Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites have become an integral part of our daily communication. These websites have been useful for keeping family and friends keeping each other updated on their lives as well as allowing people to conduct businesses. But over the last decade, politics have invaded social media, especially in the last five years.
And, to say the least, it has brought out the worst of people.
For many people, it can be annoying when the group of people you follow is always bombarding your news feed with posts dealing with major issues going on in the White House or around the country. Whether it has something to due with gun laws, abortion, terrorism, etc., someone always has something to say. Next thing you know, a comment war breaks out between friends and family, and more often than not, it gets nasty.
Political posts mocking people for their views can people can get annoying, but what I notice about is that people seem to enjoy attacking others through memes they find on politically-based pages they follow. These memes often make inflammatory comments about Democrats, Republicans, or whatever group they're targeting, and if the user agrees with it, they hit that "share" button and it becomes part of your news feed.
This leads me to a question: are they fact-checking these memes?
More than not, they don't, and that's because they choose to use these pages as their news source. People are quick to dismiss anything negative news about their political party and anything positive about the opposing party, but when they read a meme on Facebook that sounds convenient, they do not hesitate to sharing it on their news feed in hopes of getting reactions out of others. These same memes will later be found on fact-checking websites like Snopes and Politifact and labeled "false."
In short words, they are fake news.
Facebook and Twitter are not reliable news sources, and memes users share on the news feed are very ill sources for educating yourself on the events going on around the world. People can say anything they want on social media regardless of whether it's true or not, and it is easy for people to get mislead into believing as it as the truth. As a result, their opinions become based on not facts but by misconceptions. Fake news has indeed become a problem in the media today and played a factor increasing the political division in our country. Little do many know, when they use social media to spread memes and unchecked articles, they are actually contributing to fake news.
There is a way to combat this, and it can start by doing extensive research rather than relying on biased political pages. Rather than sharing a meme on your news feed, take some time to fact-check it before you hit that "share" button, or better yet, find a reliable news article. While politics on social media can get annoying, it's only more troubling when people share nonsense posts without doing any sort of research. Indeed, the media is the problem, and we should be fighting the problem, not becoming part of it.
