Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Joshua Lucero
With news sites and news blogs popping up every day on the Internet, consumers need to begin thinking critically of the information contained in the posts they read and share daily through social media.
link Joshua Lucero
On Facebook, I see people sharing news stories daily but often the stories come from a source that is clearly biased or poorly sourced.
These stories are worse than someone not looking at news because those who read it usually aren’t going to fact check it and will continue to spread the story as if it is the truth.
This misleads large numbers of people and spreads misinformation around until the truth is so far buried that it has almost no chance of being found.
If someone does do the research to get to the bottom of a misleading story, the truth often doesn’t make it into the public consciousness because the truth wasn’t as exciting or click-worthy as the misinformation.
I experienced this first hand recently when I found that I happened to share the same first and last name of a Clovis man accused of being seen with a missing girl from Texas.
At first I didn’t think anything of it, but as the story was spread around from Facebook page to Facebook page my friends began contacting me and asking me if anything was wrong and what was going on.
I saw the post about the young woman who had been reported missing. The last person she had been seen with was a man that shares my name, but that’s where the similarities end.
Not wanting to be implicated in something like being responsible for a missing girl, I began researching the origins of the post.
I realized if I didn’t take the time to do the research no one else was going to.
With a few clicks on Facebook I was able to track down the original post by the girl’s mother and began browsing her page in search of any updates or any information that could let my friends know I wasn’t the guy in the post.
I didn’t have to scroll far to find the mother’s update about her daughter. As it turns out, just a couple of weeks after the daughter went missing she had called to let her mother know she was safe and had disclosed her current location.
Wanting to be done with worrying about people thinking I was involved in a girl’s disappearance, I quickly shared the mother’s post about her daughter being safe and sound.
After sharing the mother’s post I quickly realized that people are not as interested in sharing things that do not scream for attention.
Not one person shared my post about the girl being found and safe.
All of the people on my friends list who had previously shared the post about the girl missing didn’t seem to have the same drive to share that the girl was safe.
I don’t know what it is about correcting misleading information or updating people on the status of stories that makes it less worthy to share.
What I do know is that people need to be critical of the news they take in on a daily basis and research it before they post it.
A few clicks and some Google searches can go a long way when determining if the news that’s being spread is legitimate or if it’s something that has been solved or tailored to strike a chord with a particular audience.
It won’t be long, if it hasn’t already happened, that stories shared on social media will ruin someone’s life and the truth will never come to light because it wasn’t as exciting to share.
Next time you’re reading the story from Facebook with the too crazy to be true headline or the post that warns of something terrifying happening in your backyard, take the time to do a bit of research before you hit the share button.
Joshua Lucero is a reporter for the Portales News-Tribune. Contact him at:
