Why you might be accepting fake news without realising it
Do you believe everything you see? No matter how discerning or intelligent you are, we are all pre-programmed to be more accepting of information in certain contexts than others. While most of us are wise to the ‘Nigerian prince’ phishing scams of old, we are less likely to question an email from someone we know. We might question news on a website we’ve never seen before – but not in a publication we know well. And if we follow somebody high-profile on a social media platform we’re familiar with, like Instagram, chances are we take what they say at face value. It’s precisely because of this that mainstream media recently described influencer and celebrity accounts as ‘the gateway drug to fake news’.