With lots of social media posts and a stream of 24-hour news, it’s hard to understand what news is real and what isn’t. Checking social media for the latest news is easy, but social media is for connection, not reliable political news.
Many of us rely on social media platforms as a news source because we’re lazy about researching important issues and events ourselves. We simply don’t care enough to diligently research political news ourselves. Instead, we rely heavily on what we see on social media because we assume that if someone published information about an issue, it’s true.
We skim and post inaccurate articles because nothing on Facebook can ever be wrong, right?
Unfortunately,fake news is a real problem, and the bigger issue is that people genuinely believe everything that they read. They think that a friend of a friend of a friend’s random political post will give them the full scope of the story.
As a society, we desperately need to hold ourselves to a higher standard in terms of checking our news sources. We need to treat our news the same way that we’d treat a job opportunity or a health concern. Research topics thoroughly on your own, then decide what to do next. If we’re so diligent about making informed decisions in other parts of our lives, why don’t we work hard to find accurate news articles, too?
Getting your news from “Fakebook” may seem easy, but it doesn’t allow you to form your own opinions about the issues at hand.
When you share something just because it seems to align with your personal beliefs, you can easily spread potentially false information without realizing it at an extremely quick rate.
So the next time you see a juicy political article on social media, do yourself a favor before you post it, do your part, and do the necessary research on the issue first If you can spend hours mindlessly scrolling through social media, you can spend a few minutes per day researching issues that will impact the world. After all, we have enough fake news in the world, so it’s time to stick to the real issues.
Photo by Matthew Guay on Unsplash
