School: Teaches you something for a week with historical background, context, effects, and outcomes.
One TikToker: Tells you it's fake while doing a bad contour.
Some of y'all: SCHOOL LIED?!
Some of y'all dunked on anti-vaxxers for "doing their own research", but you're perfectly happy to parrot some laughably ahistoric pap from a dubiously sourced book that you got filtered through three layers of social media influencers.
So I’ve seen this post floating around a lot, and the pictures in it are immensely powerful. And almost all of them are real.
Almost.
One picture, though, bothered me—not because it looked fake, but because it looked like the moment before a truly horrific tragedy, and I was troubled by the idea that I was looking at something that perhaps only moments later resulted in death. It was this picture:
So I did a quick image search
and found that it was all over pinterest and twitter and such, which are… unhelpful sources at the best of times. But I did see the picture posted on Reddit, which is a cesspool but usually is pretty good about sourcing its shit. And:
Sure enough, when I looked up the trailer, here was that exact moment:
Welp.
But why does this matter? In the dozen or so pictures of that really great post, one of them wasn’t a genuine moment of protest against or confrontation with an oppressive, bigoted authority. That’s not a big deal, right?
Maybe not. But it shows how easy it is to sneak in fake information, misleading information, or just wrong information into posts that are largely accurate. And if you’re scrolling through and think “90% of this is stuff I agree with, the other 10% is probably fine too,” you’re more apt to digest the fake stuff along with the real stuff.
This is particularly important right now, when we’re on the eve of US elections that will quite literally decide our country’s fate for the next fifty years; we cannot, CANNOT trust the things that are reblogged onto our dashboard, even by our good friends (the person who reblogged onto mine this is a friend who is imminently trustworthy, for example). We have to be mindful, we have to check sources, we have to consider what we’re looking at.
And that’s not fun! That’s not what tumblr is here for, for most of us; God knows I’d much rather reblog the 1000th gifset of Schitt’s Creek or some shit. But unfortunately, social media isn’t just a place to have fun anymore; it’s been weaponized, quite literally, by people who want us to believe shitty things and are very, very good at sneaking those shitty beliefs into places where we won’t notice them until they’re part of our own ideology.
This isn’t a command that you have to source every single picture or bit of information you reblog; but it is a request that you stop to think. Humans tend to chase the feeling of validation and confirming their own beliefs, and that’s totally understandable. But don’t mistake validation for the truth.
