Fakebook

Fakebook

By: Erreh Svaia

“Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

Bertrand Russell

Facebook was revealed as a disaster almost ten days before the USA elections, "fakebook" became a nightmare as a quick succession of fake, tricked and non-confirmed news started to flood the social network, turning it into a propaganda machine that might have helped to create twisted opinions and notions about the candidates, fear and anger its most immediate consequences, somehow in the middle of this post truth era, truth was ejected from the basis of news and affirmations, making it unnecessary to confirm news before taking them as legit, a deformation following the path of Brexit, when the British simply decided to stop asking for true fact and for experts opinions, somehow the truth wasn't considered to belong in news anymore in order to be believed.

Are we all becoming partners in crime in this insanely non stopping chain of lies? Are we responsible in part for this? Are we being used in order to spread lies in this sophisticated piece of propaganda? think about it for a second, Goebbels would have been very happy individual in the age of Twitter and Facebook, where there's apparently no need or will to check the veracity of the news, we are simply not questioning "the truth" anymore, again, we are falling in the deadly trap of assuming that if it was printed on a book or a newspaper it was the truth, now we assume that if it's on the Internet, or if a friend or an acquaintance posted it on his Facebook or Twitter account it's true, what a terrible mistake! What a tremendous regression in media we are facing these days.  

I escaped from Facebook a couple of weeks ago, the overload if information was simply becoming too much to bear, I was never too enthusiastic about Twitter, the limited characters was something awkward to me, and for a while Facebook was very amusing, mainly as a source of news, but suddenly it started to turn into a whirlwind of unconfirmed propaganda, I had to start not only checking up the news I read, but also the news friends were posting, so I decided to stop using it, as lack of importance giving to checking up the facts started to became the norm, the amount of time invested in checking the sources and debating the post worth was too much time for me to be invested on, so I decided to let ignorance lovers sink in their tricky stuff, Facebook will eat itself.

We have seen the enormous consequences of this post truth culture, and honestly I'm not interested in being a part of it, considering that the UK and the USA have been powerful struck by this phenomena, we, in México are starting to experience this on the way to the 2018 elections, it will be a tough task to try to avoid falling into this trap, considering that it is already becoming a trend within the country, we watched how the media along the PRI (Revolutionary Institutional Party) made an alliance in order to discredit PAN (National Action Party) president Felipe Calderón´s administration, augmenting the effect of violence within the country with unrelenting news about crime, the spread of non-confirmed news could create a damaging effect of creating an enormous amount of lies and nonfactual information irresponsibly freed on the Internet, considering that today, there's an intense campaign in order to create a worse than reality image of the country, we could be on the way to a big media disaster, a potential chaos that could grow more and more social unrest towards the elections and it's resulting outcome.