We are in a non-war-related revolution. Our jump from the 80s has been enormous and have gone past so fast, that the problems we meet disappear before we can even fix them ourselves. I am talking about the way you are reading this. You are probably reading on your computer, but this could just as well be read on a tablet, a phone, a TV or, if you have to, a piece of paper. It is amazing, isn’t it? I can push some buttons on this plastic thing, and it sends what I type through the air until they land safely inside your computer. This revolution is the biggest since the industrial revolution, in my opinion. We have come so far, that it’s quite obvious that it’s not all for the better. It is easier than ever to spread fake news, basically for free. It is a true challenge stopping these. We are in a non-war-related revolution. Or are we? Is there anything the average person can do about this?

Facebook has been the main source of misinformation for the last few years. If you are looking for articles claiming that Hillary Clinton has connections with ISIS, or that Jews are reptiles trying to take over the world, this is your place to look. One of Facebooks catchwords has always been to be open and almost having their own laws. You could post anything without consequences, and that’s what made it and its users so vulnerable. Anyone could make an account claiming to be a trusted news source, and that’s what they did. People created websites that sounded trustworthy, but were just made to make easy money. Most of the “fakers” didn’t really care about the articles at all. They didn’t do this to put certain people in a bad light, they just did it because the more their posts spread around Facebook, the more money they make. This is not the only problem with Facebook. Facebook is known for selling personal data. They collect everything you do on both their website and other places. I recently experienced this myself. I logged on a website called restream.io, which is a tool for streaming. I logged on with my twitch account, and the next time I opened my phone, I got ads from restream.io on Instagram. Instagram I owned by Facebook, but I have not connected my twitch account to Facebook in any way. The only way I can think of how this happened, is that chrome saw that I logged on restream.io. Since Google and Facebook share a lot of personal information, Facebook may have found this out and thought it was a good idea to show me a few ads on Instagram. It’s a long route, but these type events happen all the time. The sad part about this is that there is not much you can do about this. Even if you turn of all the settings on Facebook, it doesn’t make much of a difference. Facebook knows almost as much about people without an account as those with. It’s scary, but it’s true.

We’re not completely done with Facebook just yet. An event in 2016 made everyone concerned about Facebook and other news sources. This event is known as the American election of 2016, a campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. During this election campaign, more fake news spread on Facebook than ever before. Donald Trump’s advertisement manager used 100 million dollars on Facebook advertisements. The funny part is that Trump’s team were not the only ones making articles and posting them on Facebook. A team on around 200 people based in Makedonia made tons of fake news and posted them on Facebook. As I said in the previous paragraph, they didn’t care about the election at all, they just made money. This caused huge problems as posts articles like “Hillary Clinton supports Russia” and “The Pope chooses Trump” got millions of shares and likes. The only thing you could really do about this is being critical of the sources you found your information, and report articles that obviously are fake.

Now things are getting more serious. Cyber-attacks have taken place and caused enormous amounts of damage. The well-known “wannacry”-attack took place a few years ago, affecting thousands of hospitals and other services. The chances of the next big war being mostly a cyber-war, is not too unlikely. Now, this is the hardest one for us “normal” people to do anything about, but it’s important to keep it in mind. 

As a summery; can we do anything about this? Yes, but no. We cannot stop people from posting fake news on Facebook, executing cyber-attacks or lurking us into downloading malware. However, this doesn’t mean we can’t do anything. There are two things to you can improve about your cyber security: “human” improvements and “software” improvements. The “human” improvements are things such as source criticism and reporting. The “software” improvements include using antivirus and auto delete cookies and such things. Overall, I think this technological revolution is a good thing, as it makes tasks easier. Without it, the evolution would’ve stopped before we ever had the power of having kitten videos in our pockets.