It has always surprised me as to how uninformed people tend to be about things. I don't mean people who have no idea about an issue as ignorance is their decision, but it is the people who claim to know things that annoy me. I personally pride myself on staying reasonably up to date with world news and being able to reel of information to anyone who may be interested and I also love finding out new information from people as well. What ticks me off to no end is people who have obviously read something on Facebook or heard half a news headline and decide to share information that is false or at least very misinformed. I mean come on people, check your facts!
Now to get something clear, I am not against someone who comes to a conversation saying “Oh I heard/read something about that. Isn't that about..?” I am against the people who come to the conversation and say “Did you hear, ...BLAH...MISINFORMED..BLAH,” when a quick Google would prove the complete opposite. This is the same principle with gossip, hearing things from unreliable third party sources generally is going to give you false and misleading information and it is up to you to not take all information at face value and to take a minute or two to check the facts and gain a personal understanding of events, news and situations.
While in real life it can be reasonably simple to tell who to trust, the Internet poses all types of new questions of credibility, trustworthiness and reliability of information. The Internet is a user generated world where literally anyone can post anything and claim it to be real and reliable. This is why teachers won’t let you use Wikipedia and why your parents don't want you chatting to random’s claiming to be a hot 22 year old male from New York, because more than likely, the information you are receiving is false or at the very least, extensively manipulated. Having said all this, of course there are many credible places to find good, reliable information on the Internet such as news sites like news.com, Fox, CNN, etc: though recently more and more sources that seem reliable are needing to be checked. For example, a few weeks ago, the Fox News Twitter account was hacked and a number of tweets were made stating that President Obama had been assassinated. This of course led to panic and the rumour mill began meaning that in no time the news was world wide, reaching people who don't even have a Twitter account and all of this extra panic could have been prevented with a quick search in Google, showing that it was a hack.
Like I stated before, news is becoming more and more unreliable and with the increase in the blur between what is news and what is current affairs, websites like 'The Onion' and innumerable other sites claiming to be sharing the truth, it falls increasingly to the individual to check the validity of information. One last thing I would suggest is that you watch this short video by Hungry Beast showing how easy the process is to create false information and pass it off as news; then ask yourself. Do you even care if the information you are getting is true or not? If so, then maybe take some time to check important facts before passing them on.
