“Fake News” is the new byword populating recent newsfeeds and headlines. Here is a step-by-step guide to avoiding so-called “fake news”

Step One: Don’t be fed. Dig for the information that you need to know.

The best way to ensure you see every story along with all the facts is to understand how you are getting your news. Search engines will give you stuff that it knows will interest you. Most will give you relevant topics based on your search history. Fix that. Go through your settings and do not let the internet filter out reality. For example, social media is based on a web of connections among people you add, follow, like, or friend. This means that if you only get your news from your Facebook feed, then you are isolating yourself from potentially relevant details of an event (or the actual event itself). Understanding your very small world, and not looking outside of it, prevents you from growing as a person. Put effort into stepping outside of your usual 10-mile radius. It is not easy, but it is well worth it.

Another way to get accurate information is to use more than one source. Getting updates from your social media is helpful, but relying on only one source can cause problems. CNN, Fox News, Huffington Post, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, The Economist, etc. all have social media pages of their own. Just as having only one friend would make it harder to find someone to tell you the truth, having one source makes it harder to find factual information. Not everybody will tell you your haircut blows, and not every source has the right information.

Step Two: Don’t assume things are okay.

This week my American Studies professor went off on a tangent and mentioned Syria. He brought up the fact that “Syria’s back in the news”. Things in Syria have not been okay in a long time. Their civil war began in 2011, and it is still raging on. Never assume that when the media stops reporting, the problem must be solved. News agencies often do not provide updates about an ongoing problem unless something out of the norm is going on. This means that if things are bad, and they remain bad for several years, you will not receive many updates. The news naturally gravitates to what is “exciting” and “breaking”. Do not fall into the trap of only understanding what is popular, understand what is important.

People seem to get into this dangerous habit of trying to fix things too quickly. People like to think that things are okay and things are back to normal. We know that wars do not fix themselves overnight, yet we are willing to have someone tell us that everything is okay. Or even worse, we just assume that is what happens when most of the world’s mosques are currently intact.

Step Three: Focus

… or at least understand when you are not focused. There is a reason that we can still remember the murder (and the name) of a certain zoo animal from a year ago but cannot quite remember what city in the Middle East got bombed last week. It is so much easier to be “in the know” about what is popular, what people are talking about, and what is being made into a meme, than to really care about what is going on in our world. I am not saying do not be up to date on the newest memes. I am simply saying that along with that, learn about the big stuff. Learn about the things outside of what you are living with. Understand why things are the way they are, put effort into listening to people with different views than you, and do not let yourself become lazy and simply know what is popular.

To quote Martin Luther King Jr., “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever effects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

In short, just because something is not happening to you, does not mean it does not matter. Caring takes energy and hard-work. But it is worth it. Things outside of ourselves matter. We all know this. Let this be reflected in the issues we study, the people we talk to, and the things we know. That way we will not have to rely on the internet to tell us what to think. We will all be a little closer to thinking for ourselves, and about others.