Social Media In 1984 By George Orwell

During this last election there seemed to be an overwhelming amount of fake news circulating the media. So many different stories were spread about each candidate that it was beginning to be impossible to know what was fact and what was fiction. Many people thought that this was a new thing, brought around by the use of social media, but its been happening for a very long time. In 1942 George Orwell, author of the novel 1984, said, “I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgment have simply disappeared from the face of Earth” about the political media of his day. You would think that sense media puts out so much fake news people would stop listening to it, but is seems like the opposite is happening. So with so many people watching …show more content…
They even have the ability to remove past events from all record. The main character of the story, Winston, even states that, “Beyond the late fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life is lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the detail of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing.” (Orwell, page 22). But the George Orwell future isn’t the one we live in today. Many people only believe in fake news because they want it to be true. Fake news is also almost always corrected in regular media since false statement that may be harmful to people is slander, which is illegal. The government may control some of what we see, but as said by Connor Lynch (author of “What Truth?”), “…no single politician or party (or corporation) has the sheer power or influence or control in contemporary America to completely rewrite history or challenge self-evident truths.” (Lynch, Paragraph