Nowadays, lots of people cannot live without internet which is the main way for people to gather new information and news from the society. However, not all the information is correct. The incorrect is divided into two different categories, misinformation and disinformation, which intensely connected with our digital society (Week 1 Lecture). Today I will focus on the influence of the political field.
What are these two concepts mean? Misinformation is like honestly wrong information which made by accident. Disinformation is purposefully incorrect information which leads by individual or organizations. Misinformation does not need to worry too much because it is not purposeful, and everyone might make mistakes in some situation (Week 1 Lecture). However, disinformation, which is more severe, is not. It is tangible that disinformation happens through the political field and economic ways. According to Kates (1998), it is stated that the party used digital media platforms to publish fabricated content or misleading content to confuse the public, in order to gain more votes from citizens. For example, during the period of election of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, mainstream media have different priorities and the structural components of the two media are quite different (Faris et al. , 2017). They all cover the negative news about two candidates, but the general trend still follows Donald Trump, especially the various scandals about Clinton Foundation when they reported Hillary. Reports like this play up trump’s strengths and undermine Clinton’s competitiveness, and that will confuse the public and influence the final result of a political campaign which is relatively unfair in our digital society.
Above all, misinformation and disinformation play an important role in our digital societies. They produce plenty of problems which wait to be solved, and that boosts the society to take actions to prevent, make laws or regulations to improve and ameliorate the current deficiency of information.
Bibliography:
- Faris, R., Roberts, H., Etling, B., Bourassa, N., Zuckerman, E. and Benkler, Y., 2017. Partisanship, propaganda, and disinformation: Online media and the 2016 US presidential election.
- Kates, S., 1998. A qualitative exploration into voters’ ethical perceptions of political advertising: Discourse, disinformation, and moral boundaries. Journal of Business Ethics, 17(16), pp.1871-1885
- Week 1 Lecture. Intro to the module and misinformation.
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