Hey You! Yes, You!! You’re in the War!!!

I’ve unintentionally shared fake news. The odds are pretty high you have, too. it’s embarrassing, annoying, and uncomfortable. We are in a war and if you are on social media, you are almost certainly a combatant. Russia attacked our 2016 presidential election. Investigations into how the American public was manipulated by Russian cyber strategies report that evoking “outrage” was the easiest and most effective  avenue for spreading disinformation designed to influence elections and to destabilize our nation. On Facebook, Twitter or whatever other media platform you use, it’s easy to share outrage with the click of a button. Right now, there is a lot to be outraged about, but when outrage is whipped up artificially it becomes a weapon. I’m easily outraged, so today I remind myself and encourage all of us to beware of  manipulation. It is one thing to be outraged over actual injustices. It is another to become a tool of a hostile government in a cyber war on our democracy.

Outrage is a powerful tool because it heats up our emotions while simultaneously shutting down our thinking. We feel emotions faster than we think thoughts and our emotions will then color how we process the information as we read it. It requires mature intentions to reign in our emotional impulses and think. It doesn’t matter how intelligent we are or what our political perspective is, we can be had. Outrage arises out of a sense that our values are being violated. The more fundamental those values are to our identity, the more outrage we feel. Also, it feels good and moral to call it out. Sometimes it is, and that is why outrage is a useful part of our emotional repertoire. It also makes us vulnerable to manipulation with lies or twisted facts. This happens on both the political left and right, in sermons, in commercials, in the news, and most especially on social media. We are fed a constant diet of outrage that is turning us into a frightened, angry, and even violent nation.

What can we do? You can, of course, decide just to turn it all off, ignore everything and go about your life. At times, that’s absolutely the right thing to do, but in a democracy, we have an obligation to participate at least in voting. Responsible participation requires that we spend some time getting informed. Perhaps in times of personal crisis we can ignore the world, it is not a wise overall strategy because then our world will be shaped by those who count on our cynicism, ignorance, or non-participation.

To get informed, here are some useful questions about what we’re ingesting on social media:

1. Is it verifiable that what I’m reading really happened? According to Business Insider in 2019 the top 100 false stories were viewed over 150 million times on social media. That’s about the number of registered voters in the U.S. Out of that Top 100, her are a few from the 2019 Top 10 most-shared “fake news” stories:
   • “AOC (Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] proposed a motorcycle ban. (It didn’t happen.) – 6100 shares
   • “Joe Biden called Trump supporters ‘dregs of society.’” (He didn’t.) – 9500 shares
   • [Congresswoman] “Ilhan Omar Holding Secret Fundraisers With Islamic Groups Tied to Terror” (Never happened.) 14,000 shares
   • “Nancy Pelosi diverting Social Security money for impeachment inquiry.” (No, she wasn’t and didn’t.) – 29,000 shares
   • “Trumps grandfather was a pimp and tax evader, and his father belonged to the KKK” (Neither is true.) #1  (156,000 shares)

Each of these stories are meant to provoke outrage in a segment of the population. Seven of the top 10 most shared false news stories intended to outrage Trump supporters, but the most shared one promoted outrage among Trump’s more liberal opponents.

2. Do I find this outrageous? Just because a story riles me up does not make it false, but it is every reason to slow down and double-check the story. Is the source relatively unbiased? If you’re not sure, you can check where the media source falls on a continuum of skewed Left to Right, and Less Reliable to More Reliable by clicking here.

3. Can I find this story with similar details on news sites rated as “reliable”? Reading the same story on a couple of different sites with different skews can help you both know more about the story and begin to determine which sites are skewed which direction.

4. Does the headline use words like “destroyed” or “explosive”. Does the language in the article use language like “BLM terrorists” or “conservative idiots”? All such language communicates a bias and simultaneously inflames outrage in the intended audience.

Outrage is easy, skews our thinking, and influences our votes based on false information. Thinking is harder, but the more discerning we become the less likely we are to be unintentionally drafted into a cyber war against our own country.

Be careful out there. AB