Dont believe a word
Recently I heard the term Post-Truth being thrown about and it’s funny and sad, that there was an election where the majority of news was fake, but it didn’t matter because people felt this way and that, things got kinda emotional and emotions make us human, and facts went on a holiday.
Back in the 80’s Madonna introduced us to a Material world, and to be quite honest, I thought we were very much still in that world, but no
Living in a Material world?
But, then facts came back from holiday, its like people didn’t realise how important and powerful truth and facts are.
The contemporary origin of the term is attributed to blogger David Roberts who used the term in 2010 in a column for Grist. Political commentators have identified post-truth politics as ascendant in Russian, Chinese, American, Australian, British, Indian, Japanese and Turkish politics, as well as in other areas of debate, driven by a combination of the 24-hour news cycle, false balance in news reporting, and the increasing ubiquity of social media.
In 2016, “post-truth” was chosen as the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year,due to its prevalence in the context of that year’s Brexit referendum and US presidential election.
Standard of journalism is declining
When I was in Eastern Europe, I saw the same fake news localised for each country I was in. A quick search will tell you everyones publishing fake news
When I was in India many years ago, I read Gandhi’s book “My experiments with truth”
When Gandhi worked as a lawyer, he would only represent honest people, who were unjustly treated, he had such a reputation for telling the truth that people believed everything he said in court. One time he realised his client had misled and lied to him about the facts, he asked the judge to rule the case against him, he was that honest, the truth was a weapon for him.
I was at a lecture in Sydney once about the stigmatization of areas, one of the interesting points made by the lecturer from Switzerland was the declining standards of journalism, when areas become stigmatised in the news, it becomes very hard for some areas to shake social views of the people from these places, a chain of events can occur like.
An area that might be economicly and socially disadvantaged is written as a ghetto
- People read about the area as a Ghetto
- People talk about the Ghetto
- Politicians listen to the people
- New laws to target the Ghettos are implemented
People become stigmatised by the term Ghetto in the media, then people living there
- Deny they are living there
- Say I know people there, but I don’t live there
- Dont want to leave their area
- Cant get jobs because of their address
Time to get real with some people!
It would appear a lot of fake news is published VIA software algorithms and Big Data. Software is constantly scanning social media, blogs, websites, videos and pictures to extract the following
- Named entities -> Who/ What/ Where ?
- Themes -> Whats the buzz?
- Categories -> What is it about?
- Intentions -> What will they do?
- Sentiments -> How will they feel?
So once you understand how Introducing Social media monitoring works, fake news kind of makes sense
Social media measurement or ‘social media monitoring’ is an active monitoring of social media channels for information, usually tracking of various social media content.
Such as blogs, wikis, news sites, micro-blogs such as Twitter, social networking sites, video/photo sharing websites, forums, message boards and user-generated content in general as a way to determine the volume and sentiment of online conversation about a brand or topic.
When I was in Eastern Europe in the summer, I would see the same fake stories displayed on social media, localised for the country I was in.
Like anything, when you start talking $$, people pay attention, Germany has now stepped up and announced they are going to fine Facebook big for every fake news article, along with Social media, should be Social accountability and its about time, its time to get real people.
Kieran O' Callaghan 
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