Understanding the Impacts of Fake News on Political Polarization | Maddie Luebkert | TEDxDenisonU

over the summer I work at a restaurant back home in Michigan one night last summer I was nearing the end of my shift so I was folding some silverware standing near the end of the bar and having a conversation with a waitress about conspiracy theories what could possibly go wrong the waitress told me that she was not a conspiracy theorist nor was she a fake news believer but one Theory she firmly believed in was that of pizzagate now for those of you who are unfamiliar with the pizzagate theory was a theory spreading around the time

of the 2016 election claiming that Hillary Clinton and her administration were trafficking children underneath of a DC pizza restaurant I always known fake news was a big problem but that night it became pretty clear fake news can be truly terrifying but fake news is much more than just conspiracy theories fake news is having very real impacts on political polarization in the US in many other countries around the world as a journalism and communication student I'm especially invested in researching and understanding this problem but it doesn't just apply to me all of us have the duty

to vote and be active members in society so it's essential that we know how and why fake news is created and spread so we can prevent it from affecting our decision- making today I'll go over four main points first I'll talk about the creation of fake news then the spread of it then I'll talk about its effects on polarization and finally what are some solutions to this problem what can be done about this but in order to start at the beginning we have to look at the very first step in the process how is fake

news created what I've come to understand is that there's two main reasons we create fake news the first is to earn money I'm sure many of you in the audience are familiar with the term clickbait and what clickbait means is it's a type of content created with the sole purpose to get a user to navigate to that platform so the Creator can then earn money from the ad Revenue that that user is exposed to this leads the Creator to come up with whatever crazy content they can imagine to get to gain the readers that attention

very quickly the next reason that we create fake news is to support partisan agendas now this doesn't just happen to one political party or another both politicians and citizens belonging to both political parties have been found guilty of this and have created fake news to either support their own political candidate or to disparage or attack a political opponent those are the two main reasons we create fake news the next step in the process is for that fake news to then spread like the creation of fake news there's two ways to think about the spread of

fake news as well the first way is a large scale spreading of fake news and what I mean by large scale is fake news that spreads through companies and corporations the first example of this happens through social media the social media algorithm is designed to keep the audience member engaged and therefore active on the platform for longer amounts of time unfortunately a type of content that is designed to be engaging is fake news so the social media platform will then be rewarded by having audience members spend longer amounts of times on the platforms by circulating

fake news news what may be lesser known though is that a process very similar to this happens through mainstream media as well as audience members we want to be proven right so we will actively seek out new sources that will present information in a way that confirms our own pre-existing biases ultimately this this leads to mainstream news media sources to present information in a way that will confirm our biases so they can keep having us as audience members that's those are two ways that fake news can spread in a large scale way but fake news

can also spread on a smaller more individual way this happens when users on a social media platform share or send content to each other and this is widely believed to be the way that pizzagate became as popular as it did because users on 4chan would then spread their theories to Reddit in Twitter and Facebook and so on those are the ways that fake news can be spread the next step in the fake news process is for polarization to be impacted but what is polarization why is fake news impacting it and why is it a bad

thing political polarization is the process of political beliefs and ideologies becoming more extreme over a period of time fake news contributes to this because fake news is designed to be provocative and to make you mad so when you don't realize that it's false it can seriously impact Your World Views now it's true that small amounts of polarization can actually be beneficial for democracy as we need debate and discourse for our government to function but the US is experiencing some of the highest rates of polarization and US history and what this causes is that we begin

to refuse to interact with each other because we disagree so much this issue is easy to ignore in our online world today but it becomes a little harder to ignore when you face it in person I'm a freshman at Dennison so before I came to school here I participated in pre-orientation program where myself and others volunteered at different organizations around the licking County area at one such organization we were having a conversation with a woman about future career paths and what we wanted to do and some of us expressed an interest in working in the

White House this woman told us well you know that really is a shame since you all are probably all Democrats she told us that instead of seeking our news from sources like CNN MSNBC and BBC we should instead be getting the real facts from sources such as Fox News The Daily Caller and Newsmax what I noticed is that after learning This Woman's political leaning my friends began to disengage from the conversation and not want to continue the conversation further though I was slightly taken a back by her forwardness I didn't necessarily disagree with her point

about seeking out a Viewpoint that's different than your own talking about polarization can be sobering but there are solutions to this problem today I want to challenge you all to be more thoughtful about how you consume news in order to do that I've created an acronym called the three ease of healthy news consumption the first e stands for examine what I mean by this is examine your Source look at the URL are there spelling mistakes does it come from an unfamiliar domain better yet look up the author what are their qualifications why should they be

the one to say what they're trying to say or are they even a real person there are tools online designed to help you with this process such as a website called all sides which is a list of every notable news source on the internet and its ranking on how conservative or liberal that new source tends to lean the next e stands for exit and what I mean by exit is Exit social media it's true that younger Generations are becoming more reliant on social media for their news and I'm not suggesting that we ignore what we

see on social media I'm simply proposing that we look it up somewhere else first see what what other sources have to say about it before we take that as fact the last e stands for expand and what I mean by expand is expand the amount of sources that you use to consume your news this may sound counterintuitive because why would you want to seek out news from a source you know might be biased but when we do this we're not only able to understand the issue we're reading about better but we're also able to better

understand why someone might have a different opinion or perspective on an issue that we do now you have learned how the spread and creation of fake news is contributing to political polarization political polarization is bad because really high amounts of it can prevent us from interacting with each other and having really important conversations but by examining our sources exiting social media and expanding the amount sources we use we can help combat the effects of polarization that fake news is causing hopefully unlike my coworker you all can prevent from falling for fake news thank [Applause] you