You children, don’t put your lips on that!
by Tom Sullivan
Good advice for 2020. Not a resolution, exactly, but some decent advice for those who remember 2016 too well. From the “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on” Department, Farhad Manjoo offers some tips in a New York Times op-ed for surviving 2020 in the disinformation age. Here’s a key one:
Virality is a red flag. Suspect it.
If I were king of the internet, I would impose an ironclad rule: No one is allowed to share any piece of content without waiting a day to think it over.
People who should have known better shared a lot of misinformation/disinformation during the 2016 campaign. We know now about Russian trolls, ads purchased through phony Facebook accounts, and fake news from Macedonia. Facebook became so toxic it was something to avoid. Political discussions on social media? Don’t have political discussions on social media.
The 2016 item I remember best was a viral post about Hillary Clinton’s joint fundraising agreements with states. It arrived via a sibling. The author was an actress from the 1970s and 80s who I’d last heard about when she had a psychotic break in 1996. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she went on to become a mental health advocate. (She took her own life in 2018.) The detailed post purported to document the ways in which Hillary Clinton had bought the loyalties of the DNC and state party organizations. And maybe it did. But in the Internet Age what the lengthy post did not do was provide a single hyperlink to original source material. That should have been a red flag. But it confirmed what people already believed and that made it shareable.
But knowing what we know now about 2016 (to quote the sage), “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?”
Manjoo continues:
Social networks and even governments are looking into ways to curb viral misinformation, but this fight will define our age. The root of the problem is that humans are weak, gullible dolts; every day many of us, even people who should know better — folks with fancy jobs and blue check marks next to our handles — keep falling for online hoaxes. Virality hijacks our better instincts, and because so many of the internet’s business models benefit from instant popularity, there’s a great deal of money and power riding on our failings.
There is only one long-term fix: that a critical number of us alter how we approach viral content. Let’s all consciously embark on a mind-set shift. In 2020, question anything that everyone’s talking about, especially if it fits all your priors, or there’s some kind of ad money involved. (Hint: There’s always ad money involved.) If you can’t stop sharing, at least slow your roll. The stakes are enormous; there’s no room for error. Strive to be better, please.
Good advice. In a world where Don LaFontaine could declare “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” critical thinking skills are neither held in high regard nor taught. Even people whose judgment is generally reliable screw up. One “bit” of mine is to loudly poke a finger at someone’s chest and declare, “Oh, yeah? Well I’m not as smart as I think I am!”