This message showed up in my family text group back in March. I called it out as disinformation maybe seeded by someone outside the country and was called to task for embarrassing the sender (more) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/us/politics/coronavirus-china-disinformation.html

I often tell people that they have to act like fact-checkers in their own social media community. In reality this is hard. You become the downer, the person who is always complaining or embarrassing people. Why does it matter people ask.

Another example was a fake letter purportedly written a famous mogul. Who cares who wrote it I was asked again. And this is the point - we have now become accustomed to not caring where something comes from, or who wrote it if it makes us feel good or aligns with our politics.

At the root of this is a complete breakdown of trust. Some trust that an anonymous message sent through text or WhatsApp from a friend or family MORE than reading something in an article that has been fact checked and has editors.

This is impossible to battle. At this moment even basic science is being disputed during a pandemic. And our divisions are being exploited. Please, be careful what you share.

And I’ll end by saying I get why this happens. This is a way of us feeling connected. And I’m more aware of disinformation because of my job. I’m not smarter. But we all need to be careful.