www.posta.co.ke
A politician telling lies is normal and we
have come to expect it but to make fake
news part of a national agenda makes
governments totalitarian and despotic
in that by a careful manipulation of
information the public is herded into a
particular direction while still believing in
freewill.
Fake news makes a mockery of elections
since people think they are making sound
decisions and this has become even more
dangerous in the social media era. A
politician can destroy the reputation of an
opponent by carefully placed fake news that
appears authentic.
Then there is the fake news generator
that seems to enjoy spreading fear and
despondency. Those schadenfreude
characters that enjoy the misfortune of
others and revel in creating panic by
creating fictitious scenarios.
Ochieng thinks that a person has to be
mentally sick to take pleasure in other
people suffering and to go further to ensure
discomfort and worry is fostered by actively
feeding them with manufactured false
information that is disturbing.
Of course we recognize this as malicious
gossip at a personal level and at a bigger
scale to be the numerous conspiracy theories
that abound in the world today that make it
Religious institutions
have remained
the most active disseminators
of fake
news and even in
the current corona
era you hear many
claim to have had a
revelation that God
was angry with the
world because of
our milliard sins
and has sent this
pestilence to punish
the world.
The politician has always been the expert
user of fake news and there is a
sanitized word for their fake news called
propaganda which usually comes in
well-crafted documents called manifestos
which are just a pack of lies designed
to propel a politician to power.
very difficult to trust what one hears and is
claimed as fact.
On the global scale Ochieng has read
tomes about who the Antichrist is and
he has been linked to the pope, American
presidents and Russian leaders. We hear of
the shadowy evil cabal that runs the world
and manipulates world economy.
At the local level we never stop hearing
about the Mount Kenya mafia of about
ten people who apparently run Kenya
and the many other theories that the so
called dynasties have planned the course
of Kenya for the next five hundred years.
Matters become dangerous when these
theories touch on the origin of diseases
and disease control. We have heard that
HIV was introduced to wipe out Africans
which seems like a canny spin to deflect
the stigma from the gay community.
We have strange situations where a vaccine
has been resisted because it apparently was
created to mass sterilize African girls to
reduce the population of Africa so that the
west can take over Africa in a new colonial
push. But if you don’t get vaccinated you
die anyway.
Ochieng has even read a petition that has
been presented to authorities in America
that seeks to charge Bill and Melinda
Gates with crimes against humanity and
one of the charges is that he is conspiring to
create a world government by implanting
electronic chips in all humans to control
them.
If you add to this melee the common
criminals who generate fake news to
scam gullible victims with projects from
pyramid schemes to miracle cures and
all these are being spread through main
media and people you trust like relatives
and successful businesspeople then the
confusion is total.
The new culture of celebrity worship has
added another angle to the fake news
saga. Since they have a disproportionate
media presence they become influencers
by default and as such excellent avenues
to disseminate fake news.
All that a fake news generator has to do
is to convince a celebrity on whatever
he or she wishes to broadcast and the
celebrity will in all innocence parrot
total nonsense which in turn will be
believed by millions of followers that
swear by them.
We have not added into the mix the
practical joker who just enjoys pranking
people by sending out deceptively
inaccurate information or panicking
people with out-of-this world claims
just to get a laugh and perhaps to feel
smart and powerful.
The last word is that the real pandemic
in the world today is fake news. It is
so serious that it makes it very hard to
control even a medical pandemic since
there are so many fake stories flying
around that one is unable to make an
informed decision.
If the world does not find a way to
control the dissemination of fake news
especially in this social media era then
we are headed into an apocalypse where
fact and fiction merge and we will not be
able to differentiate when a crisis strikes
whether it is real or not.
We inadvertently ignore serious issues
because fake news told us not to worry
or act aggressively towards a non-issue
again because fake news told us it was
dangerous. We are caught up in a fake
news reality and the scary part is we
don’t know how to extricate ourselves.
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