Social Media Facts and Fiction Competition
From 23 year FBI veteran, “You don’t need to be a top-notch interrogator to figure out what is going on in someone’s head. The signals are always there–all you need to do is know what to look for.”
Now a days it is much easier to gather information about an individual especially if that individual is active on social media. Lawyers, investigators, potential employers, even marketers, journalists and many other make use of this method to make a profile individuals they are interested in.
I good example of the this is how the FBI use social media to investigate those who participated in the recent capitol riots. They were able not only able to identify the rioters but also gather incriminating evidence in social media. People also use what they saw on social media to report to the FBI incriminating information.
Whenever you engaged in social media you created a digital foot print that may reveal to people a lot of things about you. Take for example Majorie Taylor Greene the new Republican congresswoman from Georgia here previous posting come to haunt her supporting conspiracy theories and advocation execution of leader of the Democratic party.
I have basically stop engaging in political discussion in social media because I find it to be an exercise in futility. I must be honest though I some see postings in Facebook messenger I am just amazed at how many people take all these conspiracy theories as though it is the ultimate arbiter of truth. You find people flouting their credentials claiming to be experts giving information that a flat out wrong. Even as a physician discussing medical issues in social media is more challenging dealing with opinionated people who have read information from pseudo experts. A study was done on accuracy of medical information from 1300 websites and found only 43.5% of these 1300 websites contained recommendations that were in line with the accepted recommendations, while 28.1% contained inaccurate information and 28.4% of the websites were not medically relevant. Out of the 1300 websites identified by the searches, 246 (19%) were retail product review site websites and 250 (19%) were websites associated with specific companies or interest groups.
The sad thing about this is a lot of these sites that promote misinformation are driven by income generated by people who put out the ideas. The amount of audience they have has help them generate income from advertising revenues and also from contributions to the cause. “President Donald Trump and his party raised $207.5 million in a less than three-week stretch after the U.S. election, fueled by outrage-filled solicitations to donors as he waged an unsuccessful challenge of the results.” (Bloomberg)
The problem may be most people have given up on critical thinking and become mere reflectors of other peoples minds. The copy and paste mentality, just focusing defending one side of the narrative that one favors.
An inspiration writer in the late part of the 19th century wrote: “Every human being, created in the image of God, is endowed with a power akin to that of the Creator—individuality, power to think and to do. The men and women in whom this power is developed are those who bear responsibilities, who are leaders in enterprise, and who influence character. It is the work of true education to develop this power, to train young people to be thinkers, and not mere reflectors of other people’s thought. Let students be directed to the sources of truth, to the vast fields opened for research in nature and revelation. Let them contemplate the great facts of duty and destiny, and the mind will expand and strengthened.”
In this day and age of unbridled flood of information and misinformation 24/7 bombarding us it is easy to us to fall prey to being misled if we don’t exercise critical thinking. Fact checking is important. If someone advertises for a product it is important fact check, see consumer reports and reviews. Remember many of endorsers are paid to promote the products and are protected from liability should a problems arise from the product which is a part of their contract. If you want to check one an article just google fact check and the title of the article and most of time you will get a feedback.
Fox News, CNN News and other new outlets have to nurture their base listeners that cater to them who they depend on ratings to generate advertising revenue. Through analytics of one’s internet usage organization like google creates a profile of you and directs their advertising and news release that may attract your attention. They sell these information to companies. Try to do a search for products on google and it won’t be long for you to see those products advertised when you open your Facebook account.
I would be honest with you, I still do political postings on social media but only on twitter because I could directly send it to the political leaders, prime movers and targeted groups by using hashtags. You don’t have deal with long discussions and nasty name calling. I had one time got a threatening reply from a twitter user and I did some research and discovered he was a golf pro somewhere in Texas and a couch of high school golf team. I tweeted him back and wished that his golf team do well in competition and he quit tweeting after that after blowing his cover. In twitter if you do it right you get tens of thousands of interactions whereas on messenger or Facebook just a few. During the time around the elections I had approximately 46,000 interaction in 28 days. That amount would be hard to get using other social media platforms unless you were a celebrity or a national figure.
Social media is fun, informative and engaging on the other hand it could be stressful and time consuming. Let us use it wisely by being in control and being controlled by it.
