Growing up, I read the “real facts” on the cap of my Snapple. I loved learning how bees have five eyelids, and I didn’t care where these facts came from. I just liked sharing knowledge. Clearly, nothing has changed. However, there has been one change in our world in the “real facts” we learn every day. It could be as simple as a street closure or as complex as the latest scandal by a politician or celebrity. These topics are brought up in casual conversations and around the dinner table just like anything else.
There are rumors, speculation, hearsay and just flat-out lies; so how do we separate a “real fact” from a factual piece of information? That is the million-dollar question.
We’ve all seen the Facebook accounts riddled with reposts from sources like “my dear friend William Michael,” “America’sPrideofLions” or “helthybodyslimfast.com.” Okay, I made those up, but you know what I mean. The memes might make you laugh and start a conversation, but it’s the “real facts” that are thrown that you have to worry about.
Like it or not, President Trump highlighted this exact issue with his comments about “fake news.” Now, he wasn’t talking about those meme pages. He was talking about historically reputable news sources like The New York Times, CNN, NBC and The Washington Post. These outlets may make factual errors or misprints and aren’t perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but they don’t necessarily hide their bias or mistakes — hence the need for occasional corrections or retractions.
Could your friend William Michael be accurate when he said Au is the symbol on the Periodic Table for gold or “helthybodyslimfast.com” when they say that not smoking can keep you healthy? Sure, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t check those facts for yourself. In fact, you most certainly should because, at the end of the day, it’s all about the clicks and algorithm.
According to tech experts in the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma ” —the ones involved in the creation of the apps we all know and love — our search results, posts we see and connections we make are all curated. So, what if you only saw a politically targeted meme because you live in a so-called “red state”or “blue area code?” Or only could easily find information from non-reputable news sources?
Therein lies the problem with algorithms and how these apps (which most people rely on for their news nowadays) could cause such a huge uproar. That’s how we get situations like what we saw at the Capitol Building, whether we want to admit that or not. Essentially, we are being fed what we already want to believe. It’s not the app’s fault. All it wants is to get you to engage with it. It doesn’t realize that you watched 20 hours of propaganda last week, it sees that you stayed on the app for 20 hours and will recommend more of that content to gratify you.
So, what does that mean for us? How do we avoid this bias from all directions? The short answer is we can’t, but we can work towards the middle ground. By using sites like allsides.com for news from each political leaning or by checking your news sources’ bias, we can find balance in our news cycle and some of the truth behind the “real facts” that we are presented with. By the way, bees do have five eyes, but no eyelids. Go figure.
