Just who can we Trust?!

Just who can we Trust?!

Recently it was announced on Facebook that users will start receiving a notification whenever they share or post fake news.

This phenomenon of propaganda is not new, although it got much more traction due to social media and its spreading power. However, now we seem to have more trouble figuring out just what is true, or pertinent though not mainstream. Media companies and journalists have agendas, and their news stories are spun according to proprietors, political inclinations, disinformation, and sometimes just the laziness of copy/paste without at least double source checking. Again this is nothing new; it's just business as usual. It is accepted albeit not the most ethical enterprise. 

However, things begin to have a different tone when we are faced with a global pandemic that brings out the above mentioned phenomena and exposes the worst aspects of who we are. We are desperate, we are angry, we are vulnerable, we are in search for an objective explanation and we are in a hurry. Compromised that we become, we then stop caring where a story comes from, and what was a need for an explanation, transforms into a perpetuation of bias or creed or institutional disbelief. And we share it.

We keep our online friends "informed" but we hardly to our homework around what we share and for those of us who try, it sometimes feels like an impossible task, since the algorithm of our search engine is already oblique, for lack of a better word. 

The job of real information has to start with the writers. There should be no need for fact checking published stories. It is somewhat disgraceful that news need to be fact checked because they aren't fact based. The narratives that are upheld supersede the facts, and we the public, fall into judge a book by its tainted cover. And we share it.

Furthermore when did Facebook become the judge of what is or isn't fake news? Does anyone know their methodology? or agenda or ideology? It is extremely hard to accept at face value that social media companies are impartial and impervious to bias. Yet they are the gatekeepers of the current flow of information. They are the virtual space where all kinds of news converge and we have no idea what they consider true or fake. Will information be suppressed or will Facebook protect us from idiocy? I hope the latter but I think the former.