Fake News Turning Small Town Upside Down

Twin falls Idaho FAKE NEWS ruins town

This weeks blog post is concerning a New York Times post about how fake news Turns a small city in Idaho upside down, and how because of this the town still has not recovered. In the small town of Twin Falls Idaho, news was generally boring. This is until there was talk about Islamic refugees settling in this small town, and news and talked turned south. These rumors and biases were the seed that lead to fake news.
This sounds familiar right? Fake news being spread by the talk and biases of the public. This incident in Idaho is a small scale incident of what happens all over the country every single day!
In Twin Falls Idaho there was an alleged incident concerning a juvenile sex scandal concerning two two refugee boys and a little girl. The reports and talk of this case were sealed because it involved minors, however this did not stop people from talking. There were Facebook groups and reports acting like they knew about the incident. This article states that, Brown the reported saw links flying around on the internet. "links flying back and fourth with articles that said the little girl had been gang raped at knife point, that the perpetrators were afterward given high fives." This sounds all to familiar these days.
With the fall of the profession of journalism leads to the fall of integrity and professionalism. This leads to anyone with a key board having access to publishing something. this leads to a confused public full of rumors. Brown states that there had actually not been any refugees that had settled in this town. This incident happened around when the shooting at the Pulse night club happened. Along with the Pulse headlines was the headline "Report: Syrian Refugees Rape Little Girl at Knife point in Idaho" 

This article and report of it is so important. It is an example of what fake news is, how it comes about and the consequences it has. Fake news is not something that people fabricate out of thin air, it is something that is taken from a small thread of information and blown out of portion.

This outbreak of fake news blew up a sexual assault crime involving minors. This hurts the minors, the family, and the town. This hurts everyone involved. Not only things but it hurts refugees. We get the opinions we do about people or group of people because of the news. In this case it gave these Islamic refugees a bad name, and a reason for people to not want them in their town.


GOOD NEWS - there are sites that help with this issue and they need to be more available. Snopes is a good site to see how true the news is. This site covers this report and is clearly states that it is "widely reported in inaccurate fashion." This site gives a claim, a rating, what is true, false, and the origin. I highly recommend you visit this site concerning this fake news. It tells how fake news comes about. The origin of fake news makes you see how easy it is for fake news to come about.