Fake News Affects Everyone
Always surrounded, yet forever alone.
Fake News: it is a process of disinformation to one’s content consumer. This is different than the mistake of providing false information. Though they both contain incorrect information only the former is malicious in its intent. The latter can be a naïve or otherwise negligent attempt to disseminate information, even still it can be otherwise correct at the moment of its publishing but incorrect at a future date.
Fake news is malicious, insidious, and extremely harmful. Fake News gaslights its consumer into having more and more outlandish beliefs further detached from reality with every story consumed. Fake News is never good news, unfortunately; it never states that there will be pop-up cookie stands on every corner in the near future, or that Israel just complimented Palestine. It is always sounding the alarm, always has the intention of making people fearful of something, this other. Fake News always makes sure to differentiate the nobility of the consumer from the terrors of the other.
The greatest danger of this is that those beliefs once extreme enough do not stay contained within the individual consumer, no, consumers find each other and help to further extremism on either part. This has been a major part of the wave of right-wing violence in the US. This violence that is focused solely on making the other hurt. But Fake News tell their consumer this is good, because the plans of the other is to hurt them.
Finally, like in any abusive relationship, Fake News isolates the consumer and makes sure that only Fake News can be trusted. Fake News is adept at projection and regularly weaponizes it. This almost always leads to the consumer becoming increasingly ostracized from society at large because of their beliefs, furthering their isolation and dependency on Fake News.
