CINCINNATI (WKRC) - Websites have started to fight back against the phony news sources after claims they may have had an impact on the election.
“Adam Sandler is no longer with us,” “The Pope endorsed Donald Trump after his hands-on comments about women,” and “An agent investigating Hillary Clinton's emails was killed in a hotel room;” all posted on social media. None of it true but millions saw those posts.
Xavier student Maura Degrazia said, “I don't know what's true and is not any more. So it's kind of hard to decipher what I can believe and what's not real.”
Backlash from fake news has prompted action. Google banned sites that hawk phony news from its adsense system. Facebook, after pooh-poohing the fake news problem, said it won't display ads in misleading sites.
Xavier Communication Asst. Professor Dr. Leslie Rasmussen said, “If Facebook doesn't do anything about it and they become a place where we're just overrun with fake content and misleading content, at some point do people leave that?”
Dr. Rasmussen applauds the action but said the real burden was people to question what they see and not share it. When social media, TV news, newspapers, blogs, and opinions all come through the same device it's not always easy to separate the phony from the legitimate. To make it worse, many legitimate sources are not as viable as they once were.
Dr. Rasmussen is a contemporary communication scholar. She doesn't subscribe to a newspaper. Her first source if big news breaks? Twitter. But would seek out the credible news sources on twitter she can rely on.
“For goodness sake, people need to think. Think about what we're consuming and why we're consuming it,” said Dr. Rasmussen.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg disputed any claims that phony ads on his site had an impact on the presidential election.
