The Importance of Media Literacy

Learn to fact-check everything you read online.

There was a Medium article out a few weeks ago in which the author (Sorry, I can’t remember their name) talked about how we are in not one but two pandemics. You know one of them, but the other is the Pandemic of the mind. Of how our brains are duped into believing anything written or shown on the internet. Part of that problem is that we are not media illiterate as we think we are.

It is not just Qanon that is at fault here. There is another issue at play, and I’ll explain it to you in more detail.

Before this Pandemic, I used to work for radio. So I spoke with one news reporter who blames the current news climate for bipartisan politics.

I’ll explain bipartisan politics through history. Before the 1990s, every media outlet did not have one particular side to a political debate. They were always in the middle of the divide wanting us consumers to make up our own minds.

That was until conservative Rush Limbaugh came along, and then political bipartisanship became a part of all media outlets because of who owns them. You all know what political party everyone at Fox believes in. They are not the only ones.

So it’s not up to you anymore to make your decision on a hot topic anymore.

This is why some people don’t trust traditional media and go to the internet for their news.

But there is more …

If you live in Canada or the U.K., you probably remember this commercial from mediasmart.org.uk or mediasmart.ca from about 20 years ago:

I know that the Canadian one has recently updated that commercial to this:

For this pandemic in that other article, the biggest problem is that we are all not media literate. We believe whatever is on the internet because we think that everything there has been researched before we read it. This is how easily we are all fooled.

This has happened to me too. I have gotten the Facebook warning a few times that whatever information that I shared was fake.

The last one that I can remember was a meme saying that Monsanto products are now banned in a couple of European countries. Someone on my friend’s list posted it, and I shared it. But, unfortunately, I do have friends and family in one of those countries that flagged it as fake news. And I got the blame for it. But I decided to delete that from my posts.

How Can We Make Sure that Everything that We See, Hear, and Read is True?

I am happy to do this for you so that you can find out for yourself. But, mind you, you do have to do the work yourself. You can’t just sit there expecting whatever you consume online to be true. You, too, have to do your research on any topic.

Don’t worry, I have some suggestions for you, and you don’t have to do these steps in order or all of them either. By the way, I am asking you to do something that reporters do before airing their story on the news, called Fact-Checking.

What is Fact-Checking?

It is a way for us to find out if the factual information we are reading is fake or not before we publish or post it on Social Media.

And there are six ways that we can make sure that the information that we read online is accurate. But, again, you don’t have to follow all these ways in order. If you find the fact fake in the first suggestion, it will be fake in all the other ones.

The first step is to use google to see if the information is correct.

From two personal experiences, I did this myself. First, whenever I read of a celebrity’s death on Facebook, I use Google to ensure that the info is correct.

There was one time that my mother said that she heard that Boy George was dead. I checked on Google, and he is alive and well. So that is confirmed to be false.

A few months ago, I walked around the grocery store while waiting on my meds in the pharmacy and following Covid protocol. Then, without a face mask, a woman barged in, yelling “99.9 PERCENT SURVIVAL RATE!!” as she went up to the pharmacy (I didn’t know what happened to her after that). But I did write 99.9 percent survival rate in the google search bar, and most blogs and articles mentioned that this was a meme going around on social media and not to believe that.

If you see questionable information shared by one of your friends and family, the second thing you should do is to ask them where they got that information. They might say that someone else shared it with them or that they got it from a website. If they did get it from the website, see if the site is a reputable one. Say, if the information came from the Wall Street Journal or a conversation on Reddit, for example.

You might also want to look at who the author is of that article. For example, say if they are a doctor on WebMD, what kind of doctor are they?

You might want to check below the article for where they got their research from. Here’s an example of below one of my articles called Kids and Covid:

The third is that you should use fact-checking tools. These are tools that you can find online like Snopes.com, Hoaxy, FactChecking.org, and more. It is to see if the information that you are inquiring about is debunked.

When I was researching this article, I found another exciting and exciting fact-checking tool that you can use. It’s from Google called The Fact Check Toolbox. I did test it out by typing Covid-19 Vaccine, and here are two of many items that I found:

There are more articles that I couldn’t show, that Google searches that debunk these Covid rumors. And by the way, when you do the same search, there will be new information that will either be true, false, or misleading.

Fifth is to verify these sources that you found on Google or on other search engines.

And finally, to check other sources on the web to see if they debunked it.

It sounds Like Too Much Work to do a Fact-Check.

I know this sounds like work, but you can’t just read and believe in anything written on the internet. I mean that there are thousands of facts about something like weight loss; you can’t just try something only to figure out later that it is just another fad diet.

But you do have to do the leg work to find accurate information so that you can make an educated and informed choice on your own.

Conclusion.

There will always be fake news everywhere. People who have never learned to check their facts will believe in whatever outlandish things are out there on the world wide web. All you have to do is research to see if the information is accurate. That’s all there is to it.

For more information on how to become media literate, there is some more linked for you to click on:

The Frustrations of Starting Your Freelancing Business.

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