SIFT
SIFT is something that I have been using my whole life without knowing what it was called. Odds are I have probably heard it before but it was called something else. This is something that I wish many more people did but it’s clear many people don’t do that anymore. It takes two seconds to go on the internet to figure that out. If I see any news on social media I don’t take it at face value. I will do my own research and see if any reliable news sources are reporting it. I have seen people turn tweets into news stories that come from some random account with one post, one follower, and that was created one day ago. Then these stories will spread like wildfire, then people who look at those stories at a quick glance thinking new sources are using a reliable source but they’re not. What doesn’t help is you have articles that you have to pay for so all you can read is the title itself and maybe the first paragraph because it is blocked behind a paywall so all anyone has to go on is the title which may exaggerate what the story is talking about just to get you to read it.
Around Thanksgiving of 2023, news broke that Melissa Barrera was unexpectedly fired from the iconic horror slasher franchise Scream, Melissa played arguably the lead character Sam Carpenter in Scream 5 and Scream 6 which revitalized the franchise after being dormant since 2011. Everything seemed on track for Scream 7 until Melissa was fired by the studio Spyglass, who owns the rights to Scream, she was fired because of her social media post about the Hamas-Israel war. This didn’t go over well fans were outraged by this rash decision by Spyglass, it even came out that Melissa found out about her firing through social media and her co-star Jenna Ortega, who played her sister Tara Carpenter, also ended up leaving the project shortly after. The word going around was that she left because of a scheduling issue, but no one believed it, everyone knew she left because of what happened to Melissa.
This is a recent time I used SIFT because I first saw this news on social media and I didnt believe it so I did some research and the only report I could find was some random site that I had never heard of before. Then reading their article it didn’t sound too reliable so I chucked it up to fake news. Once the major publications like Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, etc. I started writing about it is when I finally believed it. As someone who follows almost the whole entertainment field from movies to tv shows to video games there are rumors constantly flying around some times they are easy to spot out if they are fake or not but sometimes you have cases of when there is smoke there is fire which usually means the rumor is real or you’ll come across rumors that have sprinkles of truth throughout them but then a whole bunch of made up stuff around it.
I find it annoying because sometimes you have stories that you can’t even wrap your brain around how they exist or how people believe them but we live in a world where people care more about money than the actual truth.
