Fake news reflection

 The story that we ended up with by the end of the brainstorming process was very different from the idea we had thought of first. At first, we considered doing something about school lunches, but after seeing that several other people were doing the same topic, we switched gears to the one we chose as the final story, which was the test scores story. To gather more information, we first researched the hardest AP exam to get a 5 for, which we found was AP Physics C: Mechanics. In order to make our story seem convincing, I used a font similar to that of popular news sites like The New York Times, and we included false quotes from the actual CEO of College Board to create a sense of formality. That in conjunction with real quantitative pass-rate statistics from the AP exam, create an article that seems very believable at first glance. We also stated that the article was fact-checked by a real fact-checking organization, even though it obviously was not. Through this project, I learned how easy it is to create a false narrative through very basic tactics, and just lying to your audience. Fake and distorted news is often only made to increase the amount of clicks per article, which improves website traffic and in turn, raises revenue their articles generate. This problem has only been exacerbated by modern social media algorithms promoting interaction through discussion-based comment sections and more lenient creator programs, creating a higher revenue floor than that of more traditional information distribution methods.

We analyzed our creative process in regards to the fake news story we wrote, and going over what we did, what worked, and what didn't.