A personal story about fake news

Algernon_Asimov
Wed, 08 May 2019 01:44:57 +0000

I had an interesting conversation with my housemate last night, which opened my eyes to just how easily fake news gets into ordinary people's minds.

We were discussing an episode of 'The Orville' we had just watched, and conversation shifted topics (as it does), and we ended up talking about free speech and political correctness - and he told me, quite matter-of-factly, that at least one local school had removed all books which referred to "boys" or "girls" from its library, and that other schools wanted to ban children from referring to themselves as "boys" or "girls". This was part of a politically correct drive to remove all references to gender, so that noone is "male" or "female".

My housemate is not a raving lunatic. He's not a rabid fascist or alt-right person. He's just an ordinary Aussie guy, going about his ordinary life, with no malice to anyone.

But his extended family watches certain TV channels and reads certain newspapers, and he had picked up this little nugget of knowledge from a TV show one of them was watching.

We discussed the matter, and I told him that what he had just said is fake news. I explained that I didn't think he was wrong, but that his sources were wrong. He wouldn't believe me - to the point where he demanded that we go to a computer and double-check it.

It didn't take me long to find both the newspaper articles and television segments spreading this fake news, and the other sources debunking it (because I knew what I was looking for). It turns out that some ivory-tower academics had done a study which showed that making little girls play with "hyper-feminised toys like Barbies" was reinforcing certain sexist stereotypes, and maybe that should be changed. That was it. But certain newspapers (owned by a certain media tycoon) had twisted this into a scare story involving evil teachers who were coming to steal your children's identities by stopping them from being boys and girls and removing everything that said "boys" and "girls" from libraries - and other news outlets had picked up this story and run with it, adding their own touches as it bounced from one outlet to another.

As soon as I showed him the debunking sources, he accepted them. He got a bit defensive, and deflected blame on to his family and the news - but he believed the truth when I showed it to him. He's not stupid or malicious, just misinformed. I agreed with him that it wasn't his fault. As he said, most normal people aren't like me, reading deep into the news and double-checking what they say. Most people just read the paper or watch the TV and accept what they're told.

Fake news is so easy to spread. Most people don't question their news sources. If a newspaper or newsreader tells them something, they believe it because it's coming from a supposedly reliable source.

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