As are all social media apps. I am a social media addict. I watch stupid cat videos, rage with others about the state of America, follow recipes I’ll never make (my cooking is a hazard), and watch tons of those AITA videos. It’s either a good time or a long descent into madness and despair. And of course, I see tons of news type headlines. According to Pew Research on the subject, a full 54% of adults get news from social media. FIFTY-FOUR PERCENT. Some of these people are getting news from Nextdoor and if yours is anything like mine, it is a terrifying place where people go to wonder, to the public, if people should be allowed to play music with their car windows open. In my honest opinion, the self-reported 54% is probably low.
What the research doesn’t tell us is what people do with the information they find on social media. Our carefully curated pages are designed to serve us up with the content we are most likely to engage with. For most of us, this is an echo chamber of what we already WANT to be true. So we really shouldn’t take it at face value. Let’s go on a terrible journey together of something I saw on my Insta yesterday.
Look at this photo:
Horrible. Not a good look by any means. And of course I think he’s basically scummy so in my mind this tracks. His personal opinions over the last few years on Twitter (because I’m not calling it X) have more or less confirmed that. At least in my opinion. The problem is that I could probably find photos of every single public figure in a similar position if I went frame by frame. My social media is feeding me something that confirmed my pre-existing bias. DON’T PANIC. My point is that I went and found the video. Go ahead and give it a Google. And make sure it’s like a legit source and not like TrumpyTearsRTasty.com. This is a situation where you needed the context to confirm that, yes, we totally saw that. Was it painful to give him the benefit of the doubt? Yes. Was it necessary are part of a healthy media diet? Yes. Verifying this stuff is basically broccoli, or whatever food you hate, but is good for you. God, I hate broccoli.
Social media companies exist to make money. And sell all of your data to China. And the US. Don’t think our country doesn’t get in on the action. Some of them have a very real agenda to push as well and don’t particularly give a shit if that agenda aligns with reality. We all have to live in this world together and I can’t stand it if we don’t at least attempt to prevent some 1984 type reality-is-what-the-government-tells-you-it-is nonsense. Love the book, don’t want to live it. (This is why The Handmaid’s Tale is still sitting on my shelf. Far too real for me right now.)
Where do we go from here? So much nonsense, garbage, bullshit, comes across your eyes every single day. It is maddening. We are truly living in the information age and that information has gone bad. It’s so easy to fall for. That Politician you hate actually runs a secret baby fight ring? Of course they do. You knew it all along. They seemed like they had the blood, sweat, and tears of newborns on their suits. But pull back a bit. Maybe laugh at the mildly hilarious thought of non-mobile babies fighting for supremacy by…IDK cooing at each other, but realize that unless you can really, REALLY, verify it, there are probably no baby fight rings. This is how a non-insignificant portion of the populus came to believe that people were drinking baby blood to stay young when, I mean, come on. One, those people don’t exactly look like they found the secret to youth and two, everyone knows it is unicorns that bring about immortality. John Hopkins’s University has some great information about identifying propaganda and misinformation that might be helpful. Also, if coloring is more your style, I found quite a few things aimed at the grade school set that might interest you.
Next, grab yourself a newspaper if you can. Shudder. I don’t mean, like, a paper one. How do you fold that? I’d have to wake up 45 minutes earlier just to deal with the logistics. No, no, they are online and even in apps now! All we have to do is click a different app to doom scroll. Yay! Now I’m not saying newspapers don’t have a bias. I don’t read Breitbart for a reason. There might be more disinformation there than on Twitter. AllSides is a website that evaluates news sources based on their bias. I’d stay away from the outside columns generally. You can check out the methodology on their site, but I’ve considered them accurate in their assessments.
Also just, read a lot. Readers have improved empathy, reasoning skills, vocabularies, and I might be stretching with this one but bullshit meters. We can recognize an unreliable narrator. I’d go with a trust but verify approach on that one, but I’m just saying be skeptical of the main characters.
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