It facilitates free and seamless inter- and cross-border communication and enables information to travel fast and wide. It builds and destroys individuals and institutions, and promotes or demotes merchandise in a way never seen before.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and others are now the new media. While in the past, people had to wait hours, sometimes days, to know what was happening around them, things have dramatically changed now. Citizen journalists, armed with no more than a smartphone, are able to break news to millions of people around the world on real time and keep stories alive with pictures and videos.
This form of communication is a boon to users and consumers but it is also a source of pain, anguish, and disappointment for many.
Fake news have permeated the social media so much so that a new cliché` has been born: don't believe anything you read in the internet.
Fiction disguised as news has saturated the social network - distorting facts and spreading propaganda, innuendos and lies, sometimes with serious consequences in politics, government and business.
Producers of fake news engage in mischief and spin information to please, hurt or damage reputations, or simply to drive traffic. Fake newsmakers "sex" their stories to attract likes and spur social discourse, and photo-shop images to legitimize their stories.
It is not surprising therefore that many people in the US believe fake news influenced the just ended US elections. Blogging sites, websites and posts carried bogus information and anecdotes about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton that were misleading and plain false.
Impostors lied to voters that they could vote online; gave different voting days for Democracts and Republicans; claimed that Clinton was a murderer; and that the Pope had endorsed Trump, among a litany of many bogus posts. Equally preposterous was a post days after elections that Obama had signed an executive order to investigate the election results.
The social media is also known to regularly "kill" prominent people - from prominent individuals like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe to Fidel Castro of Cuba; to celebrities like Sylvester Stallone, Paul Mcartney and Lady Gaga.
Those hoaxes were spread through the social media and were shared to thousands of people. A finger was pointed largely at Facebook where most of the false news items appeared. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, however, denied that Facebook influenced the elections, and branded that idea "crazy." He said it was "extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election."
Currently, a number of the social media organizations including Facebook are scratching their heads over how to deal with the fakers.
Since it's generally difficult to distinguish between genuine news and fake news because of the way the latter is crafted and presented, consumers are left to use their own intuition.
So, good luck as you thumb your way through the various internet platforms.
And that is my say.
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