FAKE news has been crowding out the real thing ever since social media became a news distributor. This is all the more so when disaster strikes.

The most blatant example of this was on display when the OceanGate Expeditions' Titan submersible, with five tourists and crew members, lost contact during a dive to view the wreckage of the Titanic. A rescue mission was launched by the United States Coast Guard (USCG), but found no survivors. It was later revealed by the USCG that all onboard the Titan died in a mysterious implosion.

On June 25, 2023, one fake content creator seized the opportunity to make money by broadcasting an audio recording of screams on TikTok, claiming the cries of distress were from the victims calling for help. Except that they weren't. As Reuters later fact-checked, the screams were actually extracted from a video game called Five Nights at Freddy's. Within days, the TikTok audio attracted about five million viewers. Weeks later, it hit 20 million views. The content creator walked away with millions, courtesy of social media owners and advertisers, caring little for the tragedy that the family of the victims was going through.

When a massive earthquake hit Turkiye and Syria in 2023, killing more than 51,000 people, greedy content creators were busy uploading videos of old disasters, such as those in Japan and Greenland. Again, like in the case of the Titan tragedy, fake content creators were claiming the videos to be real-time footage, Reuters reported.

More recently, when tragedy struck nearer home in Myanmar on March 28, fake content creators were hard at work again. For weeks, they were uploading bogus videos after the 7.7 quake hit Mandalay. Most of them were not shot in Myanmar but in Syria and Malaysia, reports say.

Is there ever a way to stop these fraudsters? Yes, there is. But first, the nature of the profiteering game. It is a game of three players: the fraudulent content creators, the advertisers who incentivise them, and social platform companies that provide the sites for the content creators.

Start with the fraudsters. So long as the fraudsters are able to monetise their content, they will never stop. If media reports are right, content creators and social platforms last year shared US$26.28 billion in advertising revenues between them. What it means is this: curbing fake content is more the job of the advertisers and social media platforms.

Several studies by universities in the United States say that many advertisers are placing their ads unwittingly on fake content sites, thereby monetising them. They need to be more responsible. If they care for their brands, they will.

Of the three, the social platform companies, which together control cyberspace, have the greatest influence in curbing fake content. All are saying that they are doing their best to remove fake content, but the reality is many fake news and bogus videos get through.

Social platforms must do more in making it difficult for fraudsters to place their bogus content on their sites. Search engines can help, too. If they can block billions of "bad ads", they sure can block bogus content.