I wrote a diary yesterday which one could diplomatically summarize as a primer in not spreading misinformation through social media because it can dupe thousands into believing something that is false or exaggerated. Take a look at what happened a little over 24 hours after I posted my crappy little diary:
Even a simple diary on DailyKos can reach tens of thousands of people in a short amount of time, and even resulted in my getting a death threat (
oh yeah, it happened). Social media has a huge impact on how we share information with one another. Imagine what happens when a page that has thirty, forty, fifty thousand likes posts something, which gets shared a few thousand times, and those shares get shared, and so on. The internet's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness: you can post something at lunch and reach millions of people before Wheel of Fortune comes on.
That's how rumors and hoaxes get started. That's how false celebrity death reports start (how many times has Johnny Depp "died" according to Twitter?). Weather rumors get started the same way. That's how the weather rumor I posted about yesterday got started.
I'm receiving some pushback because the models are starting to show a winter storm that could last for several days from Missouri across the Ohio Valley and up through the Northeast. I mentioned yesterday that it is likely that there will be some kind of storm, and it won't be paralyzing or cover nearly as many people. There have been worse storms this winter. The funny thing about science is that it's based off observations and hard evidence, and the evidence just wasn't there. (It still isn't). The models just haven't supported that theory. If a historic, paralyzing winter storm comes to fruition next week and it turns out I was wrong, I'll be big enough to accept it and own the egg on my face.
Winter storms regularly get hyped up on social media during the winter, and that's by lots of people, not just those I specifically called out. The same thing happens during the summer. Amateur pages look 14-21 days out in the weather models and try to hype up fantasy hurricanes in order to garner popularity. Actual meteorologists used to fall victim to this when the internet rose in popularity during the 1990s. For most people this was the first time weather model data was publicly available and easily accessible, and some meteorologists would latch onto hurricanes that the models were erroneously spinning up a week or two down the line and hype them up to the public. The National Hurricane Center had to stop posting forecast model data on their website as "such graphics have the potential to confuse users and to undermine the effectiveness of NHC official tropical cyclone forecasts and warnings."
Welcome to the viral age of the internet. Stopping misinformation starts with you, be it a satirical news story from a site people don't readily recognize as satire, to celebrity death hoaxes, weather rumors, and even our favorite political lies that folks on both side mindlessly share without bothering to check the facts first. Do some research before you click "share" or "retweet" or "reblog" or "repin" or "re[verb]." Hone your Google-fu, for sanity's sake.
Shameless plug: speaking of social media, you can follow me on Facebook and Twitter if you'd like. I promise I don't post misinformation.