In the vidchat of July 19, 2024, I made a comment criticizing what I see as a tendency to rely too much on social media posts when we analyze current events.
Just for the record: I was not trying to say we should never look at social media posts. Nor was my comment in any way directed at the writing of @vardas3 – quite the contrary.
My main point was that we need to be extra careful these days not to assume that something posted on social media is factual unless it can be corroborated by some other, reliable source.
My secondary point was to caution against relying on one’s own social media feed as one’s main (or only) source of news. After all, what shows up on your social media feed is determined – and manipulated – by some totally opaque algorithm that’s filtering what you’re being shown. Too often, that makes people into passive recipients of manipulated information.
