It happens to the best of us. A sensational headline rears its ugly head on your Timeline, you click through, and within a couple of paragraphs, the outrage boils over.
“LOOK AT THIS SHIT!”
You proclaim on Twitter, slamming that Retweet button, righteousness flowing through your veins…Until a friend politely clues you in,
“Dude, this is from 2016.”
Even the most socially active and morally aligned people among us still fall victim to clickbait traps. While most of us are savvy enough to avoid obvious low-quality sources with links like “obamadid911.com”, poor spelling and grammar, and 1990’s site design, source-checking in the 2020’s needs to go a bit deeper than that.
Give these four points a check before you hit “Share”:
- Is the content you’re sharing recent? Is it relating to the same current event? During the 2020 protests, many people were sharing shocking, upsetting, funny videos of interactions between police and protestors. Lots of videos, from both sides, were actually footage from earlier protests or completely unrelated events. Some of them weren’t even in the country. While protest footage from something like Ferguson could still be very relevant, we have to be careful how we’re labeling these things, as opponents of progress will happily jump on any examples of misinformation to discredit every-freaking-thing you say.
- Has the issue been resolved already? This is a huge one with animal abuse videos; people get their hearts shattered watching a disgusting animal abuse video and reflex share the link in order to raise awareness right away – not realizing that the animal has already been rescued, or the perpetrators already arrested. Save your friends the mental scarring and google the latest news about the case before you share.
- Is there actually relevant information or is it just filler text and a bunch of ads? For the sake of your own and everyone else’s time, give an article a quick scroll and ensure there’s actually something there other than endless weird banner ads. Sometimes websites will use a paragraph or less of filler text in order to create a shareable post for social media, but any kind of facts or data are completely missing.
- Is it from a Russian meme farm? Liberals and progressives like to assume Moscow is only targeting the other side and the boomers; they’re wrong. Check the source of the meme and make sure it doesn’t seem like a shoddy, rapidly put together “meme page”, likely started by a very low-paid troll farm worker. Are most of the memes posted in the middle of the night, around Moscow’s working hours? There’s your answer.
We live in an age of misinformation and information overload. The powers in control of our modern information channels have already said they don’t plan to do much about it. If we want to be heard; if we want to point our efforts, then we need to be sure we’re not wasting our own time or our own credibility, and contributing towards the ever-shrinking pool of truth out there on the web.
And just in case you’re wondering…no, I am not a Russian troll farm. Share away.
