Two weeks ago, the residents of Hawaii spent 38 minutes expecting to die. They were told – via text – that a ballistic missile was streaking toward them.
Last week, a North Vancouver man was told to pay the Canada Revenue Agency $3,000 in bitcoin. He paid. On Wednesday, a Facebook user announced that our sister newspaper, the Victoria Times Colonist, was about to close.
For the record: the Times Colonist isn’t closing, the North Vancouver man was duped by a scam artist (CRA does not yet accept cryptocurrency), and there was no missile heading to Hawaii.
The Hawaii incident is particularly revealing because the scare would have ended earlier if not for one crucial detail: the governor forgot his Twitter password.
The editor-in-chief at the Victoria Times Colonist did try to squeeze the breath out of the closure rumour by commenting on Facebook. He was blocked.
There was a time when even the most determined liar could only stretch the truth as fast as his lips could move. But in our age of social and anti-social media, every deceiver, prankster and befuddled commenter with a Wi-Fi connection can distort, antagonize and flat-out lie at a speed the imagination cannot hold.
At their most coordinated, these lies can shift the pillars of democracy. We note that Facebook finally admitted they were “far too slow to recognize” interference during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
And now Facebook is changing its algorithms to give real news, and local news, a bit of a higher profile in our “news” feeds. But Facebook can’t force feed us and our Facebook “friends” reality. Let’s face it – if we all want to just see cat videos and remain blissfully unaware of how the other half of the world lives, we’ll find a way to do it.
And we won’t be able to blame Russia. The vast majority of folks are feasting on the cotton candy of information available online without any urging from Russian trolls and agents.
Often we’d simply prefer not to know the truth behind things. The fact is that it’s up to us – not Facebook – to support the truth and get off of the Facebook fast-food assembly line.
If we’re going to stop social media from fomenting a golden age of yellow journalism, we all need to usher in a culture of skepticism, reserving judgment, and thinking before we click.
Regardless of political affiliation, we all need to subscribe to one policy: honesty.
