Fake news is a problem for everyone young and small old and young, we all have fallen for it at least once because the media machine now more than ever cant and wont stop for anyone. Fox, CNN, BBC, and every major and non major news source now only exists to either stoke fear about how scary the other sides new decision is about to be. Or it exists to placate there own followers and to make them feel smart and better than everyone who doesn’t believe what the believe, regardless of how true what they are saying is. We have texts from fox executives and personalities complaining about how fake a lot of there stories are and how they are gonna start to look like clowns if they keep posting it. But people still believe it for I think two main reasons.
Firstly despite what school loves to tell you as a student we don’t teach critical thinking we teach rigid conformity to the status quo and taking things at face value. Anyone who’s tried to do something you were encouraged to think independently on in a different way than what was already approved in a public school can attest. This leads to the average American being much more gullible and desperate for an informational authority to look for. This then leads to click bait monsters and people listed above weaponizing these people for larger political agendas. As well as the sheer ease of falling into an echo chamber, which again we almost design our schools to make sure you just simply fall into whatever your parents believed as a child and stay there forever (at least in my schooling experience I found especially when I went to some poorer schools). These people will just simply consume and regurgitate whatever falsehoods they are given purely on the basis that it has to be true it sounds like it is (it confirms my biases). ultimately I don’t think there is a way to really solve this, not to end on a downer but the fake news problem will to me just get much much worse as time foes on. Plus looking at trends and how we run the public school system frankly I dont think we have seen anything yet.
