The internet is one giant game of broken telephone.

I remember growing up in the 1980s. Every night the news was on the television in our house. There wasn’t a set channel or a preferred broadcaster, at least not that I can recall, but rather at dinner time each night and later at ten in the evening, the anchor from the local TV station was on the air, sitting with a serious expression, telling us reports of what was going on in the big wide world. 

Reports. From reporters, who had gone to school to learn how to write and think and ask good questions and vet sources and relay balanced facts.

Maybe that still exists to some extent, but I would wager that most people now get most of their news from the internet in some form: social feeds, news posts, shared links, podcasts.

Who am I to judge, right? I’m posting stuff online and you are reading it? And I get news from all kinds of places, often through second hand links and feeds and offhand comments from influencers, too.

But I would also wager that the collapse of traditional media has left multiple generations of people with a real big mental gap, and a lot of us are afflicted: we assume that just like there were standards and rules and ethics for airing the news each night, that if someone managed to post anything on the internet it must have gone through some kind of filter, right?

Right?

Nope. None of that is true. 

Websites cost literal pennies to build. Social media accounts are frequently, if not in the majority, created by AI algorithms that create content out of thin air based on the casual prompts of… well, that’s the question isn’t?

Who’s at the other end of that broken telephone? Who is really giving you your news? And who is giving those people their information? You clicked on a link posted by a friend, but who gave it to them… think about that, because it actually matters, now more than ever.

We spent years never asking because it rarely needed to be asked.

If it came over the airwaves and into our homes on the television it had been vetted.  It could be trusted.

But if anything the exact opposite is true for the internet, glued as we are to our feeds and plugged in as we are to our podcasts. 

No one is vetting these people—if they even are people—so you need to crank up your own awareness and pay attention to what the garbled message really is.

Do you answer the phone?

Do your remember the last time you answered the phone without checking the caller ID?

Used to be, and I might just be old enough to remember those days, you picked up the phone without a second thought simply because it rang. Maybe it was a friend or family member. Maybe it was a stranger. Maybe it was a wrong number. Maybe it was a telemarketer. Whoever it was, you almost always answered.

I have multiple layers of screening that I do with my phone these days. Call display, pre-answering services, and voicemail screening are just the three big tools I use these days to prevent getting unwanted calls.

And why do I screen all my calls lately? Why don’t I just pick up the phone whenever the damn thing rings?

I screen because enough of those calls are people calling to try to scam me. I am filtering what gets through to reduce the amount of thought and effort I would need to do “on the fly” if—and ultimately when—I answer one of those calls.

I don’t want to be scammed, and I doubt anyone actually does. So, moreso lately I have honed techniques and used tools to avoid being tricked by a stranger.

Now… and be honest here: Do you remember the last time you clicked on a link and read the article behind it with the same vigilance with which you probably screen your phone calls? Do you really think those scammers are restricting themselves to the phone system?

How does one fight misinformation and disinformation?

It’s not an easy task. The people who fall for it seem to be shielded from reality by layers upon layers of even more falsehoods.

Smart, if terrible, people are actively using mistruths to gain money and power. The purveyors of those falsehoods devalue the truth by twisting language, reverse accusations, and equivocating minor transgressions with deep evils.

For my part, I—simply—cannot be a news blog, keeping up with the day to day flood of distraction-filled gibberish which seems to the be the tactic-du-jour of the right.

I just can’t leap at every shadow, parry with every lie, and jab at every distraction.

So, I have been trying to think of how to start this site with a purpose of rallying against the dark rise of fascism in the west. Truthfully, I have been struggling with my role, my voice.

But alas, I think I have landed on the idea of starting small by calling out mistruths and misinformation, trying to shine a lantern on disinformation. I may not have all the facts at the tip of my tongue ready to argue convincingly against fake realities, but I think I might have the tools to help others clarify their own evaluations and make their own judgements.