Does anyone else remember the playground taunt, “Your picture is in the dictionary next to gullible”?
It was usually thrown at someone who believed something ridiculous. Maybe alligators lived in the New York City sewer system, getting bitten by a bat could turn you into a vampire, or the gym teacher secretly lived at the school. We were kids. Someone told a good story, and sometimes that was enough.
The internet has made that problem considerably more complicated.
We have access to more information than at any other point in our lives, yet figuring out what is actually true can feel harder. Social media moves quickly, people share things before checking them, and artificial intelligence has made it possible to create photos, videos, voices, screenshots, and entire stories that look convincing enough to make us hesitate.
Being skeptical used to mean questioning an outrageous claim. Now it sometimes means questioning what appears to be evidence right in front of us.
Looking Real Doesn't Make Something Real
For years, one of the easiest pieces of internet advice was, “Google it.”
That is still useful, but it is no longer enough.
Search results can repeat the same incorrect information. A convincing screenshot can circulate without context. Reviews can be fake. Videos can be edited or generated. An account can imitate a real person or company closely enough that someone scrolling quickly may never notice the difference.
Scammers have become better at this, too. A message no longer has to be full of spelling errors and bizarre requests to look suspicious. It can sound professional, reference something familiar, and create just enough urgency that you react before thinking about it.
That is probably the part that concerns me most. The internet rewards speed, while figuring out whether something is legitimate often requires the opposite.
Slow Down Before You Believe or Share It
I don't think anyone can fact-check every single thing that crosses their feed. I certainly don't. But when something asks me to believe an extraordinary claim, give up personal information, spend money, or immediately share it with someone else, I try to slow down.
The source matters. Is the information coming from the person, company, organization, or publication it claims to represent? Can I find the same information somewhere independent of the original post? If an image or video is doing most of the convincing, is there any context for where it came from?
None of those questions guarantees that you'll get it right. They do, however, create a little distance between seeing something and accepting it.
That distance has become increasingly important.
The Internet Is Very Good at Making Us Feel Something
Fear, outrage, surprise, and disgust are powerful reasons to stop scrolling. They are also powerful reasons to share something before checking whether it is true.
That doesn't mean every emotional story is manipulative or every shocking thing is false. Sometimes something really is outrageous. But I've become much more suspicious when a piece of content seems designed primarily to make me react.
Social media has always given people a place to share thoughts and opinions. Now those opinions can be packaged with increasingly convincing images, narration, statistics, or other material that gives them the appearance of fact.
It requires more effort from the person on the receiving end.
I don't particularly like that reality. I'd rather be able to look at something and trust that what I'm seeing actually happened. But I also don't think we can operate that way anymore.
The old advice was not to believe everything you read on the internet. I think we've reached the point where we shouldn't automatically believe everything we see or hear there either.
And if someone tells you your picture is in the dictionary next to gullible, you should probably still check for yourself.
