Evaluating Misinformation

For our assignment , we were guided to look at 2 resources sharing about misinformation and learning all about it. In this article, I will be sharing with you my learning experience with both resources while also sharing my opinion on how they will help me understand misinformation.

Rumor Guard

Rumor Guard is a website where it shares all the rumors you here about trending topic and debunks them for you. In the website, you can click on a certain topic and it will automatically tell you what facts are true and which are false. To me personally, I like the layout because it can help me pinpoint what is exactly true or not and what is partiality true.

The topic that stood out to me the most was the newest one under #BreakingNews sharing about the Baltimore Bridge Collapsing. Before getting on the site, I had heard about this through social media and then looked more into what was happening. I had been hearing a lot of rumors from different news outlets and social media about how this could of happen and if it was something caused on purpose.

When heading into the Rumor Guard site it started by sharing 4 facts with 2 of them being correct and 2 being incorrect. It shared that there is no proof or evidence of it being an intentional attack and linked to an article written by NPR sharing more facts about the theory that were made by conspiracy theorist. It also went into sharing another major rumor sharing that this collapse was a cyber attack because of a past Netflix film that came out. Alongside debunking those rumors it also shares true facts about how the cargo ship did loose control and how conspiracists are trying to continue spreading fake news to the media.

Fake it To Make It

With this portion of my blog, I had to go into playing a game to learn about Misinforamtion and fake news. I choose to play the game Fake It To Make It which is all about seeing how far you can make it to your goal with news articles on your "site".

In this game I was able to quickly notice that you have to create a website as if you are a blogger to see what article create more traction. In the game they let you choose fun articles , political articles , and some that share rumors. In the game, I started by just choosing nice ones that were credible but I noticed that was not creating any traction to the site. I then decided to create one that was false and a major rumor and it got so much traction. It was interesting to see the difference in the comments and views the ones with Misinformation would get compared to the 100% credible ones.

This made me thing about why and how these news anchors are creating false narratives to create traction. It also makes you think, which articles provide credible information or is it all just for the clicks and traction. I think now that I have played this game, it made me want to go into a major news website such as CNN and see which articles had "clickbait"titles compared to " real titles"

CONCLUSION

In Conclusion, I felt like this exercise made me understand more about how and why major media outlets tend to spread misinformation. I was able to see in the first website, that there are a lot of news sources creating articles sharing misinformation but wanting it to sound credible. As for the game , I was able to learn that it is a real tactic to use clickbait style titles and articles to create the attention the news anchors need to get their money.