Growing up, most of us were taught that sharing is caring. Meaning, sharing your things with others is kind–and we should do that, but not always on social media. I am all for sharing posts about information you think is useful, if that’s your thing, but we have to make sure it comes from a reliable source. We all have family and friends on social media who see something, and get a little too click happy and press that share button right away, because they see something they agree with, and they don’t take the time to look at the sources to make sure they are credible and accurate.
For example, last week I spoke about this article which talked about debunking anti-vaccine misinformation on Twitter. This became worldwide information so fast because people were sharing without even taking the time to see if the information they were reading was a credible source. Because of this worldwide sharing phenomenon of this anti-vaccination information, it created panic and a lot of people had to do a lot of clean up because of it. They are STILL doing clean up because of it; the information is still circulating around. But I will say, after doing research both sides of the party (pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine) are using credible sources for their information and siting those sources in the documents and videos they put out.
Going back to our click happy family, we can help them by informing them of credible sources and using what we know to help them find those credible and reliable sources like newspapers that are based on facts and not opinions, with their sources cited, for example. They could also share blogs they have found while browsing; making sure that they us the same criteria when sharing as they do the news articles. We could do this by sharing articles or pictures on our social media explaining what a credible source is. Like this one (CRAP)
We want to try to make them as informed as possible and when we do that, their readers and followers become more informed and there is less of a chance of “rumors” spreading.
