Fake News and Trolling

With the world in quarantine and social distancing as a result of the COVID-19 Pandemic, the importance of news, especially the online kind, has been increased by a lot. Whether it is learning about the daily cases of COVID or the development of the vaccine, it has been an incredibly important source of information for people around the world. This, however, gives people ideas on how to use the said news whether it is to misinform people, or to make fun of certain people such as politicians. In this article, I will tackle examples of said fake news and trolling and describe what they are and how it affects the general public.

Sample of Fake News/Trolling

Here, we see an example of a “news article” from 2018 claiming that a parish priest impregnated two of his associate pastor’s daughters. The article itself got around 185,000 views, and many people had reacted negatively to the article against the priest involved. However, this turned out to be a fake or false news article. This story was actually first talked about in 2017 and was already deemed as fake then. Yet, it still got spread around and received a lot of attention for something that was already talked about. It makes me believe that people would try to share or make up articles like these to gain attention or to mislead people (which sadly, many of us still fall for).

In our example of trolling, we see how people are commenting on a post by the University of Oxford about the use of social media trolls and fake accounts in the administration of Rodrigo Duterte. In trolling, people are paid to spread comments or posts, most often being fake, in order to give attention to certain topics or to just “troll” or cause annoyances for people. Even though in the article Duterte claimed to hired commenters for the election, it doesn’t hide the fact that he really did make use of people in order to give attention to himself. It is truly astonishing to see how far certain trolls can go in order to “troll” or post stuff in the media.

Sources

About the author [author_image timthumb=’on’]https://scontent.fmnl4-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/4538_1153254345410_4423061_n.jpg?oh=ab83b4d925fc5ddc89404ffbd796ba17&oe=5B4232F9[/author_image] [author_info]About the writer: Mark Nituma. (2018, March 09). Busted: Top fake news in the Philippines this week. Retrieved February 06, 2021, from https://filipinotimes.net/top-stories/2018/03/09/true-queen-elizabeth-ii-calls-pres-duterte-brave-man/

Mongaya, K. (2017, August 09). Philippines’ ‘TROLL-IN-CHIEF’? DUTERTE ADMITS hiring defenders DURING POLLS. Retrieved February 06, 2021, from https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/philippines-troll-in-chief-duterte-admits-hiring-defenders-during-polls-117080900172_1.html