Ibrahim Ali

Professor Mary

Rhet 105

Date: 1/21/17

Word Count: 450

Fake News and Bias

In The Real Story about Fake News is Partisanship, Amanda Taub makes the statement that our political biases cause us to be more susceptible to fake news and polarize us. I would say that this thesis was directly stated because the author explains how partisan bias makes us look for information that confirms our partisan beliefs, whether these beliefs of ours are correct or incorrect. Because we only look for information that supports our beliefs, we do not pay attention to the credibility of the source of the information and trust the information is real only because it confirms our partisan beliefs.

An example that was used in The Real Story about Fake News is Partisanship was how voters for Clinton were very interested in any story that portrayed Trump in a negative light and Trump supports were also attracted to stories that made Clinton look bad, regardless of whether these stories were fabricated or true. The supporters look to see if other people of their party support the information. If other party members support the information, they also believe the information as being true and do not verify the information as being truthful or not. This shortcut is what makes fake news so rampant. Because of people not verifying information to see whether it is legit, they become misinformed and spread incorrect information, causing more people to become misinformed.

I found it very interesting how the Wikipedia page distinguished satire news from fake news. It defines fake news as sources that publish fake information for the purpose of creating social traffic and to misinform and mislead people. However, satirical news and fake news were always similar to me. Both satirical news and fake news post fake information that can be misleading. However, it seemed to me that fake news sources deliberately want to mislead and misinform people for more harmful and malevolent reasons compared to satirical news sources, who create fake information for comical reasons.

While looking at articles from Snope.com’s Fake News Archives, I was intrigued how they named some stories false just by explaining why the story could be false instead of using any form of strong evidence regarding the specific story and how the evidence proved that the story was false. I was just a bit thrown off because the article was not as informative as I anticipated. However, the Snopes.com still supported the idea that people with a certain belief are more inclined to believe a story that supports their belief. For example, there was a story that claimed that a Chinese restaurant in Florida was serving dog meat. This claim was not true, as there was no evidence of dog meat served at that restaurant. Xenophobic people were more inclined to believe that this story contained true information since they already had a similar belief. Overall I do believe that our beliefs make us more susceptible to certain stories and we must become critical readers to avoid being misinformed.