My name is Shaked Kaufman, a Master’s student in Industrial Eng., Ben Gurion University.
This blog is hopefully going to allow me to express my views and opinions about Knowledge Management theory and practices as part of an academic course.
It’s interesting to see the role of “garbage” data in our daily life and how it may influence it greatly.
The term “Fake news” wasn’t coined recently, but it became really popular during the 2016 US presidential elections. Looking at Google Trends (https://g.co/trends/VScNw) we can see that since 2004 the use of this term was pretty sparse, but a surge took place at 2016.
Take The Onion website as a great example for actual fake news. Since 2007 (and even before as a printed edition), the website publishes satiric articles about a wide range of international, local, cultural, political and other issues. All the articles are humor and convey a distorted and sarcastic view of reality.
What makes The Onion unique, compared to other sources of amusement and humor, is that its articles look genuine as if they were actual news articles. For the casual Joe that bumps into one of their pieces, this might look like very odd news.
Myself, I failed for some time to understand why עמ;לק summarizes such strange articles!
As it dawned on me, there’s a cool service called אמ;לק, the equivalent of TL;DR. The service allows readers to summarize posts and articles for the benefit of other users that want to get the bottom line.
עמ;לק is a satirical service, however, that with a single change of a letter entitled itself with a sophisticated name in Hebrew (referring to an biblical arch-enemy nation of the Israelites). It summarizes real articles in a humor and totally incorrect way.
So no harm there - after few posts I understood my mistake and confusion.
And while sites or services like עמ;לק or The Onion are only meant for humor and fun, in 2016 we learnt that Fake News can be very not amusing and also very dangerous.
Allegedly, it has been reported that Russia intertwined in the US elections using fake posts and news generated in order to influence on the American people opinions and views.
In other cases, men were accused in India for rape or other criminal acts in a WhatsApp message. The messages spread quickly and an angry mob killed those. Whether or not these men actually committed the crimes - they were taken to drumhead court without proper justice measures.
Both the tech companies and the society should address the issues of fake news and the ease which they can be conveyed without cross checks.
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