After my initial blog post on this subject, I decided to put my action plan to the test. I have a friend from high school who is a huge culprit of sharing news stories of a political party that are not always fully true. I decided to private message this person and just start a simple conversation on one of his posts. After some time, I very nicely stated that some things in this particular article are not necessarily true. Of course I was met with backlash but then I sent the article from Forbes that I discussed in my other post. Although the article was not about proving him wrong, he did state that it opened his eyes to the idea that fake news being spread could be dangerous. This person did not take down the post that seemed to have some fake aspects to it but we were able to have a really great conversation on fake news and why its so dangerous.
I’m not sure if I have cured this person from his fake news sharing tendencies but I do believe I opened his eyes to why fake news is dangerous. He and I had a great conversation about the topic and I got to see his perspective on things. Although I don’t agree with has previous posts, he hasn’t reposted anything fake since the discussion so I will be interested to see if the content he shares now will have been somewhat fact checked.
