96 And Left To Die

Imagine seeing a newspaper headline with the title ‘96 And Left To Die’.

For sure I would imagine that a lot of people seeing such a news item would read the subheading and the first few words on the subject, and if an online publication, leave comments at how enraged they are and how the alleged crime should result in the person at fault being imprisoned or worse.

The story may be true but in many situations there is a good chance that the attention grabbing headline could be a fake in an attempt to get people to visit the news site so that advertisers know that people, while reading the story, will see their adverts.  Commonly called ‘clickbait’ news items these days.

Take the case of a woman, reportedly 96 years old, being locked in her room by her eldest son while he went on holiday.

This of course could be a very valid true story, (that is the aim of ‘clickbait’ news of course to make it all look real), but when you take into account that if she had her first born when, let’s say 20 years old, then the image portrayed of a young man neglecting her old mother and locking her in her room does somewhat start to look shaky at the very least when you take into account that he must be around 76 years old himself.

Thanks to the internet we are now able to publish news all over the world but that sadly also means we are all subject to fake news items at the same time.

Many people think of fake news as being to do with politics, character assassination and of course various forms of propaganda but advertisers wanting people to see their advertisements also promotes the need by online news services to publish fake news items for financial gain.

There are many forms of ‘clickbait’ and fake news stories around these days and not all of them are not that noticeable at first look but human nature as it is – who has the time, or even the inclination, to look deeper at the details behind the attention grabbing headlines to find out how true it all is?

The photo used for this article, by the way, is for illustration purposes only!
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