Marc Amorós García, an analyst and expert in investigating the fake news phenomenon, was recently invited by the Circle of Sports Journalists of Uruguay to analyze this problem that is having a negative impact on today’s society.
This does not mean that fake news or manipulated and altered information has not existed before, and throughout history – it is not a new phenomenon. However, the explosion of social networks has had consequences, affecting the way misinformation infiltrates one’s life, altering communications, and submerging good information.
“Fake news has real consequences” was the phrase with which the Spanish journalist and writer began his presentation, noting that, “fake news is the ideal breeding ground to divide us as a society, to polarize us,” he warned. Only in March of this year, some 40 million fake news circulated on networks. How much of this information was disseminated as true? Attendees listened to the international zoom, moderated by the Uruguayan journalist Ernesto Ortíz Gómez.
Amorós García stressed that the World Health Organization has been warning for a long time about a new epidemic related to false information, which it has named “infodemic”. “The infodemic,” he clarified, “is the epidemic of false information that generates alarm, fear, uncertainty, even death and spreads with such speed that it undermines trust in the media and science itself.”
The social influences of reading, believing, and spreading false news (especially in this time when the world is facing a serious health emergency problem as a result of Covid-19) generates even more confusion and true chaos in the information since “the false shine in the same showcase where the truth shines”, said Marc.
He explained that the rise of fake news became a social media issue of global importance that also generated a scenario of uncertainty for all information. “We live in a situation in which everyone fears for the unknown and we need someone to explain to us what is happening,” said Marc, “we are facing a situation in which the activation of two emotional levers is triggered: fear and insecurity.” All this, he added, “because the truth of the facts is simply denied”.
Marc Amorós went further and warned journalists that the “fake news” pandemic plunges citizens into a war of stories, as a weapon of disinformation. “The common good,” he said, “has been overtaken by the individual good with inevitable and dangerous social polarization.” We witness the confrontations against those who “do not think like one” and the “risky tendency to criminalize people of different opinion”.
He added that another of the great evils of fake news is the devaluation of scientific information, overriding popular beliefs. “How many people have preferred to believe in testimonies of magic remedies to prevent and cure the coronavirus. The use of chlorine dioxide was the clearest example, where scientific information lost ground to popular belief,” he exemplified.
This exhibition led the participants to question themselves in a personal way: what are we doing as journalists to contain false information, be aware that a false news story goes viral in a matter of seconds 70 times more than a real news story?
It also highlighted the need to promote and attend news checking workshops and seminars and begin to access these tools that the profession gives to identify the real news from the fake.
The President of the Uruguayan Sports Journalists Circle, on behalf of the participating journalists, mostly from Latin America, thanked the Spanish journalist, teacher, and writer for his intervention and insisted on the commitment to continue doing truthful and reliable journalism.
