When it comes to having family members sharing dubious information, my grandfather is known for it in my family. Whether it is sending Facebook posts or tweets that you can clearly tell are not credible, that’s what he does. Now he is older in age, but that does not give him an excuse to be sharing unreliable news.
This is kind of a sticky situation to solve. Personally, none of my family members myself included wanted to hurt his feelings or upset him. However, it was a talk that needed to happen because as a journalism student, one thing I cannot stand is fake news.
When I decided to finally talk to him about it, I made sure to come from a very understanding angle. I told him he should only be sharing things that he knows for a fact to be accurate. Sharing fake/ unreliable news is not okay and he should no be okay with sharing it.
He told me that “he usually only reads the headlines,” he does not even read the article majority of the time. Some headlines can be very misleading without reading the article. When dealing with this issue I believe the best solution to the problem is to throughly read the story. If you believe that something doesn’t add up or it doesn’t make sense then do not share it.
It is very important for your family members to know when you share this type of imformation, you could be causing other people to start to believe it. That is why the best solution is to not overshare. It is better to be more careful and undershare news than to overshare news that is not true.
We know that this will continue to happen because of the amount of information we have at our finger tips. However, if everyone learns to only share information they would be okay with putting their name on like they wrote it, then it will help stop the sharing of unreliable news. This is a hard topic to bring up with your family members but if you come from a very understanding view and simply state how sharing untruthful news has a negative impact then they should not be upset.
The sharing of false or misleading information on social media is something that everyone needs to stop and it is our role to imform people of ways to help counteract it.
