Community > Fake News
Count the times you hear or read the phrase “fake news” in a day. We see it on the President’s Twitter feed, watch skits about it on late-night comedy shows, and read well-researched articles about its history and impact. It has permeated jokes we make with our friends and certainly has changed what folks consider reliable journalism. Fake news is confusing and muddies the waters of who and what is trustworthy.
Unfortunately, as Non Wels asserts:
For better, but most likely worse, fake news looks here to stay.
The level of information consumed by an average US adult is steadily increasing annually. More of us are relying on social media to get news at a time when foreign governments have been found to be using such platforms to meddle in United States politics.
If we are getting our news mostly from feeds that we curate, we are at a high risk of consuming news that already confirms our point of view. This is called confirmation bias. And everyone does it. But finding our information only from perspectives that reflect our own keep our worldview small… at a time when our worldview, and our empathy, can and should be ever-expanding.
These trends obviously raise concerns about the truthfulness of news. However, it also indicates that we need to critically examine the way we view and process the world. Before we know whose voice we can trust we have to know where we, ourselves, stand. We have to understand what news we’d be most likely to deem “fake” and then ask ourselves why.
Becoming a conscious consumer of information requires that you map out your own perspective. This means interrogating how the identities you hold, the privileges enjoy, and/or oppressions you face influence the way you navigate the world.
As individuals, we have a unique combination of identities that inform how we think and act. To acknowledge and name qualities of your own perspective is to challenge objectivity. Just as your identities, privileges, and oppressions shape the way you take in information, other folks are influenced and shaped by their identities, privileges, and oppressions as well. Our individual perspectives guide us in how we speak and write as much as in how we interpret information.
Get a notebook to chart this stuff out. Once you take notice of how you move in the world, you can keep track of how your perspective shifts or grows.
Consider these questions. Write out your answers.
What identities do you hold that shape how you see and influence the world? What issues presented in the news illicit a strong emotional reaction? Who do you follow on Twitter… and who do you not? Take into account the people in your life: the people you spend time with, the people whose opinions you value. What identities do they hold? Why do you find them trustworthy?
Next, identify ways in which you can and do support yourself and your identities. Surround yourself with community (online, or IRL) who affirm you. Important parts of my identity are being queer, being a librarian, being a godperson. To affirm these aspects of my identity, I prioritize relationships with my queer friends, I am active in a local professional library association, and I spend a significant amount of time hanging out with my godbaby. Dedicating time and space to parts of myself I value grounds me. It is from a grounded place that I then feel able to critically examine other ways I see the world around me because I am confident in my capacities for good.
Try to identify your blindspots. This part is tricky and requires honest refection and perhaps the feedback of your most trusted friends.
Questions to consider:
What privileges do you have and are you are aware of? What are perspectives that are hard for you to consider? Whose voice do you find yourself not trusting? What perspectives do you not live? What perspectives is your community lacking? What parts of history have you not examined? Why you were taught history the way you were? What do you wish you would have learned earlier? What new insights are hard for you to believe?
Answer these questions for yourself honestly and without judgment.
Then, seek out voices you don’t typically consider. Read outside your normal interests, follow new folks on Twitter, download a podcast or two about something unfamiliar, listen to a new radio show, try a different 10 o’clock news station. During your commute, devote your time to considering outside perspectives. Notice what’s said that doesn’t sit right with you, other things that you agree with.
Write about it. And keep writing. Writing will help you keep record of yourself — the questions you have, the answers you are brought to, how your perspective is expanding.
(quick plug: check out what’s happening in your local library!)
Set your boundaries and know when to log off. Know that you don’t have to pursue knowledge places that makes you feel unsafe. For example, as a queer person you don’t have to dive head-first into information produced by anti-LGBT organizations. Your safety and health is important and you should prioritize yourself, always.
On the flip side, understand the difference between feeling uncomfortable and feeling unsafe. As a person of privilege it can be uncomfortable to hear accounts of folks who do not enjoy the same privileges as me. But my discomfort does not excuse me from learning about how other people navigate the world. Having white privilege does not excuse me from learning about or combatting racism. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Luvvie Ajayi writes, most clearly, about the responsibility of privilege in her book, I’m Judging You: The Do-Better Manual:
“In whatever way you can, do something to lift someone else up. One of the easiest ways to do that? Be an ally, by living in ways that respect others who are marginalized.”
Being an ally means being self-aware, humble, and learning continuously. It means apologizing promptly and sincerely when you muck up (because if you are an ally, you will muck up) and then doing better.
Fake news is here to stay, but we don’t need to be scared of it.
As long as we know where we stand, we can more honestly sort through news — fake or not. As long as we know what voices we most easily believe and what we most easily discredit, we make room for our perspectives to expand. We learn how to challenge our own thinking, how to be challenged by others, and how to challenge others. We learn how to show up as allies and build entire communities on the basis of empathy and curiosity. We learn how to hold each other up and hold each other accountable.
Fake news can’t trump community.
