Bam. A shocking event, bordering on scandalous, happens. Mere minutes later, your lock screen in your smartphone starts lighting up with adrenalized headlines that pop up one after another. Or you check social media and the lines between what is real and opinion start to blur as your naïve mind tries to stitch together what happened, but nothing seems wholly truthful, but nothing seems quite like a lie.

In a world where almost all the commodities of the modern era, such as social media, online shopping, and flying, are made to fit the accelerated lifestyle of the average American, speed is always favored. This is especially true when it comes to the whirlwind that is the world of online news.

For example, moments later after the Parkland school shooting in Florida, eye-catching headlines started to appear, each one more unsound than the next. In some news outlets, the shooter was an extreme leftist. In others, he was a violent anarchist. Finally, some pinpointed him as a member of the terrorist group, ISIS. This all became visible to the public before Nikolas Cruz's name was released as the culprit.

In another occurrence, during the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, social media conspiracy theories filled the landscape, many users believing that they were true. For example, in one, the Boston Globe, a newspaper based in (you guessed it) Boston, was presumed t tweet about the explosions before it happened. However, in a debunking, the tweet times always match the time zone in which the account is reading in, offering an explanation for the discrepancy. In another outlandish theory, memorial pages for the bombings were created too soon. But it just so happens that in Facebook, users can choose the date in which their page was founded

Though this is only two events, they are part of a vast collection, almost endless, as the majority of the new sources are unable to get rid of the bias that is and will probably be ever-present. Especially in the modern 21st century where the promptness is prized far more favorably than accuracy, as seen throughout various posts of miscellaneous events, so take a step back and try to analyze the whole affair with impartial eyes.

Now, I'm not asking you to go off the grid and become one with nature. Rather, I'm asking you, as a reader, to be aware of the role you play in the flawed internet-based world of news. This digitization has ruined the way the world processes news, allowing us to find ourselves trapped in a door-less chamber where the bias of the news outlets is inescapable. Or our vision is warped, much like the way a funhouse mirror does, letting us be poisoned by the point of view in each news outlet like the liberal New York Times or the conservative Fox News. Not to mention that in a social media each event comes from someone else's viewpoint, blinding you from your own.

Though this is scary, there are ways to avoid artifice of the online news outlets, like making sure you don't read incidents the moment they happen. This will make life easier for you in the long-run, allowing the detection of the bias and actual fake news easier than it would have been if you had read it right away as many news sources would have corrected mistakes that might have gotten published. Despite the fact that you might see news a day old, you will be better informed as the amount of misinformation you receive will be minimalized.

So, please stop checking news the moment they come out, that way diminishing false information that is seen and read. Aside from that, another way would be to stop believing everything read on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter as this will lower your stress levels by making the world more manageable by lowerung the amount of information you're getting and will make you better informed, permitting you to form your own opinions, free of the bias found in news.