Standing on a fence you should choose true or false: there is no in-between
Frank Sinatra’s song is resonating in my brain this morning and I find myself humming “start spreading the news”, the line of the song that made me think aloud and then I realised: we are ignorant.
Buddy my puppy has mastered the art of finding his ball or food and he knows when I am faking a throw or misleading him with a treat. He is more versed in the art of sniffing out the fake than we are and that’s worrisome. Our main source of information and news is (mostly) Facebook and this in itself is problematic because of the scale of fake news we share and convince others to partake in. We are cultivating the fear mongering and we are dumbing ourselves down in order to just quickly share a post or be on the forefront of “breaking news”.
The prime example of this would be the 2016 US Election. Fabrications and outright lies were spreading through the web and Facebook and it impacted South Africa just as much. Friends and family arguing about the sexual assault cases against Hilary Clinton, the Pope endorsing Donald Trump and the whole election being rigged (all of this is untrue by the way) just went to show the lengths we will go to just “be right”.
Closer to home there was a Whatsapp voice note being spread around about the “storm of the century” and how we should “seek higher ground” after the initial flash floods hit Johannesburg and of course instead of actually seeking to find out the validity of the claim, we shared it like there was no tomorrow and the end was nigh. Turns out we had a light thunderstorm and nothing happened, no floods no nothing. Better safe than sorry you might say? Not if it causes unnecessary unrest and causes political and racial divides between our people of SA because that is not worth it. That is just plain ignorant.
As I scrolled through my news feed I saw a shocking article about how South Africa has been state captured by the Gupta’s and our president is facing close to 700 charges of corruption and fraud. I don’t share fake news I look at the…oh…wait my bad.
