Transformational Bias

Picture a world where everyone tells the truth, nobody lies about anything, and everything in the news is true. The false things people and organizations says are all gone. Now take that world and turn it upside down. Everyone spreads false information, or even rumors about people that are not even true. News outlets are now publishing untruthful and sometimes hurtful things about other people while at the same time, doing it all on purpose. Readers now have to question everything they read or hear, and even major publishers are at question on whether or not the contents in the articles they publish are correct. Unfortunately, this is the case with reality, many people have now been publishing fake news articles with the intent of getting
As with any human, they can be effected in anyway psychologically. This includes when deciding whether or not something is true or false. When determining if something is true or false, bias can play a role in the final verdict. Conformational bias is “the idea that we only believe information that is similar to our beliefs is the start of the problem” of people believing fake news (Sundar). This can ultimately push a voter to one side or the another. If the voter was a Trump supporter but still had some thoughts about Hillary Clinton, his bias when reading an article, even with false information supporting Donald Trump can lead him to think the information to be true. Whereas if he was not a supporter of any side, the bias of the reader would not play any role of determining if the article was true or false and he would have immediately known that the article had incorrect information. To add on with that, humans have become less and less of active readers. They have become lazy when reading, they imagine that everything thing they see online is true, so they have stopped checking the sources of the article in which the information was gathered from. It “is our relative unwillingness to check the credibility of the news source” that can be detrimental in the end (Sundar). It has been failing to do the easy things that has
Even with that, people will still continue to share their arguments in the highly controversial topic. This is because readers fail to notice any signs of fake news being fraudulent because of the introduction of computers and their lack of attention to detail. But, there will always be ways for the readers to be able to know the differences between fake news and real news. Additionally, people might never be able to come to a complete verdict on such a controversial topic, both sides have strong arguments that contradicts the other’s arguments and evidence. Due to this, one side of the argument backs up their claim by stating that readers easily believe these articles because of the fact that humans have become more and more like computers. However, the other side counters this by stating readers do not even read articles with different opinions they do, they only read about things that has the same viewpoints. At the end of this, other people just want to fix the problem and have developed some strategies to combat this problem by helping those who had fell victim to this problem by helping them identify truth from lies. As a result, fake news has become one of the growing problems in the first world. If the society does not do something about, it might come to extreme circumstances where fake news might be more of the norm than real news. Everyone might just have to question everything