While the rapid growth of the Internet has brought amazing things, it has also brought some pretty bad things as well. One of the negative aspects that is important and visible now more than ever is disinformation and how easy it is to spread and convince people that it is real.
It’s so easy to fall for a clickbait title, lots of times the titles look pretty convincing and seem like they are actually truthful. But, if you know what you need to be looking for, then it becomes pretty easy to see what is true and what isn’t.
However, I think that some of the people most susceptible to reading, believing, and sharing false information is the older generation who didn’t grow up with the internet and believe a lot of things that they read. Obviously, everyone has fallen for disinformation at some point in their life, and it is so hard to stop. I find that some of the fake stories that I come close to believing are stories that provoke my emotions and appeal to things that I either strongly like or don’t like.
With the rapid increase in information being shared on the internet, it is bound to increase disinformation too. This of course raises the question: “How can we fix this?” My answer is simply: I really don’t think that false information can be stopped, or at least completely. People are so quick to believe anything that sounds good to them, even if it is false, and just as fast to discredit anything that they don’t want to see or hear, even if it is true.
