From the book “Faith is Not Blind”, an article now ten years old, still relevant today Bruce C. and Marie K. Hafen wrote:
The current problem that bothers U.S. columnist David Ignatius most is that “people don’t seem to know what’s true any more” from the climate change and allegations about people we like or don’t like to the “political polarization” now affecting “every area of our common life—including sports. . . . We’re learning that social media can be tools of deception as well as truth.”17
For instance, a grandmother who had raised her grandson recently received an email from someone posing as a police officer saying the grandson was in jail in Europe for a DUI and needed bail money. Another of her grandsons said, “Grandma (who loved and had spent many years investing in her grandson) was sent into despair—one email from a fraudster and she seemed ready to jettison all of her dearly held confidence in her grandson. Church members are sometimes driven to distrust by equally ill-motivated and anonymous sources on the web.
Social media’s deceptive power now shows up in many places. We can no longer “trust the reviews [we] read online” about consumer product quality—a problem that is an “internet nightmare.”19 And tragic acts of large-scale violence, like mass shootings, often trigger false, politically motivated stories that claim who and what caused the violence, vrooming virally across social media sites so quickly that the true news accounts can get lost in a kind of public semi-consciousness. Recent examples include a tragic shooting in Las Vegas and another in a Texas Baptist church. Perhaps the most flagrant recent fake news problem is the Russian government’s apparently fraudulent use of our major social media platforms in the 2016 U.S. presidential election—and American society’s general perception of itself.21
In the largest study of fake news to date, MIT data scientists in 2018 found that false stories are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted, perhaps because they are more “engaging or provocative.”22 This research feeds into “a raging global debate about the ability of Silicon Valley………. companies to influence society. [The] internet giants are under intensifying scrutiny over the power of their products and vulnerability is not just unsettling but dangerous. The internet really can be manipulated for religious or many other purposes. ~~~Bruce C. and Marie K. Hafen, “Deseret Book Faith is Not Blind” Deseret Book” p. 34-35
