Process Post: False News

The game telephone is notorious for showing the contortion of information as it gets passed from one person to the next. I believe that social media is our current telephone. As younger demographics tend to watch TV or read the news less, our main outlet to current events is through their publication on social media platforms. Although this is an efficient way in the spread on information, the verification of the spread information is severely lacking. Just as certain news corporations have affiliations and align themselves with a political standing, social media users and profiles do the same, but I believe due to the anonymity of social media, the publishers political affiliations are often forgotten.

As experienced immensely during peak pandemic era, the sharing of infographics that contained tips and statistics with how to avoid catching COVID was everywhere. The issue with these infographics that get reposted, is that the credibility of their information is not verified and therefore leads to the spread of misinformation. As misinformation riddled content gains traction, this content becomes more of a societal truth than an actual fact. It is accepted as true because of it’s scope and mass publication, rather than the credibility of the information within the content. As users we must become more vigilant in becoming our own fact-checkers, rather than be reliant on the fact-checking done my social media corporations.