Check before you post

Claire Del Vita

cd750919@ohio,edu

With the current social and political climate of the world in disarray, many people with even a sliver of a social media presence have been using their platforms to share information. However, the odds that these stories are fact-checked before they are posted is quite slim. It is much easier to immediately repost an infograph on Instagram or a tweet on your timeline than it is to analyze what they are saying and do further research on the topic beforehand. I myself have been guilty of posting before fact-checking, something that as a journalism major goes against my ethics. When we share news or information before we establish whether or not something is true, we are fueling this notion of "fake news" and cause distrust in the media and ourselves as sources for our peers. 

Social media allows people from anywhere and everywhere to have a voice on issues that are important to them and in recent years it has served as a major source of information when it comes to spreading activism, learning about current events, information on protests, and more. According to a study by the Pew Research Center, Black Americans are some of the most active on social media when it comes to spreading awareness on social, political, or cultural issues. This shows that minority voices which are often over looked, have a platform that allows them to finally stand out. As influential and helpful as social media activism can be, when we share information that winds up being false we risk our credibility as journalists.

Fact-checking matters. When we fact check our sources and our posts we are telling our friends and followers that, "Yes this news is true and it is having an impact on our present and future world." They may choose to share our stories or retweet our tweets and we can then reach a bigger audience and spread more awareness on important issues. Additionally, if we, as future journalists, fact-check what we post now as students we establish a rapport for when we enter the professional world and the chances that our past social media activity is held against us decreases. More and more Americans are interested in fact-checking and find themselves looking through fact-checking websites and articles. In a 2015 study by National Public Radio (NPR), when it comes to election coverage 77% of NPR listeners were most interested in fact checking candidates statements, just falling behind the 82% that prefer the actual election results.

Graph from NPR

The interest in fact-checking is there and it should fuel you to make sure that you don't just post something blindly. Social media companies themselves are getting behind this movement. Instagram has recently started to label posts containing information that has been fact checked. They hope to slow the spread of misinformation and they are not alone. Twitter has made a similar move by urging users to read an article before they tweet it, even making it easier to open articles directly on the app. If big business can do it, so can we. The next time you find an interesting article or infograph on your socials, check before you post.