It can be quite tempting as Gen Z to believe that we are immune to falling for misleading propaganda, and instantly holding their ideals as gospel truth. We tend to believe it be our elderly grandparents glued to Facebook, still deciphering how to use the cell phone itself, as those who are to take the bait.

Not that it doesn't happen. We have all shared the collective sigh seeing our grandmothers or grandfathers re-post a blurry meme onto their pages, with bullet points of a rhetoric proven ten times over to be untrue, unproven. They are nothing but the ramblings of a madman. You have tried to explain this to dear grandma relentlessly, but she doesn't understand.

But perhaps, like Grandma, we are not always as immune to believing falsehoods as we'd like to believe?

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Fake News Spreads Faster?

In 2018, three scholars at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology conducted a study. After one of the researchers noticed a rise in false news on his Twitter (now X) feed, he wanted to delve into how widespread of a phenomena this truly was.

To do this, the experimenters analyzed an approximate 126,000 cascades of widespread news stories. These pieces were tweeted over 4.5 million times, by an estimated 3 million users. They tracked an 11 year period of these stories shared on the platform from 2006-2017.

The results were startling.

Sinan Aral, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and who was one of the three researchers stated,

"We found that falsehood diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude,".

The study found that fake news stories had a 70% higher chance of being retweeted compared to true news stories. It also discovered that it takes true news stories six times longer to reach 1,500 people than false ones.

This isn't only a concern on Twitter (X).

A 2020 study analyzing 3000 Americans' social media use leading up to the 2016 election was published in the journal Nature: Human Behavior. Researchers found that only 6% of the time, Facebook referred users to reliable news networks, and it referred them to unreliable news networks around 15% of the time.

A similar 2021 study in regard to the 2020 election was conducted, and the results from Facebook were quite alike.

It would take a significant amount of time to analyze all of the research done on this phenomena on Instagram, Tik Tok, and Youtube, but it is agreed upon by many who have researched this topic that widespread fake news is a concerning occurrence observed upon many social platforms.

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Dangers of Fake News

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When fake news takes precedence over true news, and the fables reported from the latter are given sincere attention, it is a dire situation.

It sends the message to those spreading thinly veiled propaganda that they can keep doing so, for the masses buy into their deception. Society on a grand scale starts to believe the tales that were once so evidently accepted as such instead as a common truth. Depending on the category of these lies spread, this can lead to a dangerous situation for many, and it has before.

One only needs to do a quick google search to research the vital role disinformation and propaganda played in the events leading up to the holocaust. Years of deception, ads upon ads to newspapers upon newspapers claiming the Jew as the enemy to Germany. Propaganda was created exploiting real fears held by many, into an ideological promotion where the creator is named as the only solution.

I'm aware this is quite an extreme example, but I use it because most of us upon hearing of these horrors committed not so long ago believe we would have never been a silent observer, or a believer of the ideologies so obviously evil and deceptively crafted. We'd instead be a champion for the oppressed, a protester waving flags in the streets.

Yet, the studies show (a multitude of which I wish I could fully expand on here) that we are not as hostile to merit lacking sources as we'd like to believe.

Now, I'm aware I've set quite a somber mood writing this piece, and perhaps I've made it seem hopeless that true news is even possible to source at all. If it is, it is hidden so deep within the corners of the internet that it would take a team of scavengers to dig them out of the ground. But, this is not the case.

If one know how to detect if the news they are reading is fake, and how to identify if the story they are writing is as true as it claims to be, it doesn't have to be such a difficult feat. There are a plethora of ways to identify authenticity.

Check the Sources

News articles reporting on issues such as politics for example tend to have a list of sources at the bottom of the page. These cited sources are the places in which the author found their information for their piece, the ones they trusted enough as their only sources of information.

Most people do not look at these, they usually just read the article and automatically go by what is stated there. The author did their homework. But, sometimes, they did not do their homework perhaps as extensively as they should've, and the sources they used to develop their thesis are ones extremely one sided, not fully researched themselves, or are contained with numerous lies that are easily able to be debunked.

So, the place you get your news from? Check where they get theirs.

Look into the Author

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Okay, you checked the sources, and they look legit. But, you're still suspicious. Another important step I'd suggest is to research the author of the news article themselves.

Does he or she have a history of well rounded journalism? Composing works well researched and truthful? Or, upon a simple Yahoo search of their name, does a myriad of pieces by multiple people come up bashing their name as a dishonest, agenda driven journalist who has a history of spreading lies for their own gain?

Are these claims true, or baseless slander? If there is merit to those accusations, and the journalist has a reputation for unreliability, you will know to avoid their work in the future.

Check Multiple Places

If a story is legit, in a very wide majority of cases, multiple reliable platforms and journalists will be discussing it. Is this the case? Or is this one author somehow the only one reporting this supposed ground breaking news? If this is the case, the article is likely not trustworthy.

Check the Domain/URL

One tell tale sign that is not commonly checked is the URL (the link to the article). Are there any misspellings? What is the domain?

The domain itself can be a tell tale sign the news you are reading shall not be taken as fact, even if there are no grammar mistakes. For example, according to research engineer Chris Larsen, some of the shadiest domains are .stream, .country, .review, .gdn, .download, etc.

Is there Bias?

This was briefly touched on in regards to researching the author, but is the article you are reading particularly biased? Perhaps, the writer is discussing a feud between two celebrities and it seems apparent the author has a preference for one figure over the other. If this is the case, it'd be wise to do more research into this particular scandal for the author of this piece could be (even unintentionally!) skewing facts in the favor of the person they are more fond of.

Do Your Research

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No matter the extensive moderation of social media platforms, or public call outs of those who spread falsehoods, there will always, unfortunately, be disinformation on the internet. This is why it's practically imperative to do your own research into topics and check the sources you read from, rather than rushing to retweet an article with a ground breaking headline.

Propaganda does not appear as the thief that breaks down in your door in the middle of the night with a gun to your head. It appears as the one who picks your lock and ransacks your house when they know you are on vacation, so you come home to find your house empty and barren, with no inkling of who the culprit might be.