How to Identify and Not Fall Victim to Fake News

The first amendment gives us the power to endlessly express ourselves. We live in an unprecedented time where ‘freedom of speech’ is synonymous with ‘freedom of reach’. The ability to express ourselves HOWEVER we want through speech and social media has allowed America to (slowly but surely) become one of the most progressive nations of all time. With abundant positivity, there is inevitablly going to be a dark side to this amendment — in terms of social media, that dark side is fake news.

Fake news is often times indistinguishable from real news and the majority of America lacks the means to decipher what is real and what is fake. Government intervention gets a bit tricky when it comes to fake news because censorship is as facist as Stalin and we hate facism here in America. My ultimate goal with Medium.com is to spread awareness of how the next generation is being set up for failure due to the unregulated social media use. A huge part of this failure is definitely the plethora of fake news circulating the web as we speak.

There are many reasons one would spread fake news but the reason doesn’t matter, all that matters is that we have the ability to identify it and move past it with ease. For this, we need to take a look at a couple key differences between real, credible news and fake, embellished news.

Fake news is typically emotionally charged with little to no evidence to back it up. When you go out into the ocean of news, be sure to keep a sharp eye out for evidence — anything that supports the claim with facts. I understand that our feeds are engineered to produce anything that will keep your attention, so it is important to channel a little bit of willpower if you’re reading something for information. We just need to learn to be a little more critical when browsing the web.

Obviously, we don’t have the time to go through the billions of search results in order to decipher whats really going on from an unbiased standpoint so we have to learn not to believe the first thing we read on a specific topic. Chances are, its better to be dubious even if it’s something you want to believe. We take in information based on what we want to believe rather than throwing away our bias for a little handy-dandy reasearch, simply because its easier.

There is a man by the name of Daniel Schmachtenberger who is on a mission to do the heavy research for us. A mission to provide the public with a database for what’s really going on in the world. A mission to dissolve the polarization caused by feeds that double down on one’s innate opinions. He and his teams provide incredible details about their articles as well as a complex breakdown of how their team chose this specific piece of news to share. This project is know as The Consilience Project — keep an eye out for it this year.

Sure, a lack of evidence in an emotionally moving piece (specifically ones that target negative emotions) is a good sign of fake or biased news, but lets simplify it even more. Keep an eye out for more credible Top Level-Domains (TDLs) such as .edu or .gov.

These are educational or government-run websites, meaning their information will be more carefully selected and relevant than those commercial, .com , sites. Pretty easy huh?

Also, it is a great idea to listen to the opinions of a plethora of thought leaders. Its important to be able to take in tons of different opinions and use them to form your own. So, for example, I challenge you to listen to someone on the far left AND someone on the far right speak about a topic you’re passionte about. Don’t make it political. You may choose a side at first because, as humans, thats a natural occurence but try to fight it and truly listen to both of their points. You don’t have to agree with any of it if you don’t want to but it’s extremely importantnot to discredit one’s ideas without trying to understand them first.

The idea of critical thinking seems exhaustive and daunting to many people but if you do what I described in the paragraph above, you’ll beworking out your brain just like a muscle. You’ll be beefing up your critical thinking skills just by being more open-minded!