William Pruett
Equinox Staff
With society being in an age of constant stimulation from devices and all forms of media, people are always being fed new information. The internet and television are the primary sources that citizens use to gather new information about what is going on in the world.
Back before technology was not as advanced, people would usually get their news through the newspaper, and radios also used to be a far more popular way of receiving the news when televisions were not normal household products. These days, people can just look up any trending topic in Google and find dozens of brand new articles that were just written about that specific event or person.
Although a good amount of these articles that are published could very well be from established and famous news brands and organizations, the amount of biased and false information that is being fed through the internet is also huge. With today’s students and younger generations being as easily available to the internet as they can and these fake news sources being widely displayed through all forms of media, it begs the question of how harmful this can be to one’s views on vital subjects.
Not only does this affect their views but it can affect their work too. With the large amount of research papers that students have to do that have all the information derived from the internet, false facts and bad sources are bound to be come across and possibly even put into the final paper. This can have a negative impact on the student’s grade and also make the teacher who is grading the paper think that they simply did not spend the time necessary or put in the proper effort to find the true information.
With this issue only looking like it is getting worse as time goes on, and news continues to be fed to people even faster and on even larger scales, people will continue to read and believe false information that they cannot even tell is not real. Since there is no end in sight to this problem, there are ways that you can avoid reading and believing the false news. This will help individuals not make it worse by spreading the untrue information that they read online.
If you are looking up something on Google, whether it is a historical fact or about an event that happened that day, always check to make sure that the article or website is a certified source. If you are not sure, search the website for the many hints that it would probably have that it is not credible. Avoid websites like Wikipedia and news sources that people who just have an account on can make and edit news.
Even major news corporations and websites may not even be trustworthy all the time due to a biased writer or editor. Double check to make sure the news you are reading matches up with multiple other trustworthy sources that you can access. This way, the spreading of fake news can hopefully be declined.
Wiliam Pruett can be contacted at wpruett@kscequinox.com
