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Just two days ago, Brazil’s Supreme Court banned the popular messaging service, Telegram in hopes of stopping the spread of fake news and hate speech leading up to the presidential elections later this year.
However, I believe that this may not be the most effective way to stop the spread of fake news as netizens can still flock to other social media platforms and continue to spread misinformation and falsehoods. And in order to successfully combat the spread of fake news, it must be a joint effort between both the social media company and the government. However, this might be an issue in this situation as Telegram is “notoriously known for its stance of not cooperating with judicial and police authorities in several countries”, this can be seen from Telegram’s unresponsiveness as it did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to its press team. Thus, the government could have reached out to other more responsive social media companies as these companies would have valuable user data which the government does not have, and the government could leverage this data to find the root cause of the fake news, ultimately nipping the problem in the bud.
All in all, fake news spreads like a virus and we should stop the spread of fake news before we are faced with a full-blown pandemic.
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One renowned TV program in my home country addressed a similar issue a few weeks ago. It was mainly about fake news and hate speech on different social media platforms including chatting platforms and YouTube. During the presidential election period, people were confused telling what is true or not, and also there were several cases of celebrities or YouTube stars committing suicide because of the hate speech and fake news towards them. As you wrote, it seems like there needs to be cooperation between the government and social media platforms to prevent such things, but simply banning cannot be a solution for fake news as there are so many alternatives.
Its not Telegram’s fault that people believe the first thing they see. Government should educate people, not raise restrictions.