To believe or not to believe

Today, we live in a world more dependent on digital platforms than ever before. Everything an average person requires, from ordering food to finding an emergency doctor, can be done with a few taps on some smart device. The same is also true for information. As an example, a research carried out by the Pew Research Centre found 55 percent of the American adult population to fall in the categories of "often" and "sometimes" with regards to how much they use social media as their source of information. While the exact metric for Bangladesh is not yet established, it is a safe presumption that most of us follow a similar pattern.

The number of Facebook users in Bangladesh registers at somewhere between 25 to 30 million, according to a report published by Digiology in April, 2018. With this increasing reliance on social media posts and pages for information, we now find ourselves in a situation where this reliance has been exploited to no end by entities relying on clickbait and false news as their chosen business model. The question now arises, how do we, the average citizen, know when to believe a particular piece of information?

Before getting to how we can filter the legitimate from the made-up, let's get a better idea of how informative content is often framed and presented on platforms such as Facebook. First and foremost, we have the misleading headlines. Although it is pretty self-explanatory given the widespread use of clickbait tactics these days, it still serves us well to be reminded of how this works.

So many times, we see articles with an extremely eye-catching headline and one that is often a prelude to a sensational new development or discovery. Yet when you delve into the article, you realise that the actual information is not what was advertised. Sometimes the wording of a headline is intentionally obscure, other times it takes a certain incident completely out of context in order to create more intrigue among consumers. A classic example would be an article from the Express that was doing the rounds following the killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. The headline insinuated that Iran had deployed its jets in "Western Skies". Inevitably, this invoked a belief that Iran had infringed on foreign skies, whereas the truth was that the Iranian Air Force had only increased its vigilance along its own western border.

Secondly, another tactic often used by various sites and outlets is the recycling of past content that is somehow relevant to current events. On many occasions, pages will share articles from quite some time back just because something that happened recently can be linked with it. Going back to the Iran-US standoff once more, another news piece doing the rounds was the joint military exercise being conducted by Iran, Russia and China. Instinctively, people jumped to the conclusion that it was in response to the recent escalation and that it underlined Russia and China's willingness to militarily support Iran if a conflict broke out. Except the reality was, this exercise had been conducted months before the Soleimani killing even took place, meaning there was no reactionary element to it whatsoever.     

Now that we have reminded ourselves of the various social media news traps, how do we navigate them? Luckily for us, there are a few clear indicators that can help guide the decision. Most of these are basic criteria that are so obvious that they shouldn't really need any re-introduction, but sadly as a consequence of the short attention span we are willing to dedicate to news content on social media, it often gets lost in the back of our minds.

The first of these is of course the source. It goes without saying that an article from the New York Times comes with a greater assurance of legitimacy compared to one from pleaseshareourstory.com. At this point, I genuinely won't be surprised if the latter somehow does exist. It is also important to know the difference between news sources and the sites that simply report news. The former refers to newspapers, channels, etc. that serve as the primary sources of news. The latter refers to websites who simply report the stories published and broken by the primary sources. Whenever you are reading an article from such a website, always pay attention to the sources they cite.

The second, and the most important way of protecting yourself from misinformation, is to simply read the thing. While it may seem strange having to break this down, this is in fact one of the major problems we have today when it comes to social media usage. We see a headline, we are drawn to it, and we hit the share button without actually bothering to read the entire piece and find out the heart of the matter. And as we have already seen, news articles on social media are the kind of books that are impossible to judge by their covers.

Social media has made information accessible on a scale hitherto unheard of. It has been one of the great inventions of our time and has had an undoubtedly positive impact in the world. However like all things, it brings with it its own cons. Hence, it falls on us, the users, to be vigilant and protect ourselves from false information. Don't believe a headline for what it says, read the entirety of the article before hitting that share button, and make sure to check the source for reliability. Information can be the greatest weapon in the world—use it wisely. 

Saam Hasan is predominantly a computational biologist by day and pop culture writer by night, but his interests include anything that is relevant to society today.