3 Ways To Know If You Can Trust Something You Read On Social Media
While our world would be a lot easier if you knew that you could automatically believe everything that someone said online, this isn’t the reality of modern digital times.
Because anyone can post anything they want online, whether they know it’s true or know it’s false, it’s up to us as the consumers to do our own due diligence and determine if what you’re reading or watching is factual and if we can trust it. And while this can be a nuisance to have to do all the time, there are some tricks that you can try to make this easier and keep yourself from getting duped.
To help you see how this can be done, whether you’re a young student looking to write a paper for school or an elderly person cruising social media in your senior living facility, here are three ways to know if you can trust something you read on social media.
Figure Out Where The Info Is Coming From
One of the first things that you should look into when you’re reading something online, especially if it goes against other things that you’ve read and know to be true, is to uncover where this information is coming from.
By looking at the source of information and determining if that person or source can be trusted, you can help yourself both now and in the future in figuring out what’s factual and what’s fiction. Because if something or someone is willing to share inaccurate information once, there’s a good chance that they’ll wind up sharing something inaccurate again.
Consider The Ads
Something else that can help you determine if you should trust something that you’re reading online, especially when it’s from a website that you might not be super familiar with, is what kind of ads they’re running on the site.
While almost all websites make money through ad revenue, if there are more ads than there is actual content, the website might be most concerned about money over all else. And when this happens, they could wind up making all kinds of claims in the hopes to just get more people to come to their website. And when this happens, you may not be able to trust the stories they are telling.
Find Ways To Fact Check
Every person who reads information on the Internet should be on the lookout for things that seem too good to be true or that don’t sit right with them. And when they find something like this, they should know how to fact check those claims.
To do this, you can search for the keywords of that claim and see what other information you can pull up. Additionally, you can use fact-checking websites to look into things for you that you can’t find adequate information about on your own.
If you want to better know what you can trust and what you can’t when you’re online, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you with this.
