Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Well, we’re in it, now, aren’t we? I’m talking about Election Season, of course, and it’s pretty clear that it’s time to fasten our seatbelts.

As we prepare for this long, bumpy night to November 3rd, though, let’s not forget the most important Social Media Commandment:

Thou Shalt Not Get Played.

Already, posts and tweets have crossed my desk—from the right and the left—that are obviously questionable, crudely sourced, and/or demonstrably false. There’s no question that this is going to be a brutal election cycle, and it is imperative that we all keep our wits about us and give everything a once-over with a gimlet eye. Skepticism is the order of the day, folks, because there’s a ton of misinformation out there, and a lot of us, with our sloppy and carefree re-post/re-tweet habits, are only making matters worse.

I’ll give you an example, and to prove that I’m not just picking on folks from the far right, I’ll use this one that came from a friend whose politics are on the anti-Trump side.

In late July, the morning after Hurricane Hanna made landfall in Texas, my friend posted a video clip that I immediately found suspicious. The clip showed a section of Trump’s border wall being felled by high winds. The video, though of poor and highly pixelated quality, was clear enough to show it was taken in the desert during daylight hours. Under a partly cloudy sky, before the gaze of several hi-viz-vest- and hardhat-wearing workers, dust-laden winds buffeted sections of the slatted steel border wall and pushed them over. The headline under the video was “Trump’s Border Wall Toppled by Hurricane Hanna!”

There were several flags on this play—i.e., the fact that Hanna made landfall at night and the video was shot in daylight, the partly cloudy condition of the sky during a hurricane, the dusty (not rainy) conditions, and even the exclamation point in the headline—but the most glaring was that, in the bottom right-hand corner was the logo of the source: RT.

RT (www.rt.com) is a Russian state-controlled and -funded English-language television network—think of it as the Voice of America or Radio Free Europe, but with a higher propaganda coefficient—and as such, anything coming from this source should be assumed to be packing a hidden agenda. Insofar as we should all know by now that Russia used social media to both promote a chosen candidate and to sow political disunity in America, and that they continue to do so, the thought of passing along anything from RT should be a non-starter. And yet, there it was, on my timeline, proffered as fact with a big “haha Trump sucks” tagline and similarly themed commentary.

It took the reputable and reliable media two days to debunk this video—it was not from Texas during the landfall of Hurricane Hanna (July 25) but from New Mexico in June 2020, when unanchored sections of the wall under construction did indeed fall over when hit by high winds—but by that time the video had been viewed 5.3 million times and been re-posted and retweeted by celebrities and fringe-level media outlets. Admittedly, most did not come from RT, but some obviously did, and even without the RT logo, even a smidgen of skepticism would have gone a long way in stemming the tide.

A lot of us were brought up knowing the adage, “Always read the fine print,” but these days, there just is no fine print for us to read. We are awash in memes, “news,” and quotes that have no credible attribution, and many are much more subtle than the Hurricane Hanna video referenced here, mixing just enough truth to seem plausible or taking a small item out of context and blowing it out of proportion.

Primarily, we must be aware of this in order to recognize it, but more importantly, we must stop propagating it, especially when we agree with the message. Whether it’s good news for you or bad news for the opposition, check it out before you pass it along, and if it fails the test, say something, either in private or in comments. Yes, you’ll catch some flak for it, and yes, there are some people in our circles who are simply beyond reason, but in such cases a fact-checking comment may encourage someone else to be more critical in their thinking, even if not the original poster.

So whether it’s “Beirut explosion was an atomic bomb” or the “coronavirus/5G” conspiracy theory or “bible-burning protesters in Portland,” take a breath, check it out, and think twice before clicking that Like, Retweet, or UpVote. We have enough problems in front of us without creating fake ones to further distract us.

k

Example Fact-Check citations:

AP News

KHOU-Texas’ VERIFY segment