Not being stuck inside of an echo chamber really does wonders for the brain. And yes, I know the irony of saying this on Lemmy, but it’s true.
Echo chambers are a lot easier to recognize and ignore when they aren’t filled with your friends and family.
I wish I could get my parents to unplug from Fox for a while
Block Fox and the other right wing news stations, but also a couple liberal news stations like NBC. When they call you for tech support, tell them it’s a weird issue happening with cable lately
My dad would figure it out pretty quick, he’s no ludite
Deleting it for 3 years also improves mental health and keeps toxic family members out of your business. I wish I’d learned that sooner.
Platforms like Facebook have an incredible hold on some people. I remember a few years ago when the “Momo” hoax happened, an older coworker arrived at the office and started warning us about the danger of “Momo” they’d seen on Facebook. I’d already heard about the hoax (and was aware of the original creepyasta origins), and brought up a few news articles explaining it, including an official statement from the police. Everyone seemed satisfied by the truth, except for the Facebook addict. They just gave me a blank stare, and a few hours later I heard them telling another group of colleagues to beware of “Momo” getting to their children.
I have family members and longstanding family friends who have succumbed to this. Interestingly almost all of them were decrying the internet as something that couldn’t be trusted before the age of social media.
My mom was permabanned from Facebook in 2020 for constantly posting anti-vax nonsense so she just went to places like Gab and Parlor. 😑
Truth depends on whoever you’re buying it from.
Damn, you’re so enlightened.
How do you decide which sources are credible? I can’t decide. Literally everything can be faked, and the more there is on the line, the more incentive and resources there are to do so.
What important stuff do you think there is that isn’t faked? How do you decide that it’s not fake?
Damn near everything you’ve ever accepted as true is stuff you were told or read and just accepted it based on how it was presented.
Removed by mod
I believe that some popular news organizations are sufficiently trustworthy. At the very least, you can find sources that rank higher than others on the scale of trustworthiness.
This is why, in a lot of universities, they’re trying to teach you how to learn, not necessarily how you should think.
We need to be able to examine the claims for ourselves and learn what red flags look like.
And a lot of the time we mix up “facts” with “opinions”. Even when we are looking at facts, most of the time there are lies mixed with truth or conveniently forgotten truths. If we only get our information from a single source, or from biased sources, then we’re going to miss some key information.
That’s why it’s good to make sure that you look at any story (especially politicized ones) from different angles and sources even if you don’t agree with them.
Not only that but it can be enlightening to hear about a story from someone who’s much more intimately familiar with the subject themselves.
For example, whenever it comes to news stories about the Supreme Court, I like to look for commentary from lawyers such as Steve Lehto or Legal Eagle. You’ll find that they typically provide some very important context into why a particular decision was made that cuts through a lot of the outrage material that reporters push for clicks.
One of the best decisions I made was deleting my Facebook. I really mean that, one of the best decisions in my entire life. Not getting sucked into the absolute bullshit fest that greedy shit fuckers like Mark Zuckerberg set up for humanity is extremely relieving. Don’t compare yourself to other people, you be you, just try to be your best self, it’s worth it. Don’t let the billionaire leeches of society take everything from you, fuck Facebook.
The downside is that everyone around you in real life is stuck in that loop, so you can’t really escape it anymore.
YouTube is getting particularly bad about this to, unfortunately. They need to do more to remove harmful misinformation, but they don’t care because it won’t make them money.
Youtube is good as a video hosting website, but bad as anything social-related. I just treat it like a video website and ignore the rest. Private browsing mode, no login used is my preferred way to access youtube videos
Honestly I prefer having an account specifically so I can filter out the garbage fake harmful dangerous content so I don’t have to see it.
PROPAGANDA. Please use the actual word. Why use two words when one do trick?
From Wikipedia:
Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented.
Propaganda isn’t always fake news, it can also be true stuff presented in a biased way.
Similarly, fake news isn’t always propaganda. Some is just stuff spread by trolls to make fun of people.
Haven’t used facebook in any meaningful way since 2012. Much less anxiety ever since.
the vast majority of nutbags with low key mental issues i meet are social media addicts who furiously want to bring their ‘curated’ image into the real world and force others to worship them.
the others nutbags are homeless folks.
Don’t turn off Facebook! Mark has a Yacht to feed!
Replace “for just a few weeks” with “forever”, and “reduces” with “gets rid of”, and now you have an even better statement.
Permanently deleting all Facebook accounts and pages could save you even better.
Or even more better: just get rid or all social media that is associated with massive corporate giants (YouTube is still too useful to get rid of, but it dors still have lots of problems)
I’m convinced those who want to be fearful of things will immediately latch onto a new source of misinformation.
This isn’t to say Facebook is good, or that we shouldn’t try to have stronger punishment for misinformation that leads to public harm, just that “people are dumb, panicky dangerous animals”
The last time I logged on to Facebook was this past fall because there was a death in our fairly tight knit group of high school classmates. It had been three or four years since I’d been in there.
So I went on and said my words.
While I was there, I didn’t really notice what was in my feed.
What I noticed was suddenly I was getting notification after notification that my posts from years and years ago were getting deleted because they didn’t fit whatever the current terms and conditions of use were.
This amused me.
So I left my words of dead classmate up for a week then sent my account silent again.
I can’t see Facebook or any social media being a place I ever hang out again, which is a little bit of a bummer because without any social media, IRL social activities all but come to an immediate and total halt.
Oh well. I’ll live.
I still don’t think this would save my mom from whichever TV source she watches, Fox News, News Max, or OAN.
Can you get into her parental controls? Someone on Reddit did that with their parents and it actually got them somewhere.
I deleted my account back in November when they enforced the ‘pay or ok’ option. I was not ok with that
Have read a lot of books since !
