The Good In The Bad. The Bad In The Good.
The trouble in, and with this information age is that there will always be a co-existence of information that simultaneously confirms what you agree with and disconfirms it.
Strangely, our fight against fake news has transformed into fighting good news. We are increasingly becoming intolerant to true news just because we’ve been sentimentally charged to fight fake news.
The fight has become sentimental, propagandist, fake, biased, absurd and misguided, altogether!
The oddity, if not absurdity of this misguided fight against fake news is that we’re labeling any information we neither understand nor agree with, as fake news.
We’ve increasingly and dangerously become accustomed to only agreeable information, a habit that has turned us into a large mass of gullible citizens.
We’ve become slaves to our most cherished awareness, to what we know and have vehemently fought what we don’t know or can’t understand.
In our increasingly growing habit to tolerate only that which is agreeable to the masses, we have succumbed to what psychologist call the confirmation bias.
Facebook, Google (via YouTube) and Twitter have been at the helm of commendably fighting fake news by deleting fraudulent information off their online platforms.
However, just like African leaders who are currently taking advantage of the prevalent pandemic to contemptuously display dictatorship instead of leadership, the tech giants have disguised behind the veil of fighting fake news to disrepute credible information just because it doesn’t appeal to the masses.
Sadly, it has become profitable to follow wrong ideas in large groups just because we’ve been told it’s rebellious and fake to air ideas as an individual or a small group.
Rather than hurriedly writing off information as fake news, just because we neither understand it nor agree with it, or just because we’ve been told that we have to fight fake news, let’s instead sharpen our wits and investigative capabilities to see beyond the veil of sentimental judgments.
I hope it’s not too late to rethink and reverse this sickening paradigm shift that has befallen our comprehension capabilities and the fight against the fake news.
Let’s fight the real fake news not what is not agreeable.