In the article Misinformation and biases infect social media, both intentionally and accidentally by Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia and Filippo Menczer in 2018, the author argues that there are 3 types of biases in the media world. Studies have shown that bias in the brain, bias in society, and bias in the machines have made the social media platforms endangered. Bias in the brain is the brain’s limitations to capture a big amount of information causing the info to get mistaken or being wrong. Bias in society is the effect of your social groups and how they manipulate what you see. Lastly, bias in the machine is the system of algorithms which is used to see what people see on the platforms and results in manipulation from disinformation. Hoaxy and fakey were platforms created to combat misinformation and teach readers to fact check their information.
I spend most of my time on social media, the app I use the most is instagram. As you may know this platform is used to spread news, share photos or videos with your social group. Once I was on instagram and was reading information about covid-19 and realized that when the government was going to lift the quarantine the news about the death rates and hospitalization rates was not accurate because the news was repeating the information from the beginning of the quarantine making people scared. That’s when I realized that you can’t trust news or posts because they only tell one side of the story and just do it to get views. This is going to change my social media activity because I am going to limit my screen time and not trust everything that I see on social media. Also, I am going to always fact check the information that I am reading and get several opinions and not just one.
I played Fakey and it was a great experience because it was information I haven’t read which made it a little hard to know if it should be a fact check or a share and made me question myself about the information I read.
