After reading three articles about fake news and how it can spread it has become clear that people and the internet have become blind to what is real and what is fake. As time progresses and technology and the internet beginning have more power, fake news can spread faster. All it takes is one unreliable source making pretty much anything they want up. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if everyone didn’t then believe it and re-publish it. One article I read discussed what happened when a young student called a normal Coati, a Brazilian aardvark.
Seventeen year old student from New York made a edit to a Wikipedia site about coati’s just mostly making a joke. In his edit he claimed for the coati’s nickname to be the “Brazilian aardvark.” He figured that within a couple days someone would flag his post for not even citing it then it would be taken down. Although, after a couple days that is not what happened. Another source ended up publishing about this so called aardvark, so instead of someone flagging to take it down, someone edited and added a cite to the nickname going back to the second website. Then the nickname quickly spread and when you started to google “Brazilian aardvark” you would get many websites about Coati’s.
This proves that one piece of fake news can quickly and rapidly turn into much more then that.
Jr WEt bAlL sMiTh 