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Spread of the fake information on the Internet

Several days ago, hurricane Sandy hit the east coast of United States. Due to the fast development of social media now, people could get newest update about hurricane Sandy. However as mentioned in the article, quite a few people posted fake pictures and misleading updates about the hurricane. (http://www.mediabistro.com/prnewser/hurricane-sandy-twitter-buzzfeed-fake_b48868) And the fake information spread really fast and only in a few days, a lot of people passed around the information through Internet and lots of people were fooled by the fake news.

However, the fake information on the Internet can not only fool a lot of people, but bring more harmful effects to people and the society as well. These days, fake information on the Internet is definitely a huge issue. A lot of people put fake information on the Internet on purpose and try to fool other people. A more severe problem is that, after reading the fake information, some people believe that it is true so they passed the information around through twitter, Facebook, etc. In this way, the fake information is spread around the Internet.

Why can the fake information spread so fast? After reading the fake news, some people can tell that it’s fake while some people cannot. So those people who believe it is true will treat this information seriously and might pass the information around. And here’s the problem. Those people who think the information is not real will find out that others around them are all sharing the information. At this time, those people might begin to doubt themselves. They might begin to think whether the information is true and they misjudged the information earlier. So the information cascade starts here. Soon everyone treat this fake information as a real one and pass it around. In this way, the fake information is widely spread and fools a lot of people.

-yz458

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