Read on Twitter
It has been...interesting, in the wake of Jan. 6, to see how many viral tweets I saw on here in the heat of the moment were misleading or wrong.
E.g. guy dying of tazing self in balls; certain incidents of cops seemingly co-operating with mob; and this. Yeah, thread incoming. https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1348688712419463174
E.g. guy dying of tazing self in balls; certain incidents of cops seemingly co-operating with mob; and this. Yeah, thread incoming. https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1348688712419463174
Oh yeah I had to do work so I forgot about this. But anyway, like, I feel Aristotle gets a bad rap nowadays and he totally doesn't deserve it. I swear this is going somewhere
Everyone's like, Aristotle thought women had a different number of teeth than men or whatever. But, like, he also dissected animals and made actual discoveries that he documented. He was a rigorous, systematic thinker who set the intellectual agenda for the next 2000+ years.
So why did he also record all this extremely falsifiable wrong shit? Probably because he read it or heard it from a trustworthy source. Like how literally all of us know what we know. The last thing *I* dissected was a fetal pig in high school, and I learned jack shit.
Anyway, especially when it comes to breaking news extremely likely to be wrong, misleading, or a flat out fabrication, we all have to stay on the ball about HOW WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW.
How can you verify, for example, whether Olive Garden revoked Sean Hannity's pasta pass?
How can you verify, for example, whether Olive Garden revoked Sean Hannity's pasta pass?
You could call or email someone at Olive Garden. Or look for their press releases. You could even just @ the person who tweeted it, "Yo who are you, is this for real, where did you get it from" and they might just tell you. (The answer is: they fabricated it, as a joke.)
This is all the shit that JOURNALISTS do when they cover the news. This is why, say, a news article comes hours after the real life events (a lifetime on Twitter!), but is more trustworthy. If I'd stayed off Twitter I would have absorbed much less misinformation.
We gotta all get better at recognizing when some social media thing 1) isn't verified, and 2) "makes us feel good". That gut "yess!" feeling you get when you read that someone died in a stupid and ironic way, or unexpectedly got what was coming to them, or whatever.
Real life first hand sense experience informed by background & context > talking to identifiable person with firsthand knowledge/experience > text, like actual text you can select with a cursor and copy and paste and shit, on an official website >>>>>>>>>> screenshot.
