Now is the time to level-up your fact-checking skills.
An anecdote about bat soup and a call to arms to try a little harder (with bonus insults).
I can hear you groaning from here. You’re tired of homework and self-improvement, and not looking for yet more things to do that you won’t actually do because you’re tired and cooped up and baking another loaf of bread.
Hang on, though. This is so much more important for our future than you can imagine, and here’s why.
If I ask you to give me an example where someone misquoted you or misunderstood you, you can probably give me a hundred. If someone actually wronged you because they didn’t bother to check the facts? Heck, you’re going to remember that for the rest of your life.
Imagine what that’s like for entire countries flinging mud all over one another.
No, I’m not talking about the government. I’m talking about us.
Here’s one quick and hellish example of how we’re all a bunch of idiots:
Just two weeks ago I woke up to find a huge number of my friends on social media talking about how terrible it is that this whole virus debacle started with bats — okay, I said to myself, bleary-eyed and not having had my tea. Okay, I’ve heard worse — and how “we” need to step in and prevent the Chinese people from eating these beautiful creatures — Hang on.
First of all, leave me out of your “we”. If that was you, by the way, insisting that “we” need to shove our hands up a culture we know nothing about? Yeah, I totally thought you were a complete goat-headed, pea-brained, bungling crockpot, and made a mental note to never listen to a word you say. I’m sorry, but that’s just how it is.
I’d heard this “Coronavirus came from eating bat soup” thing before but never imagined people actually believed it. How come?
First line of defense — it sounds ridiculous.
No, I’m not saying everything that sounds ridiculous is false. Lots of ridiculous things are true. The Rolling Stones were still touring before the quarantine.
But if something sounds ridiculous you owe it to yourself to investigate before you say it. Like I did, just now, when I googled whether the Rolling Stones are, in fact, still alive.
That same morning, bleary-eyed and half asleep, I checked up on the bat soup theory.
Second line of defense — it’s shocking.
I found out that this loose, unconfirmed theory became pop fact mainly because of a video of a Chinese woman eating a whole bat that went viral on YouTube.
Now, not everything that’s shocking is automatically wrong or fake, but when something as vital as information about a disease that might kill us makes this much of a headline? At least double-check.
What happened instead was that the entire internet took a video from 2016 by a travel blogger in an entirely different part of the world as gospel truth. And that’s just embarrassing.
Third line of defense — a simple search using the right terms.
“Did Coronavirus really come from people eating bat soup?” is something I was ashamed to type into Google, and yet there I was, doing it for you.
Searching for any “fact” using the words “did it really”, “myth”, “exposed”, “fake” etc. will immediately show you, at the very least, whether the information you’re talking about is contested.
And you know what? If it’s still being debated by the scientific community, and you’re not a scientist, you don’t get to state it as a fact.
When Google was done laughing at me, I found out that particular myth was under no debate whatsoever — it had already been put to rest. Reputable sources like Sciencedaily had already published this:
Not shocking, not headline-worthy, and hidden in a boring research paper — therefore, nobody noticed.
Fourth line of defense — compare sources.
When the claims are being disputed and you find evidence on both sides, one quick way to figure out which is more likely to be true is to compare exactly who is doing the talking.
On the one hand, you have Youtube videos and Buzzfeed, on the other hand, you have Sciencedaily, NBC news, and Health. Would it be pretty safe to say you have a good idea of which might be more reliable? Yes, it would.
Final line of defense — don’t be a jerk.
Here’s the thing. You think it’s not a big deal — you were wrong on the internet, right? Everyone is.
The problem is that a lot of people were wrong very loudly all at the same time.
A lot of people with no connection to Chinese culture presumed to make decisions on their behalf and dictate what “needs to happen” in their country.
Thing is, even if someone somewhere putting something in their mouth did cause all of this, you have no right to blame them or their culture for what is a natural calamity that could have happened to anyone.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m a nomad. I move, I travel, and I can’t stand the idea of being locked in one place. This quarantine is very hard for me, but I’m working through it because I know that we’ll go back to open borders sooner or later.
Every single time we point fingers, blame other countries, and profess our ignorance and self-centeredness, we make it a little more likely that those borders won’t be open when we need them.
Every time we’re racist and bigoted, we’re giving people with power we can’t even understand an excuse to wage a war we don’t want that will exact a price we can’t afford.
So, let’s not do that. Let’s be critical thinkers first, and kind people always. That’s all I’m saying.
Stay safe out there.
