There are some things that are objectively true no matter whether you agree with them or not, and there are things that are subjective, a matter of opinion. That ubiquity of social media has convinced many of us that all information is of equal value and truth is determined by what our opinion about the information is.
Like it or not, what constitutes a fact in some realms is determined by experts. There are many areas in which I am incompetent to render an opinion - medicine, and it's subcategories of epidemiology and virology among them. I am happy to defer to my primary care physician for most medical situations, and to the CDC and other boards of experts in matters of pandemics. Can the experts, in medical science or any other field, be wrong? Of course. Science, in every category, advances and learns as time goes on, unfortunately, sometimes from its mistakes. But the response to the possibility that an expert might be wrong is not to reflexively and mindlessly disregard anything an expert tells you simply because they are an expert. Just because the answer might seem counter-intuitive to a non-expert, or involve discomfort or inconvenience doesn't mean that it's wrong. Surfing the internet looking for some crackpot to validate your ill-informed opinion is unlikely to yield any real answers either.
The thing about deferring to professionals, whether they are scientists with advanced degrees and a track record of results, or seasoned reporters working for established news agencies, or economists who understand the interplay of the myriad variables that make up our economy, is that we know who they are. We can check their reputations without necessarily understanding fully their field of expertise. Professionals will check their sources, make sure that their results can be duplicated, verify their math and underlying assumptions, before making an unequivocal statement. The non-professionals, be they bloggers, or podcasters, or some Bubba with a Twitter/X account can say anything. If they have a large enough following then the unsourced rumor that they just started is going to sprint around the globe multiple times before the truth can get its shoes laced up. I put politicians firmly in the camp of non-professional, by the way.
The "stealing and eating cats and dogs" in Springfield Ohio rumor is a textbook example. One person posted about it on Facebook, only to later recant and take her post down. There was one police call (months ago) about a missing cat (which soon after turned up). The Facebook post was shared, it was picked up on X, people who themselves did not having a missing pet showed up at a City Council meeting to complain about immigrants stealing and eating pets. A candidate for the presidency repeated the rumor during the debate and was quickly fact-checked and corrected, which caused all the believers in this rumor to double down. Photos were shared, not of immigrants in Springfield stealing and eating pets, but of a mentally ill American woman in another Ohio city killing a cat and possibly eating it; a photo, also in another city, of man carrying a goose, which as it later turned out, he was picking up off the road after it had been run down. No actual evidence that immigrants are stealing and killing pets has surfaced, yet the believers are not dissuaded one bit. On social media platforms you'll often hear the phrase "the mainstream media isn't reporting this" - usually the reason is that it isn't happening. Long established reputable news organizations aren't know for publishing unverified rumors and the CDC isn't going to recommend that you inject disinfectant.
Does this mean that everything that you see on social media is wrong? Of course not. But finding the truth in a given situation takes more than scrolling through Musk's online junkyard and searching for something that "makes sense" to you and fits with your preconceived view of the world. In my observation most of what I see posted on X is nothing but opinion. Occasionally there's a well researched and thought-through analysis (some that make me reconsider my opinion on the matter) but usually it's just someone screaming into the ether.
A tactic that I see fairly often is a tweet with a photo or video clip attached where the tweet describes the attached image at odds with the image itself. A recent example showed First Lady Jill Biden at a cabinet meeting. One tweet claimed that she was "sitting in" for President Biden others claimed she was running the cabinet meeting and pointed out that she was sitting at the head of the table. This of course spurred a lot of outrage for MAGA world, where they all assumed that Dr. Biden was pulling an Edith Wilson. But a glance at the photo would reveal that President Biden was there and was sitting in the seat where presidents traditionally sat (center of the long side of the table, on the right in this photo, in front of the flags) and Dr. Biden was a guest addressing the cabinet.
Mainstream media has its own biases, the experts sometimes get it wrong, but looking to X for truth is idiotic.
No comments:
Post a Comment