If we’ve discovered something for the reason that COVID-19 pandemic upended all our lives practically 2 years in the past, it’s the right way to sanitize our palms, properties, workplaces, and absolutely anything we encounter to cease the unfold of the virus. Turns out, we additionally want to take care of that vigilance when encountering details about COVID-19 in our social media feeds. As the pandemic continued, harmful misinformation about remedies, cures, and the vaccines flourished. This surroundings has underscored the significance of consuming and sharing on-line content material with care. And that strategy applies not solely to a public well being disaster, however to all data we encounter. We have to take steps to make sure a publish, picture, or meme is “sanitized” earlier than we belief it, prefer it, go it on, or market it in any means.
The News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan nationwide schooling nonprofit, has created steps you’ll be able to comply with to make sure that you observe good data hygiene. NLP, a information literacy schooling chief since 2008, offers applications and assets that can assist you acquire the abilities, information, and mindset to be sensible shoppers of reports and different data. If we sanitize the method round our data habits, we are able to forestall deceptive and false content material — which might be hazardous to our well being and society — from being extensively shared and doubtlessly doing hurt.
You don’t want any particular skills or know-how to learn the way to take action. NLP offers you with important steerage in its infographic, “Sanitize before you share: 4 quick steps to stop the spread of misinformation.” It can take solely 4 steps to maintain your self or others from changing into a “superspreader” of misinformation. And if you happen to discover credible proof {that a} social media publish isn’t true or the supply is unreliable, warn others in a reply to the publish, and if vital, report it to platform directors.
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