Stephanie Busari's How Fake News Does Real Harm

Perpetuating Fake News and The Consequences of It: A Textual Analysis of Stephanie Busari’s “How Fake News Does Real Harm”
In April of 2014, over 200 girls of the town of Chibok were kidnapped from their homes in Nigeria by a terrorist group known as Boko Haram. During this time, the Nigerian government was under pressure regarding many issues, including questions regarding a possible negotiation with Boko Haram in attempts to bring the girls back. During this time, many influential names such as Michelle Obama raised their voices to show their support and to spread awareness. With the story gaining ground internationally, many journalists became involved including Stephanie Busari, who became a large advocate in the return of these girls.

Busari appeals to her audience emotionally through varied sources and in doing so paints a vivid picture that demonstrations superbly the quality of media in today’s society. This appeal to emotion shows how quickly an audience can be swayed and overall speaks to how consumers today must inspect media more thoroughly to understand the validity of stories.
Busari blends personal information with factual information, which brings the audience in and makes them trust her story that much more.

Through the use of sympathy, she grants herself the power to sway her audience in a much more profound way, showing the ease of persuasion through the use of emotion. By emotionally investing her audience, Busari exemplifies how quickly the reader can be swayed and their judgment skewed in the first glance at a story. Busari gives a personality to the narrative by telling the story of Hadiza, “Hadiza is 20. She's shy, but she has a beautiful smile that lights up her face. But she's in constant pain. And she will likely be on medication for the rest of her life” (Busari 00:09). By giving this account, Busari immediately appeals to the emotions of the audience and engages them in a way that shows her expertise in not only the subject matter she is discussing, but also in leading opinion. As she goes on, the level of emotional taxation is increased through the use of visual aids which show pictures of the distraught families of the kidnapped girls. She also tells of a mother who said, “that if she could have reached into the laptop and pulled [out] her child from the laptop, she would have done so” (Busari 02:27). This, along with Busari stating that she is a mother as well, appeals to a more specific group in the audience and evokes a stronger reaction from them as a result. Towards the end of the presentation, Busari explains “I must confess

that I have not been a dispassionate observer covering this story. I am furious when I think about the wasted opportunities to rescue these girls” (Busari 03:51), speaking more to the general audience again and eliciting a new emotional state from the audience which is anger. By speaking not only to the sad nature of this story, but also the absurdity of it as well, Busari covers a larger portion of the audience and in doing so, gives herself even more influence. Throughout the entirety of the speech Busari continually appeals to the audience’s emotion and persuades them accordingly.
As we become more involved in media, we begin to see a decline in user awareness.

While media is an important and vital way to obtain information, there is a clear disconnect between what we are told versus what we actually see. Busari is addressing the fallacy of blindly accepting stories and posing that users today must take the time to check their sources and ask tough questions as a way to avoid calamitous effects. Busari explains that there were Nigerians in power that “told us that the story of the Chibok girls was a hoax” and allowed this narrative to pass through the people and as a result halted the search for these girls entirely for two years (Busari 01:41). In allowing this hoax narrative to persist, Busari sees the “deadly danger of fake news” and the harm of spreading stories that haven’t been checked or proven (Busari 04:26). If the story had been checked, or the people took the time to check the facts of the story then maybe the girls would have been saved much earlier. Busari makes claims on society through the statement of mothers who told her “If these were the daughters of the rich and the powerful, they would have been found much earlier”, as this is usually the way society deals in media regarding things of this nature. Busari’s passionate fury is an appropriate retort to the harmful nature of what the media portrays in addition to what society portrays. Busari says “I think everybody here [has] a role to play…We are the ones who share the content…We're

all publishers, and we have responsibility” (Busari 04:26), posing to the audience that their decisions matter and depending on what they decide, the world they live in can become a very different place and it is the job of the consumer to make the change they want to see. In Busari’s final paragraph, she says, “…Some of us don't even read beyond headlines before we share stories… But what if we stopped taking information that we discover at face value?” (Busari 05:29) Asking this question could make the reader begin to question how they have assessed information and could begin to make them wonder how they will in the future.
Media is an amazing tool that allows society to understand many things, but leaves room for incorrect or blatantly false stories. It is then the job of the society in which these false stories propagate to address and check the legitimacy of the stories. The story of the Chibok girls is one that has been debated multiple times across nations, being called a hoax by many people. Through the work of people like Stephanie Busari, however, the hoax narrative was challenged and disproven by checking the facts and looking beyond what is spread in the everyday media.