Don't Believe Everything You See on Social Media - The Case of the Tilapia's Tarnished Reputation

Images and video on social media can be used to persuade - big time. If you don't believe me, consider the Tilapia scare memes circulating on Facebook.

This is just the sort of image that I usually scroll right past on my way to other more "important" braingum - recent travel posts from friends, pictures of college friends' babies who aren't very cute, posts about players who were traded from my favorite sports team. I stopped and read this meme, though, because a family member posted it, and commenters were running amok.

When I saw a family member post this, I felt compelled to read the comments. People were reading and reacting to the meme and treating it as fact. This surprised me, because I considered it a pretty poor photoshop job that seemed to contain some pretty dubious, unsupported claims. I felt an itch I just had to scratch. My critical evaluative reflex kicked in, and I decided to enter the conversation.

I advised the original poster thusly:

I felt satisfied that I had put the rogue poster in her place, that I had used my superior intellect and years of communications education and practice thinking critically about the information on the Internet to "school" this person. I soon realized, however, that this compulsive need to debunk her post was a knee-jerk reaction. I wondered about the source of my own impulse to even comment at all. Should I have just left it alone?

I was soon soothed, however, when the family member seemed to take my commentary rather well. She was online when I posted my rebuttal and commented back right away. I think she saw the value in what I was trying to get across. I did some further research and found that the Washington Post had done a story about this ill-reputed fish, so I shared that, too.

The next posts from her indicated that she enjoyed the article and understood what I was trying to get across. "...But it's so much easier just to post something," she said. I couldn't disagree with that. It is easy to post something without doing the background legwork.

This, to me, is why it's more important than ever to teach these evaluative skills to students. If the next generation of kids leave school and enter the world with critical eyes for stuff like this, they won't be duped into believing unsupported information just because it's scary-looking and accompanied by pictures. They won't have to live their lives afraid of lies and half truths that they picked up on the Internet. This might seem like a small thing, but people not eating Tilapia
is one thing - people believing bigger hoaxes without skepticism can be downright dangerous.