Is Everything You Read Online True?

CHECK IT OUT
My cousin recently received an email from a ‘friend’ touting a particular extreme political point (makes no difference for this essay whether it was extreme right or extreme left). She questioned the accuracy and asked her daughter who is computer/internet savvy to check it out for her. The truth was the incident touted as true was a parody of a prominent politician and had no basis in fact or fiction. So her daughter wrote her back the following which is right on point for all of us.

Truth, fiction, and social media
For what it’s worth, here are a few of my observations and thoughts on this subject:

Many people my age and older seem to have a difficult time distinguishing truth from fiction when it comes in the form of a Facebook post or a viral email. Perhaps that’s because we grew up listening to Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley, or reading the newspaper. We weren’t bombarded by a plethora of news sources, some of which have ideological or entertainment objectives rather than journalistic ones. Oh, we knew that the stories in the “National Enquirer” were not to be believed, and we knew that there was a difference between news stories (just the facts, ma’am) and editorials (opinion pieces promoting a particular point of view) But this kind of discernment doesn’t seem to have carried over into the Information Age.

I am constantly amazed and appalled at the kinds of things I see posted on Facebook and forwarded to me by email. Most often these deal with politics, religious, ethnic, or cultural groups, or topics related to science and health. I’m amazed of the credulousness of people who pass on satire pieces, thinking they are factual…or who submit photo shopped pictures, or videos of speeches cut-and-pasted into something unrecognizable from the original. People who believe everything they see, hear, or read must live in a frightening, chaotic world. That’s bad enough, but they also seem compelled to try and suck others into their alternate universes. My younger friends (not all, but many of them) seem to be more discerning. Those who came of age in the 21st century grew up using the Internet, and learned how to evaluate online sources in school. If they pass on a satire piece, they generally know that it isn’t true and usually pass it on because they think it’s funny.

And now for my thoughts:
1. Don’t believe everything you see.
2. Consider the source. Who is saying this, and what reason might they have for saying it? Go to the “about” tab of the home page hosting the article in question and see what it says.
3. Be aware of your own confirmation bias…the tendency to believe something if it seems to confirm what you already think, and the tendency to discount something that goes against what you already think.
4. Go to the main site the article came from, and look at the headlines for the other articles listed there. From those, you should be able to tell if a site is satirical in nature, or has a particular ideological bias.
5. Google keywords from the article in question. Sometimes it is helpful to add “snopes” to the keywords as that will very quickly pull up a fact-checking article from there. Try to find articles on the subject expressing a different point of view. On topics you know to be controversial, if there’s only one point of view, that’s a red flag.
6. The comments following an article can be very illuminating. Are they full of spelling and grammatical mistakes? Contain personal attacks? Express only agreement with the article? Those are red flags. If, on the other hand you find a variety of thoughtfully-written viewpoints which express differences politely, that’s a good sign to me.

Having done all that, you should have a good idea about whether what you are reading is something you should believe and/or pass on to others. If you don’t have time to fact check something before passing it on, don’t do it. It should be the person on the sending end who does the fact checking, not the person on the receiving end. If I invite someone over for dinner and serve them mushrooms, it’s not my guests’ responsibility to make sure they aren’t the poisonous kind. It’s my responsibility to purchase the mushrooms from a grocery store or other reputable source, not serve up something that popped up in my yard or something I found mushroom-hunting on the dark fringes of the forest.

If you know something false or misleading and you pass it on anyway, I have a problem with that, and won’t think very much of you. The majority of religious and secular philosophies have some version of “thou shalt not bear false witness”, and for good reason. Passing on something you know to be false in an attempt to convert someone else to your way of thinking, particularly the inflammatory, fear-mongering, mudslinging stuff…that’s morally wrong. Just because you didn’t set fire to your neighbor’s house doesn’t mean it’s okay to throw gasoline on it.