Use Your Difference to Make a Difference

10The Media

The media has played a huge role in shaping culture for many, many reasons. Its footprints are in all our lives: How we receive information. How we report information. How we see others. How we engage and how we learn about the world.

Whether we know it or not, virtually all of us interact with the media on a daily basis, so it makes sense to truly examine the role it plays in our lives.

The media can also be used as a tool for negative perpetuation if we are not careful.

Negative perpetuation happens because of three reasons: ignorance, incomplete stories being circulated, and fake news.

Let's take a look at the 2016 U.S. presidential election. On one side, we had the Republicans, and on the other, we had the Democrats. We even had a large group of people who didn't identify with either, so there was lots of dissension in the ranks. However, one of the things that all sides could agree on was that there was a lot of false information, or fake news, going around. There are several studies that show that thousands of people fell for the allure of completely fabricated news. In fact, Google had to banish more than 200 sites from its AdSense network and change its news feed algorithm to combat fake news.

Not only that, there were troll farms being set up in multiple places with the deliberate goal of spreading disinformation. A troll farm is an organized operation of many users who may work together in a “factory” or from different places across a distributed network ...