Teaching Fake News

[Belsnickel]

(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.

(02-03-2020, 10:02 AM)BmorePat87 Wrote: 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.  

Completely agree about the social media commentary. I used to have two accounts for both Instagram and Twitter. One account was more politics forward, and the other was about my fishing/outdoors excursions. I deleted the accounts that looked at political stuff and only really use the outdoors ones. I also post more personal stuff, like my dog and what not, but I've stopped following political news on social media and I will mute or unfollow people that post a lot of it, from either side.

When stuff is going on I will search out some folks or tags and see what is being said, but I don't follow it all because of how toxic it is. I make it so I have to actively look for it instead of just passively absorbing it all.