Enforcing law against Fake News

Fake news is a form of propaganda that spreads quickly and frequently. Our awareness of this issue has increased over the years due to false allegations made about and by significant individuals in our contemporary society.

The issue with fake news is that, for one it is something that affects everybody in society. In February of 2017, 42 percent of the traffic for false news was produced through out social media. According to Statista, in march of 2018, 52% of responders claimed that they were convinced by online fake news sources that were continuously being published. If the information that we receive is falsified then it causes uncertainty and the accuracy of news comes into question and if this is the case then we will begin to have a harder time figuring out what things are actually accurate. To summarize, we believe that this negatively influences and misleads individuals in our contemporary society.

How we propose to fix this problem is as follows. We suggest to spread awareness of this issue and to make sure that the most public articles and news sources fact check and show their sources to show that they are accurate. If an individual wanted to fact check certain pieces of text, they could go to multiple fact- checking websites or do more research on this cite that could potentially be unreliable. A law could be enforced where websites that contain misleading or incorrect information, could be fined and taken down. This would encourage interested users to publish trustworthy information.