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  • Stanford C. Stratton

Social Media and False Information

Updated: Dec 14, 2018

There is a youtube channel that I watch called YES Theory. Their goal is to show the world what could happen if people just started saying yes a lot more and threw themselves out of their comfort zone. One of the videos they did, they engineered a few scenarios with a look-a-like of Justin Bieber. They took a picture of him sitting on a bench and eating a burrito sideways. This video once it surfaced and started to spread around the internet went viral with people picking sides on weather a burrito should be eaten sideways or not and people actually got upset with the real Justin Bieber over it. This is just a small funny example of when false information is used to deceive the public. There are many cases of awful reporting and its increasingly becoming an issue in the US as citizens are starting to expect news to come almost instantly after it occurs. Another example of false information and a much more serious case is when a reporter at the Rolling Stone wrote an article called; rape on campus. The story basically depicted this girl who had been supposedly raped by a fraternity at the University of Virginia. When the story came out, it went viral. A ton of people jumped on board with her without checking all the facts. The reporter made up the whole story. She had no proof the girl she was referring to didn't even exist and the reporter even tried to put all the blame on this person who had never been introduced to the public and was only known by her first name. The reporter was really trying to start an issue where absolutely zero issue had occurred. An example of this effecting the economy in the US, is when United airlines had transcripts found by a reporter that said the airline was going bankrupt. These files that were found turned out to be old papers from 2002 and this reporter found them in 2008. The reporter informed Bloomberg of the news he had just gotten of United's economic standing and then United lost 75% of their shareholders. It was so bad that trading was suspended for an hour that day until NYSE had been corrected.

This is the fake Justin Beiber Taco story

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