by Joelle Steele
The widespread use of social media formats for information is an amazing phenomenon. We can find out what our friends and family are doing on a daily basis. We can see what’s going on in the political arena every day. We can see what’s going on all over the world instantly, as it is happening.
While social media has the potential to do all of these things, the reality is that the majority of people who look at their feeds in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc., are not critical thinkers. They read only the surface post, believe it to be true, and completely ignore articles that are attached or linked to the post. Many posts are just “grabbers,” somewhat sensationalized statements that are not exactly true. In fact, many of the “facts” in these kinds of posts are not sourced (cited). That’s because some can be amazingly inaccurate. The grabber is meant to lead you to a hyperlinked article on the poster’s website. Grabbers are rarely factual, and if you do click and go to the poster’s website, you will probably find an article that is mostly composed of misinformation (false or inaccurate information) or disinformation (deliberate and often malicious misinformation). Or, you might just hit the “like” icon and move on to the next post in your news feed.
But that’s a mistake. Liking a post without reading the article is just what the people who post these grabbers want. Liking their posts is not the same as liking the message in the article. But, those kinds of likes still lend strength to that message, whatever it is. It helps them prove that what they say in the post and the article is being supported. This perpetuates misinformation and disinformation across the broad social media platforms until enough people believe it to be true. This can ultimately lead to a plethora of conspiracy theories and to people making all kinds of decisions based on shallow claims that are not fact-based. The bottom line: Read the article, or ignore it and don’t “like” it.
When you do read the article behind the post, use the guidelines in the previous article about researching online to help you determine the credibility of the author and the accuracy of the information. One way to help you with determining accuracy is to use a service such as Newsguard. They do the fact-checking for you, and they put a small green shield next to the sites that come up in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) that they deem as reliable sources because they meet Newsguard’s high criteria for accuracy.
