Recently, I’ve accepted the role as the Public Relations Director of the Arizona Chapter for Yang2020 presidential campaign. With this, I will be handling an array of duties, one of which is to ensure quality information gets placed in the Yang 2020 presidential page.
With this mission in mind, I filter through popularly news article that dissimmnate into the campaign page. One struck my eye.
An article with the title: Millions Are Registering Democrat Just For Andrew Yang.
That would be great news! But it sounded way too good to be true, and the article had several misgivings.
One, the article was clearly an opinion piece but not labelled as such.
Two, it doesn’t provide any source that backs up the claim in the article. Even more so, it doesn’t even mention these millions that are registering once in the body of the article.
To me, this was enough to categorize it as misleading, if not totally fabricated. So, I sent the following message to Victoria Papaioannou, whom first shared the article.
“Hey Victoria, I love that you are sharing Yang content, and you seem to be sharing a lot of quality content about Andrew. However, I’d be cautious posting stories like the one from the Incomer. The article doesn’t link to sources that support the conclusion, and I think if this is true, we’ll find an article with better data for it! #Yang2020 #HumanityFirst”
I linking the approach from the Grandmother Problem and Yang’s message of Humanity First.
First, by approaching with respect and recognizing her worth as a member of our group.
Then, without placing blame on her, explaining the problem with this specific article she shared.
Lastly, ending with an opportunity to share better content.
I thought this message was well done, and usually the #YangGang responds aptly and with kindness in my experience. Yet, I never got a response back!
Searching through her feed again I couldn’t find the shared article, so maybe she deleted it without comment. Either way, I will be using the approaches described in the Grandmother Problem to help fight fake news for the #YangGang!
