“Fake News” the catch cry of the day. “I saw it on Facebook” a motto of a generation. The unprecedented amount of information at our fingertips should make us more informed. Instead, it offers a minefield of misinformation and a plethora of kooks claiming to be professionals who spent $9 for an online course and printed a certificate at home.
Were you one of the 10 million plus youtube viewers who saw the girl casually snowboarding whilst, unbeknownst to her, a bear chased her?
Did you laugh at the boyfriend’s reaction before sharing the video of the girl almost hit by lightning in Sydney (language warning)?
But did you share the news article explaining how the Woolshed Co created these viral (read ‘fake’) videos as part of a two year social experiment? Probably not.
But what is the big deal? The videos were funny and no one was hurt.
The point, however, is not just that we had the wool pulled over our eyes, rather, these fake viral videos highlight a larger issue with online “information”.
Queensland parliament recently debated, and changed their abortion laws. The “news” spread quickly that it would allow women to abort their baby at 22 weeks’ gestation. Those who opposed the changes used it as proof that abortion is a legal form of infanticide. But, if you dig past the flurry of quickly shared, poorly researched articles designed to whip up public outrage, the facts and statistics paint a much calmer, realistic picture. This is when misinformation, fake news and constructed outrage becomes dangerous.
The sheer amount of information online enables us to cherry pick the information that agrees with our already established world views. If you firmly believe, for example, that you are what you eat, it is easy to ignore the concept of “correlation does not equal causation”.
We readily spurt the ‘fact’ smoking causes cancer. Except for the passionate smoker, who knows of a long list of people who smoked since their early teens, and died in their sleep in their 80s or 90s.
Michael Pollan,a well-known, published author and professor at UC Berkeley, shares some reliable information on diet and health. His overall message seems to be “cook it yourself, from scratch and you’re good to go”. Sage advice. He is also behind the now viral video espousing the dangers of McDonald’s French fries.
Through their own admission, McDonald’s sell french fries with 19 ingredients. The premise of the video, (made by Pollan, a professor of Journalism) is that the pesticide, methamidophos, commonly known as monitor, is about to kill us because it is used on McDonald's potatoes. But...this information is no longer true, nor was it true in 2014, when the video was published. Methamidophos has not been used in the USA since 2009.
Who is willing to fact check everything they see online? Who will spend the 30 plus minutes watching the entire video (with an opening sound byte from Sir David Attenborough for added ethos) then spend another 10 minutes googling? But you feel like Pollan’s information is validated because of all the shares and media attention it received.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with viewing and sharing interesting articles and videos online. In a world of too much information, it is so important that we acknowledge the internet is a mind field of useful and useless content. We need to expose ourselves and our children to world news, become skeptics, even cynics of the information we absorb everyday and ensure we have a balanced view of the world. And know that what we hold to be true, is only one study, one conspiracy theory, one viral video away from being disproved. Or at the very least, heavily scrutinised.
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