Viral Novelties Curated in ‘Fake News’
The news today seems to be blowing up over the advertisements permitted by Facebook and Google during the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections that were allegedly purchased by various accounts connected to the Russian government, suggesting that these political advertisements should be under the same set of requirements (with regards to the public disclosure of the individuals and/or groups that provided funds supporting a particular political cause/party) to which print, television, and other platforms that have been covered by previous legislation. The current proposed reasoning behind these advertisements is that those connected to the Russian government were seeking to create division and confusion between the popular United States political parties. This led to the discussion, however, of the long-standing (in terms of the modern social media timeline) acknowledgement of these networking giants being perfectly chaotic platforms for misinformation to be spread among their vast numbers of users.
A monumentally effective method for spreading this misinformation is by strategically creating ‘memes’ and other viral content mediums to spark initial interest, despite the following realization of falsehood in these ‘shocker’ headlines and images. One example of this was well-visualized by the following, likely widely-relatable thought ‘over time, for many people, it is that false initial connection that stays the strongest, not the retractions or corrections: ‘Was Obama a Muslim? I seem to remember that….’” Nonetheless, these are the (while seemingly harmlessly absurd) thoughts that sow into the subconscious of their audiences, creating the perfectly subtle divisions and disorganizations that were sought by those who produced and purchased the advertisements.
The dissemination of misinformation goes beyond political contexts, however, and were certainly not always generated with political motives when this trend came to rise. The ways that people have consumed this information can only be so-driven by the careful positioning and wording of their statements; the omni-faceted interfaces of Google and Facebook allow their consumers to believe that what they are seeing is not always just common advertisements put into their feeds by companies wanting them to subscribe to their sales. These giants have become the epicenter of crème-de-la-crème of modern advertising, not solely because of the impeccable ability for messages to be spread with pinpoint precisions, but because the advertisers themselves have the ability to make their messages (no-matter how outwardly ridiculous) be heard by incredibly masses, while slipping under the cover of the interactions between friends.
The use of platforms as methods for friends to interact and keep up with each-other was the initial premise for Facebook, and harmless search for needle-in-the-haystack information for Google allow the sneaky messages to use their guises to get into the subconscious of their viewers. People on Facebook, especially, pay much more attention and take much more interest in the things that are put into their newsfeeds by their friends as opposed to the ads placed to the side of the scrolling space that are perceived to have come from mass advertisers. On a social network as vast as Facebook, each close friend is perceived to act as a source for novel and relevant information, as the common user will assume that these are the people who will best share the values and interests (either in-common or as an opposing perspective) that will interest and stick-with users the most. So, by creating these virally-conceived memes and headlines bound for popular consumption by shock or humor, these advertisers and agents were able to make use of the deeper applications of these platforms than just their average advertising space; they instead employed thoughtful manipulation of share-happy content to disseminate their content to breed their desired division and chaos that were all-the-while able to be ignored and hidden from the formal requirements to be publicly known as acting in the U.S. political arena.
Article Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/20/health/social-media-fake-news.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology