EOTO #2

The first thing that comes to mind when I think about the concept of disinformation is the direct correlation that is has to the Holocaust. During WWII, the reason why are so many people did not realize the horrors that were occurring at the concentration camps - the starvation, the unjust murders of millions of people, extreme manual labor, and cruel scientific experiments was because society was not able to see the accurate depiction of these concentration camps. Disinformation goes hand in hand with propaganda because it obscures and covers up the real, harsh truth and conveys to society a totally inaccurate picture of what is actually occurring in the world to prevent activists and people unafraid to make a change ill-informed to keep a main group of people in full control of a society and living under their false pretenses. What people were being shown in these promotional videos about concentration camps were images of children playing together in fields, getting three square meals a day, and people grateful to have some form of employment. The fact that the people who resided in the Polish town where Auschwitz was located did not truly know the extent of what occurred there until way after the fact is a truly frightening thought. 

If Hitler could convince a whole country that targeting a single group of people, dehumanizing them, and then committing major mass murder on said group was acceptable and right, than surely this still continues in our ever-present social media focus as well, right? The fact is that disinformation is completely inevitable in today’s society, regardless of further education and fact-checking because people will use social media to depict what is not real for their own agenda - to convince an audience of something that truly is merely a portrayal of what we want people to believe as opposed to a true glimpse of reality. 

This concept is very relevant and prominent in today’s most recent news as well, especially in the ways that people discuss their own agendas first as opposed to the facts. While the COVID-19 cases were steadily rising in early March, my dad and I were joking in the car about how when you flip back and forth between two news stations such as FOX and CNN on the radio, you would be hearing such completely different stories that it sounded like the two popular and trusted stations were in the current process of having a broadcasted argument. We were being told by FOX that COVID-19 was nothing more than a hoax and that scaring American society like this was all part of meeting the Democratic agenda while CNN was not mentioning the statistics or any of the true facts and were instead discussing how poorly Trump was leading our country. At this point, I found the inner journalist in me getting extremely aggravated and frustrated. These were no longer trusted sources of mass media communication, but debate teams. I did not want to know about their political views but rather, I wanted to hear what the numbers were so that I had a clear picture of the true danger of this virus before exposing myself to it without safety measures. I wanted to know how to keep myself and my family safe. By telling people the severity of this virus without political bias, would have helped isolate it much sooner by promoting social distancing and implementing safety measures and protocol. Due to disinformation, we had become a reactive society as opposed to a productive one.

Link: https://en.unesco.org/fightfakenews