THE FAKE NEWS: IS IT THE FAULT OF SOCIAL MEDIA?

Abstract

In recent years, human are living in a post-truth society where it is extremely difficult to correct falsehoods that have been passed so fastly and indiscriminately through the net. The proliferation fake news in social media increases significantly because of the popularity of social media. It is possible for annonymous user to spread defamations and inacurate stories as quickly and easily as the truth. Fake data appear very real as the original. In Indonesia, an immense number of fake news increases dramatically toward election period, either the president or governor election. Drawing on audience data, archives of fact-checking websites, literature review, and results from a new online survey, we find: fake news proliferated and spread quickly because most of the mainstream media have lost their credibility. People have started to understand that what is presented in the mainstream media is influenced by the political ideology of the media owners. People are starting to look for alternative news sources. This created a vacuum, which allows for almost everyone to make up story and spread it through social media. Nevertheless, social media is not the only one to be blamed, there are several other factors that influence this situation. The objective of this paper is to describe the technological, economical, sociological, political and cultural context which were boosting the increase of fake news today.