Please Check Your News

 Hallo! I hope if you’re reading this that you came through Hurricane/Tropical Storm Ian okay, and can go out for a nice dinner or something.

I recently re-read The Sandman, Volume 6: Fables & Reflections and guess what! I still like it very much. I’m currently reading another Redwall book, and after that I think I’ll finish the Inheritance Cycle. I’m playing the “Iki Island” expansion for Ghost of Tsushima (the Eagle in Jin’s head will not shut up). After that I should be able to finally get to “Forgotten Saga” and “Tombs of the Fallen” on Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.

Also! Probably not best to play PS4 when there’s a risk of power going out.

Today we’re not going to talk about fiction! Or rather, I suppose we are, when we’re talking about misinformation, but not, like, novels and television and stuff.

I am BEGGING You to Not Get Your News from Social Media

This is on my mind because there was a Tumblr post floating around in my circle which said something like, “I know Tumblr isn’t the best way to receive news, but it’s the funniest.” And this is a joke, whatever, haha, but a Tumblr friend I know shared it and put in the tags a comment along the lines of “Tumblr is how I get ALL my news, lol.”

No. Please, no. I am begging you not to do this: not with Tumblr, not with Facebook, not with YouTube, or Twitter, or whatever social media or blogging website you use. Please do not use these to get your news. If it leads you to new information, fine, but please please please do not look at a headline on social media, or even just look at a headline, and take that as news to share and act on without investigating further.

[In hindsight, the revelation that she got news exclusively through Tumblr actually made a lot of horrific sense. Your experience on Tumblr is almost entirely self-curated–unlike Facebook or others, which gives you a lot of suggested ads and pages on your feed based off of what it thinks you would or should like.]

I remember a few years ago when a Facebook friend railing about some new law (we’re not going to get bogged down on which law it was) and how it was going to cause this problem, something I’d seen a lot of headlines panicking over. And I had to point out that in the bill itself, no, that’s not what was going to be enacted–or at least, not what’s in the text of the law. I understand, of course, that sometimes laws have effects that are not intended or not explicit in their writing, and that’s important to talk about too, but what I was seeing was blind rage not over the law itself which was being enacted, but over what she’d been told to be upset about by a headline.

And even worse, more and more recently I’m seeing people worked up over headlines of things that weren’t even close to true to begin with. The one that sticks with me is a post on Tumblr claiming a government official was forced to resign for taking bribes for such-and-such cause, and that proves that such-and-such corporation has world governments in their pockets–only, when I looked into it, that official resigned because she was caught in an affair with another politician, and that connection influenced a lot of her political decisions, so she was deemed corrupt for completely different reasons. This was a public scandal! You just plug in this politician’s name into a search engine and you’ll find the real answer!

“But I don’t trust the mainstream news!” Look, we know that the news is a business that will gladly sell us BS to get us to watch or click. That’s not okay! This weird idea that non-right wing news is immune to spouting nonsense has come in because people think they have to pick a side in every single aspect of the Culture Wars, but it’s stupid. Yes, CNN will mislead you. But that sure as heck doesn’t mean you start getting your news from sketchy conspiracy theory websites who are happy to emphasize the worst possibilities, if not spread outright lies, in order to get you to click and share those lies because you’re mad about it.

“I don’t trust CNN/FOX News/CBS/NPR!” Fine! Then look at the sources for everything! If you’re going to say, “I question what I’m told,” apply that to non-traditional news sources as well. Look and see what everyone is saying, or at least get several samples so you feel as if you have a better picture of the truth from several angles. If you don’t trust any of the news sources, research the information for yourself! If you can, that is–obviously you’re not going to be able to interview people in regards to developing stories like disasters, but if you think a story is misleading about a historical figure, a lawmaker, a philosophical or theological subject, you CAN find that information with very little effort.

Again, I promise you that 80% of the people who tell you “I don’t blindly believe what I’m told like everyone else, I question things,” are just blindly believing what they’re told, but from a non-traditional source. Maybe it’s InfoWars, maybe it’s Graham Hancock, maybe it’s friggin’ Zeitgeist: The Movie. I guarantee you it’s probably going to be nonsensical.

More and more headlines are being written to get a reaction from the viewer, and so many people on social media aren’t reacting to what’s actually happening, they’re reacting to someone reacting to a headline that they saw, and it’s likely no one in that chain is actually aware of what happened or the context of it. Especially because social media is designed to cater to your interest and views, to surround yourself with like-minded people. So we get these weird echo chambers where you’re being fed things that reinforce what you already think and don’t question it online. 

For instance, there was a post about how the city of New York was planning on taking down the statue of Teddy Roosevelt in front of the American Museum of Natural History, and this caused rage because don’t people know all he did for the National Park Service? None of these angry people mentioned the statue’s design, or, I bet, stopped to look at the statue in question, which is, at best, racially insensitive, and discuss why it was slated for removal.

And this is how you get weird shiz like right-wing people lionizing Elon Musk of all people (???) as a champion of free speech and standing up to globalism, and left-wing people declaring that they think black anti-racist activist Daryl Davis is a white supremacist.

I am honestly begging you to look at news from a variety of sources, justs make sure they’re people who are tethered to reality, make sure you’re not just reading headlines, and please, please, I am pleading you to not just look at a headline and go off angry about it, sharing it with all of your friends as something to be upset about. I’m not much of an advocate of the “Angry gets s*** done,” school of thought, but even if I was, could you at least be angry about the truth, rather than what was fed to you for the purpose of clicks and shares?

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