Ok aliens haven't really invaded earth. But I have a good reason for saying it, I promise.
Social media has become so popular, pretty much every news outlet has a page for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Often times people share news stories to their own personal feeds. But as we've all heard a thousand and one times before, you can't trust everything you read on the internet!
If I had a dollar for every time I heard someone say something along the lines of, "I read on Facebook that..." I'd have many dollars. BBC conducted a study in 2016, finding "51% of people with online access use social media as a news source." And that number is only increasing with every passing year.
Have you heard that Kanye West and Kim Kardashian are getting divorced? After Kanye wore a MAGA hat and met President Trump at the white house, there was a lot of buzz about how Kanye and Kim were getting divorced. To me, the most interesting thing about it is that it's not true. Snopes is a great source for fact checking any and all things you hear on the internet. Here's a link to the Kanye/Kim thing on Snopes.
It doesn't bother me that people use social media as a primary source of news, it bothers me that people take everything they read at face value, without checking sources. I'm willing to bet you didn't click the link to the study I mentioned in the second paragraph. Just the act of providing a link and citing a statistic is enough to lend credibility to an argument. This same principle is applied when reading news on social media. If someone shares a post saying "Aliens invaded earth!" or "Vaccines cause autism!" everyone collectively panics and spreads it like wildfire.
I found a good story on Huffington Post. You can read the whole thing here, but here's the short of it: after the Trayvon Martin shooting, Spike Lee tweeted out George Zimmerman's address to his 500,000 followers, and then they all retweeted it. The problem was, the address was wrong which meant a poor elderly couple was receiving many death threats. Stories like this happen all too often.
I feel that it's worth mentioning that social media didn't create this trend. Everybody remembers hearing rumors in 2nd and 3rd grade. People have spread rumors since the dawn of time. And you'd think that the internet would make it easier for people to debunk rumors. It happens a lot, but not always.
Social media is not a reliable source of news, but neither is any single entity a reliable source of news. If you read something on a blog or on Facebook, do a google search and try to find out whether it's credible or not. Just don't use The Onion as a news source...
As a fun bonus, feel free to share this post on any social media and make a comment about how aliens really are invading. See how many people take it at face value.
Comments