MISinformation

There’s are many things I dislike, among them; when men wear v-neck t-shirts, humidity, being said I “look like” any and every bald, white male celebrity.

Similarly, but limited to things that truly irk me, are occurrences I would place in the category of hate. At the top of these, is when I see people being bilked into believing that something is true, when it simply isn’t.

Truth be told, there’s been a lot of commotion about fake news lately. You all know where that came from, and so I will not spend time or precious words delving into that again.*

What I will say is I feel bad for anyone that gets convinced into believing outright falsehoods or half truths, just because the read a compelling post in their Facebook news feed.

I say this not as a Republican, not as a Democrat either. The only agenda I have is to help people do more to think for themselves. Therefore, I can freely say EVERYTHING in media has a slant to it. Every news agency, radio station, website, television network, blog (uh oh) has an angle. If that angle isn’t politically motivated, you can bet it’s motivated by something else; sales, donations, clicks, emotional response, or some other form of attention.  

I was moved to write about this today when I saw, more than one Facebook contact post the below. Essentially, it’s a post trying to fuel the flames of anti-refugee rhetoric via social media. As you might’ve guessed by now it’s not true, Snopes did a piece on this very thing back in 2015 (with an update in 2016), you can read it here. Note, that Snopes hasn’t called out this particular use of this post (at least as of my writing), but you’ll notice the pictures are recycled from the stories labeled as false on their previous reports.

Which brings me to my next point, think critically - what might the poster or originator of these types of items get out of you “liking”, or otherwise circulating their post? If you can answer that question without any skepticism, good for you. If not, I would suggest following some of the steps used to evaluate peer reviewed literature. Cornell University (which I have never attended) has a great guide available here, that can be applied to just about any item or source.

I’d also like to state that what bothers me most about these types of posts are the unfounded prejudices they perpetuate, and the dividing lines they are clearly attempting to draw. Let me also remind you that  ALL of us are in this together.

To conclude, if you are so inclined, you can choose to be republican, you can choose to be democrat, but please don’t choose to be ignorant.