Part 1
Oh, boy – where to start with this one?
We've all heard about the problems with living in a social media bubble. Surrounding yourself online with people who share the same points of view as you becomes a dangerous echo chamber. Opinions get amplified, differences get demonized, the way you see the word gets warped, and there will be negative consequences in the "real world."
I want to avoid this. I want to know what people who don't agree with me think. I want to have some sort of balance so I don't lose myself in the echo chamber.
As a result, there are some people who I follow or have befriended on social media who espouse beliefs and ideas that are very different from my own. I have been tempted many, many times over the years to remove them from my feed – and truth be told there have been a few who I did end up deleting because I never really knew too well in real life anyway – but I resist that urge for the most part because I didn't want to be a hypocrite.
These last few days, though, that has been harder and harder!
My basic rule is to not get sucked into "debates" with online "friends" unless what they say is blatantly false about a topic that I have specific knowledge of or they comment on something that I have posted. Both of those things happened the other day.
An old high school acquaintance – I guess I would have called him a friend back when I was 14 and 15, but I haven't seen him in person in almost 30 years – posted comments that were verifiably false about a topic that I happen to know a bit about, teaching.
In doing so, he revealed himself to be astoundingly media illiterate.
Here are some screenshots of one particularly egregious part of our exchange (I've covered names and faces):
The setup is that he thinks schools should reopen at the end of summer because the data about COVID-19 is false. He shared a screenshot of a social media post (in purple) to prove this to me. As one should when presented with questionable information online, I tried to fact-check what he shared.
The image was taken from a fact-checking website that I had never heard of called APF Fact Check. The link he shared was to the screenshot itself, so I went directly to the web site it was taken from to learn more about it. I read the about section, scanned through some of the other articles, and it seemed fairly reasonable – it's run by a French news agency.
I was still skeptical, but before I did some lateral reading, I thought I'd type "cdc covid" into their search engine and see what I'd find. There were over 500 results, but after scrolling through just a few of them, I saw this headline, "CDC does not add flu and pneumonia deaths to COVID-19 toll."
I clicked on the link, briefly scanned the article, and saw the exact image that my friend shared with me. He sent me a screenshot of the very website that debunked the information that the post contained!
I was dumbfounded.
Granted, he didn't take the screenshot himself – it was either sent to him or he took it from someone else's post – but still, how could this guy be so ignorant? I'm feeling self-conscious about sounding overly judgemental, but people, this is ridiculous!
How could an adult, especially one who thinks so highly of himself and his opinions, be so foolish?
He, and many others like him, lacks essential media literacy skills.
It's been a few days and I still haven't received a response from him. In the meantime though, he's posted dozens of more memes and links to articles that he thinks prove his worldview, most of which are either demonstrably false, from dubious sources (no "lamestream media" for that guy), or actually have nothing to do with what he's trying to prove because he does not even bother to read what the article says.
I haven't called him on it yet – I'm sticking to my rules – but I've decided that I need to go on a secret media literacy campaign. I'm certain it won't work. This friend of mine won't change his mind about COVID-19 or racism or police violence or whatever until he or someone he knows experiences it first-hand.
But I'm still going to try to carry out some covert ops. Maybe it will help someone else.
I'll be sharing some updates as I go.
One more thing: earlier today, APF Fact Check updated their story and included the handy image below.
I wonder if that red X would have made my friend question what he read.
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