[Day 4] The Era of Fake News - Exploiting technology to fuel fake news

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This article is part of 7 day challenge.

In the previous post, we saw how fake news can be powered by AI. Today's topic "Exploiting technology to fuel fake news" is also in the similar line. Everything around us is connected with technology. Technological growth is crucial for every country, tech can be a double-edged sword, it can be used for good as well as bad intent too. One such thing for which technology is wrongly used is 'fake news'.

Social Media, Artificial Intelligence etc are obviously thriving because of the advancement of technology. All the technology targeted towards mass communication is misused for spreading fake news.

Page Rankings

By now everyone would be more or less aware of website rankings by search engines and other independent analytics companies. The page ranking algorithms are based on the monthly/daily active users for a particular website, traffic, performance, time spent by viewers, geography etc are some of the parameters used by the algorithms. They do not check about the contents of the website.

Search engines like Google take up the above factors and decide whether the website will show up in first page or tenth page of the search result.

Imagine a scenario where someone publishes a 'sensational' or 'controversial' fake news and it is shared across all the social media then all those traffic is driven back to the website, eventually that website gains popularity in-terms of SEO and ranking. So when someone searches for any particular phrase, then google search algorithm shows up the fake or unreal stuff. Remember what Google Images showed(couple of months back) when you search for 'Idiot' ? Google CEO had to explain it to US congressmen.

In the above case, even the right technology and tools are exploited to show up fake stuffs!

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Search Engine

When some fake news gets popular/famous, people tend to search on 'search engines' like Google, bing etc which again scouts for the fake news and bring up those results. From being popular, it becomes viral since everyone are searching & sharing on social media.

The main stream media also picks up the story, thereby people search even more(just to try if they also see the same result since it is funny).

Recently searching 'best toilet paper in the world' in Google shows irrelevant results, everyone who got aware of it through media channels, articles, social media posts came back to Google and tried searching that particular phrase. Again the cycle goes on and the fake news becomes funny yet it is uncalled for. You can try searching 'best toilet paper in the world' and see what Google shows up.

Call to action | Points to remember

• Not just the human beings, fake news can confuse computers and algorithms.
• Do not spread false information intentionally, it may be fun for you but it would end up as tragedy for someone else.
• Use safe browser and search engines. Personally, I use Brave browser and DuckDuckGo as search engine.

A glimpse of what is coming up in this 7 day writing challenge:

You can also read my previous posts on the same topic, by clicking on the links below.

Day 0 - Announcement - Plan - Prizes
Day 1 - Social media
Day 2 - Going back in time
Day 3 - AI to build fake stories
Day 4 - Exploiting technology to fuel
Day 5 - The science behind it
Day 6 - Financial impact
Day 7 - The future