Lies, damn lies and social media

Photo by Jesper Sehested on Flickr

In my last post I outlined some of the issues and challenges of deceptive online content. Bad content arrives because it has been promoted through social media company commercial algorithms, or it is made visible on our personal timelines by well-meaning (but incredibly naive) friends and family members (see above). Either way, the irritating regularity with with we are exposed to this turgid tide of trash has driven many people away from social media use. People are closing down and deleting their accounts, and they are not coming back.

86 per cent of respondents in a recent Ipsos poll admitted that they had been taken in by at least one item of fake news on Facebook. And 75 per cent believed that social media companies were a leading source for their distrust in the internet, surpassed only by cybercriminals. From the patently ridiculous 'Donald Trump ends school shootings by banning school', through to the embarrassingly bizarre 'Woman sues Samsung for $1.8M after cellphone gets stuck in her vagina', we are bombarded by fake news.

I've said this before, but its always worth repeating: We all need to be more careful what we click on, and who we follow and interact with online. The essential digital literacy of being able to discern good content from bad will become ever more important as the deluge of deceiving dross increases. Knowing how to filter it out, block and eventually eliminate it from our timelines may be our only hope of staying sane in an increasingly crazy digital world.

With that in mind, here are five questions you can ask yourself when checking whether content is fake or real:

1) Who is the author of the article. Are they a legitimate writer, journalist, academic? What is their track record with other articles? Are they credible? Are they actually real?
2) What is the source of the article? Find the original source - website, social media feed. Are there contact details, and is the a particular mission statement or ethos of the organisation or individual?
3) What's behind the headline or picture? They may be deliberately misleading just to get you to click on the link.
4) What is the date of publication? Is it current, or is it out of date? Reposting and sharing old news can be a faux pas.
5) How does the story check out against fact checking sites like Snopes or Full Fact?


Lies, damn lies and social media by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted by Steve Wheeler from Learning with e's