Social media has been around for a while and as much as we love seeing pictures of Aunt Diane's cat for the 75th time, it has also become a place where people share whatever opinion they want and especially so on the topic of politics. Politics is ingrained in many facets of our everyday life, everything from cartoons for children to the way we dress a cat can be and has been political at some point.
The worst part about this funny topic is that the image above, all those topics, can be made political and we all know someone who could do that easily. With everyone at home due to Covid these posts are much more frequent and in some cases tiresome. With misinformation at an all time high many people are sharing posts and articles without reading them or researching their validity. I have personally seen many posts where people have shared an article and only reacted to the headline which in turn is usually contrary to the to the article as headlines are designed as clickbait to make people read and now people are doing the exact opposite. With this in mind we get down to the difference between fact and conspiracy theory. After the debacle that was the 2016 election many social media sites brought in fact checking to help stop the spread of misinformation and help people distinguish the difference between real facts and someone else opinion.
Now of course this is not the end that most people thought it would be, the first thing that happened with this is people began to call the fact checking a conspiracy to prevent "the truth" because we all know people dont like to be told they are wrong and so the thought process begins "im not wrong they are!". Now that being said a lot of these post shares are all malicious in their intent some are just sensationalist and people see them on a news headline and immediately believe them as fact without reading the article critically and social media sites bringing in fact checking is an attempt to promote media and information literacy. Social media is in itself addicting, many people are looking at notifications for one site or another. According to Peter Pomerantsev, the author of the book This Is Not Propaganda, which details a number of information and influence operations on social media. "So many studies have shown people can be super-educated and super-critically minded and ignore any evidence that goes against their identity," Pomerantsev says. "People will be very critical when they see something they don't like, and then they switch off their critical faculties when it agrees with their worldviews." and so when people see these fact checks pop up and say the the information in the article they shared is incorrect, of course they are going to disagree with it. Just like when people were up in arms over the fact that president Trump had a fact check notice on a tweet he made in may. Along with the fact that almost every social media company is pushing voting whenever you log or roughly every three posts as you scroll your site of choice. Even TikTok known for its dances and voice overs has gotten in on the political spectrum this year. It is harder to fact check videos on TikTok because of the way the platform is made but Youtube on the other hand, being a big hotbed for misinformation, has added fact checking to some of its videos. Twitter and Facebook even went as far as to say that if any candidates tried to declare a victory early that they would sanction them. That of course was followed by Trump tweeting they "were up big" and that the left was "trying to steal the election" which then got hidden by Twitter for breaking their Civic Integrity policy. Trump would later go on to live stream himself saying that they won the election, despite that many places were still counting votes, and this information of course was written in articles and shared abundantly so that many thought he was indeed the winner before all the votes were counted. The spread of misinformation through social media is a tough nut to crack, but as long as the vast majority stay vigilant and read and research before sharing we can help stop the spread.
Comments
Post a Comment