This is because most of the college students use their social media pages to communicate with their peers and have little or no interest in evaluating the credibility of the source of such information (Leeder, 2019). It is uncommon for college students to check the validity of the source of information as they do not have the patience or knowledge that they are supposed to take due diligence before sharing any type of data that is of public interest. Most college students do not possess information-seeking behaviors or a skill that gives them the discipline to avoid spreading fake news. Arguably, it is important for college students to understand the implication of spreading fake news against the persona of an individual, especially public figures who might not take such an issue politely. Students can find themselves in legal battles for defamation cases with the court ruling in favor of the plaintiff. Such cases require the defendant to pay damage fees and it may result to unnecessary debts for the students.

Spreading fake news may create some form of popularity amongst users if they are the first to know about a current event (Mustafaraj & Metaxas, 2017). For instance, if some piece of information about a popular celeb and gets into the wrong hands, the first persons to share that data attract traffic to their social media pages. This creates the impression to most college students they can use this strategy to ensure they attract the attention of other online users to their pages. It is common for students to have the comparative advantage of being the most popular person in the school who is always aware of the events taking place in the entertainment industry (Chadwick, 2018). As such, students might be blinded by the intrinsic need to be famous in college and fail to validate the source of a piece of information they share on the social media pages.

Arguably, social media platforms have created a culture amongst its users since it does not require people to pass through a validation process when sharing information. This means anyone can start a news item about a particular issue and pass it to the friends list who, without taking much thought on the authenticity of the information will be willing and ready to share the information (Leeder, 2019). The fake news will be shared across the social media platforms and since there are no geographical boundaries, such pieces of information may reach people across the world. The primary audience of this argument is all social media users. The justification of selecting this audience is every social media user has the potential of spreading fake news if they fail to validate the source of such information.

References

Chadwick, P. (2018, March 19). Why fake news on social media travels faster than the truth | Paul Chadwick. Retrieved April 5, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/19/fake-news-social-media-twitter-mit-journalism

Kim, J., Tabibian, B., Oh, A., Scholkopf, B., & Gomez-Rodriguez, M. (2018, February). Leveraging the crowd to detect and reduce the spread of fake news and misinformation. In Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (pp. 324-332).

Leeder, C. (2019). How college students evaluate and share "fake news" stories. Library & Information Science Research, 41(3), 100967.

Mustafaraj, E., & Metaxas, P. T. (2017, June). The fake news spreading plague: was it preventable?. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on web science conference (pp. 235-239).

Shao, C., Ciampaglia, G. L., Varol, O., Flammini, A., & Menczer, F. (2017). The spread of fake news by social bots. arXiv preprint arXiv:1707.07592, 96, 104.

Shu, K., Sliva, A., Wang, S., Tang, J., & Liu, H. (2017). Fake news detection on social media: A data mining perspective. ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter, 19(1), 22-36.