Digital media and technologies are constantly being updated. New information is constantly being sent out into the world. For many people, it is impossible to keep up, because so much news appears every year, month, day and even every hour. It is not humanly possible to keep track of it all, so we quickly switch back to digital tools to support us in this. But isn’t that precisely the catch, because in that way we remain a little behind the times. Something new is developed and people hear about it through digital technologies and media. In this way, you actually always remain dependent on digital devices.
Should we believe everything these digital devices tell us? They are after all a conduit for information that we, as users, simply accept. But should we just accept that information? Nowadays, more and more people are becoming skilled at abusing this, because users often accept it uncritically and are a little too trustworthy. An example of this is the spread of fake news, but if you don’t realise that it is fake news, you still accept it.
How can you recognise fake things? In the past, fake information was easy to spot because it looked totally different from the real thing and was missing a bunch of elements that the real version would have. For example, if you received an email that supposedly came from your bank, there were many clues that it was a fake email. The sender was a random email address, your name was misspelled, there was no official sender logo, etc. There were many aspects that indicated that this was a fake message.
Nowadays, fraudsters specialise in this and can make fake things look almost real. For example, online shops that offer items at a lower price and look very real. They then spread advertising for this website on social media in order to appeal to as many people in the target group as possible. Many people (including myself once) fall for this and visit these websites. This allows the fraudsters to obtain your information and try to get you to buy things. I also fell for this and once bought items worth a hundred euros from such a fake online shop, but never saw any of it again. Money gone!
It is therefore important that we are increasingly vigilant and aware that this is happening all the time. You need to be alert and not just believe everything you see. Because a lot of fake news is also spread via social media. It sometimes goes so far that fraudsters use AI to edit a video of a person and make that person say all kinds of things they never said. These types of fraudsters are becoming increasingly bold in spreading fake news, which means we have to be careful and not believe everything, because fake news is constantly being spread!
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