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Fake News And Its Effects On The Election Of The United States

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News is everywhere. It’s on TV, in newspapers, on phones, and on computers. Some may say that it’s inescapable. Lately, a whole new type of news has begun circulating without much of a second glance. This form of news, referred to as “fake news”, contains fraudulent or misleading information that masquerades itself as real news. While some believe that fake news is easy to discern from real news, that is not the case. Because of this, the circulation of fake news has real and significant political consequences. The most obvious and relevant of these consequences is the election of the forty fifth president of the United States.
“The poll lends weight to the suggestion that the US election result was influenced by a widespread belief in …show more content…

Harris admits to fabricating an individual who found fraudulent Clinton ballots. He found an image of a man standing in front of many boxes with the label “ballot box” written on them. Despite not knowing who the man in the image was, he claimed that he was Randall Prince, the individual that he fabricated (Shane). He bought an expired internet domain for five dollars, published it on that website, and before it knew it the article was being shared all across the web. It went so far that the Franklin County, Ohio, board of elections announced that it was investigating the claims, and later made a public statement denying the story (Shane). Harris simply took a claim that Trump had publicly shared and created an entirely fabricated piece of fiction that appeared to back up Trump’s claim. It was simple, and it spread like wildfire, possibly turning more individuals into Trump supporters. Unfortunately, news, and all too often fake news, spreads incredibly fast as this example illustrates. One author even compared it to a disease. “The propagation of such information through social networks bears many similarities of infectious diseases” (Kucharski). The only way fake news can spread is through the sharing of it through either social media or word of mouth. This turns out to be the case when it comes to the election of Donald Trump. “In the weeks before the election, search giant Google’s

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