I recently saw a Facebook post from a really sweet guy I know. (I’ve redacted his name.) He is a very compassionate individual. The kind of man who is sensitive and cries at life’s tragedy. He also happens to have an advanced degree (Doctorate) and has a career that requires constant education.
And yet, this objectively well educated, good guy drinks deeply from the well of misinformation.
In the early days of the internet, this smart, kind person reflexively forwarded every joke or meme that came into his email inbox. (He was a one man spammer.) Now, in the age of social media, in spite of his good character and quantifiable education, he continues to consume and propagate easily falsifiable bullshit. – All of which is far right leaning.
It’s exhausting and feels like a losing battle. It doesn’t take much work to investigate a claim, but for most people it’s still too much effort and doesn’t come with the dopamine release of bias confirmation. I believe that there are real world consequences of this mindset to our country and world.
Often, when I see these posts and have time to spare, I’ll provide evidence refuting the meme. But it all seems so futile. By the time I see the posts, there are invariable already a series of ‘Likes’ and affirming comments. And when I do post the evidence, he (and his followers) never addresses my remarks. Instead, like the mass-forwarding days of yore, he’s already moved on and posted more junk. (I suspect that he posts and never looks back.)
I’m reminded of the saying:
A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes
~ Attribution Uncertain
Here is one of the more recent posts he shared on Facebook:
I immediately sensed the dubious nature of this meme and did a quick search to check the validity. With the super simple entry of the words (lifted directly from the post), ‘A gas powered van, towing a diesel generator, charging an electric car‘ into Google, the first results returned debunked the meme: No, that’s not a van towing a diesel generator to charge an electric car.
But that’s not the punch line.
I intended to share this information to his post by pasting the link into the comment section, but upon doing so, I saw a series of Facebook auto-generated links that also disproved the validity of the post as the header to the comments.
The punchline is: someone named, ‘Jill’, went to the same comment section as I did and ignored the FOUR fact checking links provided by Facebook. ‘Jill’ went on to write, “Yep, can’t fix stupid!“
Maybe Jill… Maybe… Or perhaps you can’t fix confirmation bias.
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