Social media is making misinformation believable

“There’s just no way Helen Keller could have been real.”

 Shock filled my face like it never had before. The people around me? Unfazed. 

These words weren’t from strangers online or conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, they were from my very own friends. Hearing them made a cut in my soul, not because I’ve never heard of it, but because I didn’t expect to hear something like this from the people I surround myself with.

Whether they know it or not, social media has not only exposed my friends to the conspiracy theory pipeline, but everyone in our digital society has too.

The days following the attempted shooting of President Trump, people and friends around me were spreading theories that it was all staged, despite the real people in the crowd who were actually murdered by the shooter.

Even trying to correct people like this is difficult, considering that they fully believe the things they see and hear on the internet, and a whole digital world of people are willing to back their beliefs if they look hard enough.

This makes it clear that in this new age of social media, conspiracy theories are no longer esoteric. They are being normalized, all to achieve the goal of shocking people into a like, comment, or follow. The worst part? It’s working. 

As teenagers and even younger kids, we have shortened attention spans. That makes the appeal of things like TikTok and Instagram that have a platform full of instantaneous dopamine to be the first thing they use when they eat, sleep, and wake up in the morning. This makes it easy to “doomscroll” and come across news media and other events. Yet, we forget social media is not as veracious as we would like it to be. 

Fact checking takes too much time and energy, even though it’s just a simple search. It takes 20 seconds to fact check and make a Google search, but it takes less than a thought to scroll with ignorant bliss.

This begs the question: how can we stop ourselves from becoming our own conspiracy theorists?

Yes, of course the answer is fact check. However, it’s unrealistic to expect the growing tech-dependent society to rip their melting faces away from something as captivating as a TikTok video.

Instead, considering the heavy amounts of media we consume in a day, it’s much easier to visualize the reality of making sure any news or shocking things we see online are from somewhere reliable, or with a blue check on a news source. This way, you know that it is already fact checked so you don’t have to do all of the heavy lifting. 

You may think that this doesn’t apply to you, or that you’ve just never really seen any conspiracies online, but I implore you to ask yourself, when was the last time you fact checked? Even if you think you have, the micro-media we consume will always have discrepancies, and your awareness is only step one.