By Adriana Mann
Almost every college student has had moments where they’ve seen posts on social media about issues such as endangered species, food recalls, virus outbreaks, etc., taken a minute to process, and scrolled without a second thought. Most of them don’t verify all the information they see, because why would they? It’s not like every post on social media is meant to persuade you. They’re simple posts about important issues, yes, but not persuasive ones. There’s no reason to think a TikTok would lie about Monarch butterflies going extinct, but what if there is?
I saw a post about species that would go extinct by 2030, and one of those was Monarch butterflies. I digested the information and scrolled without a second thought. A few videos later, I saw in the comment section of a video where a kid falls on a Monarch butterfly that there are only 100 left in the world. This confused me. I knew from the post I saw that they’re going extinct, but 100 seems like an incredibly low amount. Lo and behold, I looked it up, and there are more than 21 million left in the world. The question is, why lie?
Misinformation spread through social media is something everyone has encountered in their lifetime, whether it’s about politics or something as random as Monarch butterflies. There are multiple reasons why misinformation is running rampant, but the main blame falls on the content creators who post the lies. A survey by UNESCO suggests that 62% of digital content creators don’t thoroughly fact-check their information before posting. Additionally, 42% said they used the number of likes and shares a post received to determine its reliability. Not only is this an alarming amount, but it suggests a decline in media literacy.
Media literacy, simply put, is the ability to analyze and evaluate information found through media to determine its credibility. As evidenced through social media posts and comments, media literacy has significantly declined. Cybersecurity expert Brett Cruz found that “more than half of social media users who share news or political posts sometimes do so without verifying the facts.” Many people blindly endorse things they see on social media without doing their research, spreading the fake-news like wildfire. Fact-checking may seem like a thing of the past, but it doesn’t have to be.
Fact-checking has been proven to significantly reduce how much we believe misinformation. Verifying what we see on social media gives us the tools to stop misinformation from spreading through shares, reposts, comment sections, etc. Society is already losing the skill to judge a source’s credibility, leading to deep divides on topics like the Lindsey Clancy trial, politics, and environmental debates. If we want to keep media literacy and civility alive, then it’s up to us to educate ourselves and others.
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