However, the thing that really quite honestly pisses me off is seeing these unheard of accounts with 50K+ followers having a tweet go viral with completely fabricated, twisted international stories that will ultimately end up being called out and corrected by the underground knights of Our Tweetdom. This is exactly what I came across three days ago. I have a very typical way of analyzing tweets so as to make sure I'm not supporting or spreading fake news and keeping the platform as honest as humanly possible on my part. My thought process and course of action for the tweet below goes as follows:
In the grand scheme of completely taking this tweet apart in about 2 minutes, I was not convinced that neither this "Influencer" nor his supposedly informative tweet is valid. And I'm extremely grateful that there are people who are much more informed and are willing to call out these "influencers" for their spreading of false information. (See pictures #3 and #4). Bless these honest souls. I sat here reading these comments like, "YEEESSS GO OFF AND DRAG THIS MAN." I also did a bit of my own research on this story and found very little except for the original video on YouTube and a couple stories voicing the same things that the Knights of the Tweetdom were claiming as the true story. No, these civilians weren't destroying expensive property in favor of appeasing a "sun god, " but rather because they weren't being paid for the manual labor they exercised for the company who owns the solar panels. This same story was also presented in this false context on Facebook as well, including details that these people were supporters of the BJP party who followed in the footsteps of a nonexistent BJP MP named Ashok Saxena. Great, people are making up names for imaginary party representatives, too, for the sake of making up a completely false story to accompany a video.
Everyone holds a responsibility to be mindful of the content we create and put out into the public landscape. Like anything else, the content we come across should be treated and considered with a grain of salt and lots and lots of research.
1. "Who even is this person?" Anyone who has a ™ in their twitter handle is AUTOMATICALLY discredited in my book, ironically.
2. Who spells "because" like "coz" ????? No.
2. Who spells "because" like "coz" ????? No.
3. "I wonder what his profile is like" >>> Hahahahahahaha his bio is incomprehensible. (see pic #2)
4. I don't trust anyone who claims their title as an "Influencer".
5. The Following-Follower ratio hints that he's the type of person to follow random people and unfollow them to gain followers.
6. Ok—back to his sketchy tweet. OH! There are people discrediting him. Oh yeah, and his overall tone in his tweet is rude and non-informative anyways. Where are the citations? Hyperlinks to news articles? Do better.
In the grand scheme of completely taking this tweet apart in about 2 minutes, I was not convinced that neither this "Influencer" nor his supposedly informative tweet is valid. And I'm extremely grateful that there are people who are much more informed and are willing to call out these "influencers" for their spreading of false information. (See pictures #3 and #4). Bless these honest souls. I sat here reading these comments like, "YEEESSS GO OFF AND DRAG THIS MAN." I also did a bit of my own research on this story and found very little except for the original video on YouTube and a couple stories voicing the same things that the Knights of the Tweetdom were claiming as the true story. No, these civilians weren't destroying expensive property in favor of appeasing a "sun god, " but rather because they weren't being paid for the manual labor they exercised for the company who owns the solar panels. This same story was also presented in this false context on Facebook as well, including details that these people were supporters of the BJP party who followed in the footsteps of a nonexistent BJP MP named Ashok Saxena. Great, people are making up names for imaginary party representatives, too, for the sake of making up a completely false story to accompany a video.
To echo the words of twitter Knight, @geraldOC_ , the internet IS dangerous. It didn't take much for this random "influencer" to simply take this video and attach a fake story with it—and for what? So it could bolster his assumed reputation as a know-it-all and try-hard meme-er? Was the face slap emoji necessary? I thought it was derogatory and uncalled for towards the people in the video, and unjustified to the people of Twitter. AND PEOPLE BELIEVED THIS GUY AND THIS STORY. That's terrifying! Some comments of the believers were along the lines of, "Just when you think you've seen it all haha," or, "They say education is expensive? Ignorance is the true expense!" Yuck?! It's not hard to take the extra few steps to fact check. Complacency really grinds my gears.
Everyone holds a responsibility to be mindful of the content we create and put out into the public landscape. Like anything else, the content we come across should be treated and considered with a grain of salt and lots and lots of research.
Yes, I agree with you so much. I, too, cannot believe a caption to a photo or a video without the evidence! If I care enough, or if I'm bored enough, I will look into it further. People are so quick to share things and criticize the people in the photo or video without doing their own research. It's ridiculous and worries me. Some people are very gullible. I've seen posts as benign as a small dog, that it CLEARLY fake and stuffed, with a caption like "This tiny dog is called a Hunley, it's a very rare breed and only lives for about 4 days." And people are attacking other people who would want the dog, saying it's inhumane to breed a dog that only lives a short time, without looking up the breed and realizing it's not even a real breed or a real dog in the picture. Even simple things like dog breeds lead people astray! It's worse when it's about something more serious, like your example.
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