Teaching Fake News

[BmorePat87]

(02-03-2020, 09:46 AM)Benton Wrote: If only adults would do that.

I'm of the growing opinion the world would be a better place without social media. It's too easy for someone to get fooled, but that's especially true of the dumb or lazy.

Absolutely we would be better off without it. The first issue is that people only read headlines. The second is that seeing something visually (meme, link, video, etc) makes them believe that it acts as authoritative evidence. The third issue, and this is not unique to social media, is the tendency to dismiss evidence that does not fit our worldview. Rather than adjusting our worldview to fit the facts, we find a way to write off the facts to maintain our worldview. 

Social media exacerbates the problem and allows it to have an incredibly wide audience in an incredible short period of time. It's also completely inorganic, as we can see with what Russia did.