Author: Grace Li
Hey lets play telephone! Yea sure! Okay here goes: supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, super..woman?, super woman? Superb workman, soup herb worm and?
We’ve all probably played telephone. If not telephone is a simple game where people in a group pass along a phrase, whispering it to the next person, and have fun seeing how much it changed during the game. It’s fun whispering one thing and seeing how it morphs into something almost completely different. However, it’s not as fun seeing this game play out in real life.
The other day I came across a video.
It showed firefighters cutting down a stork’s nest. Comments berated the firefighters. However the real story was much different. The nest had caught on fire, so firefighters had to take the nest down, and the next day they even helped the stork rebuild its nest.
This is a *minor* form of misinformation commonly perpetuated throughout the internet, especially social media, today. Much like a game of telephone, the original story becomes mutilated and mutates into a different narrative. Unlike a game of telephone, the story is often intentionally manipulated to push an agenda or to force an argument
Now, there are two main forms of false information: misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation is simply getting the facts wrong, like an innocent game of telephone. However disinformation is purposely giving false information to others. Imagine someone purposely changing the phrase in a game of telephone.
Regardless of their differences, they both have serious impacts, shown in the past, and now.
Yellow journalism is one example. It is a type of journalism where eye-catching headlines and exaggerated, sensational, stories are created to increase sales. This type of journalism was especially prevalent during the Spanish American War, helping push the united states into the war. On February 15th, 1898, the USS Maine, a United States navy ship, sank in havana harbor in cuba. News outlets ran with this story, claiming that the spanish were responsible for the destruction of the ship, when in reality, no evidence backed up this claim. Public opinion in the united states largely blamed the spanish, and soon after, the US joined in the Spanish American War. Regardless of the outcome of the war, the evident impact of yellow journalism is concerning, as the sensational stories it created greatly swayed public opinion into causing the joining of the Spanish American War with likely false information.
Another case is of Richard jewell.
Richard Jewell had been working as security at Centennial Olympic for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia. Jewell noticed a knapsack underneath a bench. He and another member of security called a policeman and the Centennial Park’s bomb squad. The bomb experts realized it WAS a bomb, a large one in fact, and they quickly evacuated the people at the scene.
Jewell became celebrated as a hero, but four days later, he became the focus of the FBI investigation, as a suspect. Under the hypothetical FBI scenario, Jewell placed the knapsack under the bench and then “discovered” it. The actions of the FBI painted Jewell as a criminal, and the media amplified this image and spread it across the country. The media ran with this hypothetical, writing it as reality, painting Jewell as an overzealous wanna-be hero. Quickly, media and public opinion turned against him, and he was slandered and insulted. Jewell was villainized, his past was picked apart and analyzed, and his life and name ruined without the faintest idea of whether he was guilty or innocent.
The investigation of Jewell ended with the FBI not having a single piece of evidence to incriminate Jewell. At the press conference following this ordeal, he stated, “For 88 days i lived a nightmare.. I felt like a hunted animal followed constantly, waiting to be killed…In their mad rush to fulfill their own personal agendas, the FBI and the media almost destroyed me and my mother. … The media said I was an overzealous officer. That was a lie. I always performed my job to the best of my ability and gave 110 percent. That’s not being overzealous. That’s being dedicated…. I am going to try to re-enter law enforcement…. I love helping people. That’s what I do, that’s what I have done, and that’s what I want to continue to do in the future.”
It is tragic what Jewell had to go through; the immense amount of scrutiny and speculation he and his mother had faced, and the accusation of committing the crime that he had thwarted. What happened to him is a clear example of how false information perpetuated through media is able to ruin a mans life. The government and the media cannot give back his good name, his reputation, or undo the trauma that they inflicted upon him. His story is a devastating reminder of the impact false information has on people.
The Internet
Going to the present, it seems that with the internet, false information becomes easier to spread. With internet being a huge form of communication in our lives, it’s understandable how it sometimes becomes a breeding ground for the spread of false information.
For example, the january 6th united states capitol attack. Facebook groups had hundreds of thousands of posts that attacked the legitimacy of the 2020 election, questioning joe biden’s victory. These posts, started by the claims of Donald Trump that the election had been stolen, spread false information that the election’s results had been tampered with, and that the president should actually be trump. Although there is no real proof or evidence that the election results were faked, this idea was spread through the internet and picked up a storm of angry, hateful misinformation. An incredible number of Americans had been convinced that our democracy was corrupt, and the misinformation incited messages promoting violence that exploded in the infamous day known as the united states capitol attack.
The misinformation in this particular case is incredibly troubling, with a large number of people becoming convinced that the government is corrupt. It is terrifying to picture a future where america becomes a country where misinformation runs rampant and it convinces people to spark violence and impose their will, and an era of ever-increasing political partisanship with no room for in-between.
Looking from a different lens, false information portrayed on the internet lies beyond politics. It seeps into multiple sectors of life, a significant part being cancel culture. While cancel culture is good for holding others accountable for their misdeeds, it has also become a device to shame others for simply having differing views. Additionally, maliciously put together clips and a lack of context can portray people as “evil” and cause others to slander them and severely detriment that person’s career or livelihood. Even after claims perpetuated by the false information have been disproved, people most often still avoid that person, not wanting to associate with them because of the drama.
Why are we susceptible to fake news?
Are we becoming more gullible? Why are we so susceptible to fake news? Fake news is so easily believable because of cognitive biases.
We often focus on “clickbait” headlines that may be falsified or dramatacized to get you to notice the story or to share it others. More often than not, people read the headline but dont check the contents, which allows these stories with false headlines to get ingrained in our memory and stored as fact.
Additionally, popularity cues, such as the number of likes or the number of views can lead people to believe that information provided in a piece of media is true, when it is not. Surely with the thousands of others watching and liking the content that it is true? However, likse and shares can be done without actually looking into the content, and the existence of bots inflates these counts.
Partisanship is also a factor that may lead to believing in the credibility of a source. People tend to accept info that aligns with their political orientation because they simply want things that support their political party to be true.
New wave of technology and misinformation
AI brings a new wave of technology – and a new form of false information.
Deepfakes use AI to mmic a person’s voice and facial features. The technology uses an audio recording of someone’s voice to make it say things that the person might never have said, and uses photos or videos and alters them to do things that the person might have never done.
Voice cloning ai scams use ai to recreate the voices of people close to you, and deceive victims into revealing info or giving money to scammers. They may state with the voice of your loved one that their car had been totaled or they urgently needed money, and family members would be scammed into giving up information or money to scammers.
Next on the horizon are completely ai generated videos. With open ai’s announcement of Sora, their new text-to-video model, showing videos created from ai that look quite realistic, we can only imagine what will happen in the future. This new ai technology could definitely be harnessed for both good and bad: its possible that it coild be used to create fake videos to tarnish ones reputation or sway people’s political views; or it could be used to create cat videos on the internet. Who knows?
As new waves of technology are becoming prominent in society, it’s important to keep ourselves safe from false information. A great tip is to take “news” found on social media with a grain of salt. While they may be true, they may just as well be fake. Try to find the source of the information and confirm the informations validity. Read beyond the headline and examine the actual contents.
In this long game of telephone we perpetually play with information spread through the media and the internet, checking the facts and remaining vigilant is crucial to staying protected against false information.
The Megaphone 