Making the Internet My Accountability Partner

Featured Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

I hope everyone made it through April Fool’s Day alright. The concept of the holiday is kind of fun, but I find it’s not present in my life, outside of the content I consume. I noticed my engagement with content on this day is different from every other day of the year. Because I expect to be lied to on April 1, I am skeptical about everything I engage with. I fact-check even the statements that I believe at first glance. But I don’t practice the same level of fact-checking on any other day of the year. In this age of internet echo chambers and misinformation, there is plenty of reason to need the same level of critical thinking, but I don’t.

Our brains love to be right. So throughout the year when we latch onto a new piece of information and find it fits, or at least doesn’t challenge, our worldview (confirmation bias), we don’t think twice about it. Except April 1, on this one day alone we second guess everything. And our brain remembers being right. When we find and then verify a piece of information our brains applaud themselves on its first recognition of veracity. When we find that the information we were double-checking is a prank or is false, our brains reward themselves for being able to identify incorrect information. Based on this one day alone, our brains conclude that we are very good at identifying misinformation or disinformation and then we don’t often challenge that assumption throughout the year, leaving us susceptible to propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation.

I may not know the exact numbers but I know that each person is witness to an overwhelming amount of information on the internet every single day. It would be exhausting to have to thoroughly fact-check everything. I believe that we can at least do ourselves, and the world, a favor by starting to incorporate some of the same safeguards against incorrect information throughout the year. We can start with just one day a month when we double-check everything. This not only makes us more aware of the amount of misinformation being fed to us by the algorithms, but it also hones our skills of detecting and verifying dubious claims.

I hope you will join me in this challenge. It can be hard to see the difference this practice can make, but we make so many decisions a day built on our understanding of the world. If we can improve the accuracy of that understanding we can each start making choices that are better for us and better for our wider communities.