Stop the Spread of Misinformation: Sanitize Before You Share

If we have acquired something considering the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic upended all our life practically two decades ago, it is how to sanitize our hands, households, workplaces, and just about something we come across to end the unfold of the virus. Turns out, we also need to have to keep that vigilance when encountering data about COVID-19 in our social media feeds. As the pandemic persisted, dangerous misinformation about solutions, cures, and the vaccines flourished. This environment has underscored the importance of consuming and sharing on line content material with care. And that tactic applies not only to a public wellbeing crisis, but to all data we come across. We need to have to choose methods to make sure a put up, photograph, or meme is “sanitized” before we trust it, like it, pass it on, or endorse it in any way.

The Information Literacy Challenge, a nonpartisan national education nonprofit, has produced methods you can adhere to to make sure that you follow excellent data cleanliness. NLP, a information literacy education leader considering the fact that 2008, delivers applications and methods to aid you attain the abilities, information, and mentality to be clever buyers of information and other data. If we sanitize the approach around our data patterns, we can reduce misleading and fake content material — which can be harmful to our wellbeing and culture — from being widely shared and most likely undertaking hurt.

You really do not need to have any particular skills or engineering to understand how to do so. NLP delivers you with vital advice in its infographic, “Sanitize before you share: four rapid methods to end the unfold of misinformation.” It can choose only 4 methods to retain your self or other people from turning into a “superspreader” of misinformation. And if you discover credible proof that a social media put up isn’t accurate or the supply is unreliable, warn other people in a reply to the put up, and if essential, report it to system administrators.

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