Twitter? Facebook? …Truth Social? Nowadays it is quite common for people to get their news from social media. It’s convenient to browse. Convenient to read. Convenient to share. Just… Convenient. Oh! It’s also a convenient way to spread lies and misinformation. And of course it is. That’s how it was designed. There was no malicious intent or anything like that. Social media was just designed to bring like minded people together to share and exchange information and ideas. Everybody gets to talk about the topics they like with people who think like them and just have a good time. In this it succeeds wonderfully.

Social media does not discriminate

There’s just one problem. Social media does not discriminate against the information it propagates. It only cares that the people who likes to talk about such information does so and engages others who care about it to do the same. This is a problem because unlike traditional means if discourse, where the truth generally prevails over falsehoods in the “Marketplace of Ideas”, the opposite is true on social media.

So what do we do about this? Do we quit social media? That’s unrealistic. Plus social media is still good for other things like raising awareness campaigns and staying in contact with friends and family. Do we regulate it? Forcing it to only allow content that is true? But then who gets to decide what’s true? Even if we agreed on what is true how’s it going to be enforced without severely crippling the way those platforms function? Neither option seem like a good idea. So what do we have left?

Social media is no different from word of mouth

The solution, unfortunately, is for each individual to do their own fact checking. This means people need to be educated on how verify sources. Boring. I know, but it’s the truth. Basic fact checking is also a skill everybody should possess. How else can we successfully navigate the sea of information before us? Social media is no different from word of mouth. We don’t (shouldn’t) trust word of mouth. Why do we trust social media? Ever since writing our first research paper we were taught to look up and verify sources. Where has this skill gone? Wherever it’s gone it needs to come back. Even if social media is true most of the time, we are not excused from doing our due diligence and verify its sources.

So, while social media brings people with similar interests and ideas together, it also allows for the spread of misinformation and falsehoods at an alarming rate. It’s not realistic to quit social media altogether and regulating it to only allow true content is problematic. The solution lies in individuals taking responsibility for fact-checking and verifying sources. We need to bring back the skill of basic fact-checking that we were taught in school and apply it to social media. After all, social media is no different from word of mouth, and we don’t trust everything we hear. It’s time to take charge and be responsible for the information we consume and share. And maybe… just maybe… the truth will finally win out on social media’s “Marketplace of Ideas”.