Lately, we hear more and more about the so-called fake news flooding the information space. Let’s try to understand how to navigate the news flow correctly and how to distinguish fake news from real ones.
It’s advisable to also inform your children and elderly parents about all of this, as they are the most vulnerable to this kind of dangerous information. AdmiGram.com will tell you how to save your time and shield yourself from information garbage.
How to protect yourself from fake news
What are fake news?
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Fake news is the intentional deception of the audience or the pollution of the media space with the aim of gaining a certain benefit. Fake news, as a phenomenon, did not emerge just now. The history of their emergence dates back to the early days of tabloid press. What can you do when society has always been thirsty for sensations, scandals, and revelations.
In our time, when anyone can contribute to shaping the information space, the share of useless information and fake news is trying to reach its potential peak. Useless, false, and deliberately untruthful information not only steals our time but can also shape a false understanding of certain events and distort reality.
What sets news apart from nonsense?
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Remember the joke about the first rule of journalism (the first rule of journalism: no one needs the truth, the crowd thirsts for sensations)? Well, news is an event that has already occurred with a well-established set of attributes (the time something happened, the people involved, events, the main plot of what happened).
News worth your attention will never contain elements of emotional coloring because their purpose is to convey information to you, not to evoke emotional reactions. So, the more sensational, opinionated, and emotionally charged an information source is, the less worthy of your attention it is.
Engage critical thinking
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If you consider yourself a reasonable person, you have every right to question any information you interact with. Every news item or event has a cause-and-effect relationship and is closely connected to the real world. So, if something sounds or looks strange, not quite logical, or excessively idealistic, you have every reason to doubt its truth.
Honest news always presents information to you as transparent and tangible as possible. Honest news always relies on specific, comprehensible facts and evidence that you can easily verify to ensure their reliability. If you feel that something is amiss with the news, don’t hesitate to engage your own critical thinking and fact-check the information.
Filter your information sources
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Hundreds of TV channels and countless news websites battle for your attention every day, employing all means and methods. If you genuinely want to shield yourself from fake news, start by filtering your information sources.
If it’s the internet, never click on article headlines from news aggregators and social media news feeds. Restrict your information space to a couple of well-established websites and read the news only there. If it’s TV, ruthlessly remove television channels that deliver informational garbage to your screen.
What is information and informational garbage?
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Information can be useful or useless. Useful information aligns with your interests and fulfills your informational expectations. It’s not always pleasant or straightforward, but it’s always concise, comprehensive, and to the point. Moreover, it’s honest. In other words, it’s like a school textbook that helps you understand something.
Useless information or informational garbage is a kind of ‘informational sludge’ with the sole purpose of keeping you glued to the screen. It barely answers your questions and is incredibly time-consuming. Essentially, useless information isn’t presented to you as an answer but as emotional discussion or aimless contemplation of an issue. It’s like grandma’s gossip, lacking any specificity.
Don’t allow yourself to be deceived
Lately, various methods (clickbait, watchbait, scrollbait) for grabbing your attention are increasingly used in the media. In essence, these methods aren’t geared towards conveying something objectively and honestly to you; they merely aim to entice you into consuming the content. Do you really need that content? Well, that’s something none of them bother asking you about.
In summary, establish a trust index, a critical point for yourself regarding your information sources. How often has the resource misled your expectations and what did it use to capture your attention? If you find that you’re misled too frequently, ask yourself whether it’s worth trusting those sources at all. Perhaps it’s even worth parting ways with them?
image on top: Fran Jacquier / Unsplash
