Tag Archives: fake news

Strange days indeed

Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Strange days indeed — strange days indeed

Everybody’s runnin’ and no one makes a move.

~ John Lennon

If you go back to the end of 2019 and made predictions of the future, there’s no way you would imagine the situation we are in. Imagine going back in time 5 years and taking a newspaper with you. Let’s make that 50 years, and describe something as ‘simple’ as a cell phone.

I remember seeing this commercial and marvelling at what people would have thought to hear such a prediction.

I’ve been humbled by world events recently. I tend to be someone who is confident about my opinion but I don’t feel like I can talk with any sort of authority about what the world will look like in six months. I have no idea where we will be in the fight to contain Covid-19? I don’t know what school will look like on a day-to-day basis? I couldn’t intelligently guess who will win the US federal election?

I read news articles and they are filled with bias. I often fact check things before I share them. I actually spend time calling out friends when they share misinformation. I see clever, comedic articles like this:

And I wonder just how many people will share them, thinking they are real?

There are days when news seems more fiction than reality. I foolishly thought that in the Information Age, the information available would be accurate. I think it’s funny that people used to worry about Wikipedia being inaccurate, and now it’s the first place I go to confirm facts. I didn’t think I’d regularly use Snopes to fact check articles before sharing them. I didn’t think people of authority would call news they didn’t like fake, and that I’d consider major news agencies propaganda pushers. I didn’t think science would take a back seat to bizarre, unfounded theories. If you went back in time a decade and played a clip like this one, nobody would believe this is anything more than comedy… Pure satire.

These are very strange days indeed… and I don’t see them getting less strange any time soon.

Down the rabbit hole

The afternoon I went down a very dark rabbit hole. First I read a tweet from an influential twitter profile that grossly miss-communicated some data comparing the flu to COVID-19, making it look like this coronavirus was only a threat to those over the age of 60. This tweet went to her 2.2 million followers. Then I went to another public figure’s tweet that was very controversial and did something I almost never do, I went to the tweet and read the conversation/reply thread that followed. Wow. I remember now why I don’t usually do this.

It was dark. It showed the bipolar divide that I spoke about in my post, Ideas on a Spectrum. It was nasty, it was mean, it was ignorant, it was a complete waste of my time. It achieved nothing. Not for me, not for anyone that commented. The lines were drawn and both sides could only preach to their side.

I’m glad that this isn’t my typical experience on Twitter. I’m sorry for those that spend a lot of time in this sad, angry space on both Twitter and Facebook. I’ll happily go back to my world of educators geeking out, sharing, and learning on Twitter… and I’ll stay there for a while. A word of advice as we spend more time at home, more connected than usual to news and our social streams: Keep away from the rabbit holes and check your sources for news and for click-bait headlines.

A while back I wrote about a new tragedy of the commons. In this post I said,

Indeed we have a new, social-emotional, tragedy of the commons. Despite our understanding that perpetuating the onslaught of negative news is, ‘contrary to [our] long-term best interests’, we still do it. And social media isn’t making things any better. We used to be able to blame the media monopolies and moguls, but now we are the news-makers: We publish freely, and quickly and without thought as to how we are part of the problem.

We don’t need to feed this negative loop, and we don’t need to feed on it either.