The sheer volume of valuable information available to us–just a split-second loading page away and contained in a pocket-sized device–is one of the few miracles of present-day technology. But just how much of this information is genuine? For the year ending in March 2022, the Telephone Crime Survey for England and Wales (TCSEW) reported that an estimated 61% of fraud incidents were related to online activity alone.
This begs the question: just how can we control such common occurrences that seem to spread like wildfire?
A Little Birdie Told Me…
While many people, young and old, get live information from social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, it goes without saying that not everything seen on these sites can be taken as the gospel truth. Every year sees hoards of rumours and fake news about celebrities, politicians, world events and, well, just about anything gaining traction and trending on Google searches. No matter how well-intentioned and informative the post may seem, it’s easy for fake news to spiral out of control.
Fake news can, at best, be a harmless joke and, at worst, lead to misinformed judgements that have more serious consequences. We’ve all received threatening spam emails and suspicious, persistent pop-ups, to the point where these types of scams have almost become a part of daily life.
While our awareness of how to spot other more obvious and harmful online scams has increased and technology is constantly improving to be able to detect spam messages and block malicious pop-ups, these things are also evolving to become harder and harder to spot. Simply looking out for tell-tale typos and skimming on-site reviews are no longer fool-proof ways to determine whether something is genuine or not. Even those who are more tech-savvy are still at risk of slipping up.
Parrying Digital Deception
Coming up with more strategies to tackle online scamming and misinformation has been a work in progress, with platforms like Twitter already possessing features such as warning prompts and context labels to warn users if a post is potentially untrustworthy. These features both discourage the spread of fake news and promote users to regularly and independently perform fact-checks before sharing news.
As for the UK, the proposed Online Safety Bill has undergone several changes since the draft was first published in early 2021. This much-debated Bill has been promoted as a way to transform the UK into ‘the safest place in the world to be online while defending free expression’ by implementing various rules regarding the content that is published on the internet.
One of the updates to the Bill includes a duty for Category 1 and Category 2A services to combat the promotion of fraudulent advertisements on their service, with legal consequences if they fail to do so. Category 1 services are counted as those with high-risk features and large user bases, while Category 2A relates to high-reach, regulated search services. With this imposed accountability, there is hope that the appearance of advertisement scams can be significantly reduced.
Final Thoughts
Having to constantly be on our toes in order to dodge fake news, fraudulent ads, and virus-infested pop-ups is exhausting and stressful, so it is essential that action is taken to tackle the threats we face. The UK has already begun taking steps to address some glaring issues with online safety, so we can only hope that the internet can, truly, become a free and safe environment for all.
