The revolution of digital technology has disrupted and transformed the entire Media Industry. The evolution of print to online media has significantly impacted the individual, business, society, and nation overall. The digitization has changed the judicious “decision-making” capability of an individual which can make or break something powerful in this world.
The advent of the Internet and transformational technologies have redefined the way we gather, receive and consume the news today. During the Pre-Internet era, it was challenging to get international or even national information without the Newspaper which slowly evolved to Radio, Television, and Social-Media.
With time, ‘Time’ became the most significant challenge which a man is always battling especially in the fast-paced mechanical world. This challenge paved the way for one of the biggest business opportunity for Media Industry in the world. Mobility became the future, and with this development, the media rapidly advanced itself in the era of social-media by providing online-news via apps which led to the decline of the print-media businesses.
However, the ever-growing influence of online social media gave birth to the ‘Fake News or Yellow Journalism which refers to journalism that provides little or no legitimate or well-researched news. Instead, they present headlines story that is eye-catching and sell more newspapers. The media and all other superpowers in the Industry who wanted to manipulate adopted methods such as exaggerations of news-events, sensationalism, scandal-mongering, deliberate hoaxes or misinformation via print and broadcast news media or online social media.
The fake news is published or written with the explicit intention of misleading to damage the reputation of an entity, agency or a person, and or to gain politically or financially, often using outright fabricated headlines to increase readership, coverage, online sharing, internet click revenues or any hidden business motivations.
To top it all the technology has proven advantageous to players in the ‘Fake News.’ The ‘Bots’ are designed with the intelligence and robotic power to perform any automated task without human intervention. In the case of online media, they are programmed to gather and collate ‘Fake News’ that could make or break any business, people, society or a nation.
Let us take the recent case of 2016 US presidential election, according to the CBS News the stories which consistently featured in Google’s top news search results were widely shared on the Facebook and they were taken seriously by the readers. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, made a statement, “I think the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the election in any way, I think is a pretty crazy idea.” A few days later, he blogged that Facebook was looking for ways to flag the fake news stories. Angela Merkel expressed her concern by discussing the topic on Fake News and Bots which can manipulate public opinion is committed not to use social bots for her campaign strategy.
However, demonizing bots might cause society from overlooking the possibility of using the same bots for the good of mankind. Be it a Bot or Chatbot it can be the optimal tools for eliminating the fake news from the system. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI), the bots can be programmed only to collate legitimate news whose data source has been validated. Apart from eliminating the rudimentary system of reporting, the ‘AI Bot or Chatbot’ will automate the entire online news reporting system and slowly eradicate the yellow journalism from its roots.
To summarize, the ‘Media Industry’ should collaborate with Technologists and Subject Matter Expertise for designing and developing AI Bots that can bring in the Next-Gen online news reporting system which will be instrumental in eliminating the ‘Fake News’ from the system and help establish people’s trust back in the power of the Social Media. More importantly, reinstating the judicious decision-making capability of an individual.
