Believing Everything You Read Online

It's because everybody knows the cake is a lie, the internet said so!

Okay in all seriousness, honestly I think you can boil it all down to people just being too lazy to do their own research. So they kind of just go with the flow, I see this so often in the YouTuber influencer community in particularly.

you were able to make observations of internet culture when you were like 5 years old? or are you just echoing what older people told you later on

You can't believe much of anything you see on corporately/gov run media let alone what you read online. You have to view everything with a critical lense and decide what to believe since the propaganda starts even when we were kids.

It became common because people have no interest learning. If you don't like learning you don't like reading, if you don't like reading you can't do research.

@MissHeed I don't feel that's exclusive to modern internet though - but if it IS, then the same question applies: why? What changed?

"Believing Everything You Read Online"

Sounds like a Republican.

"Believing Everything You Read Online"

Sounds like a Republican.

For a lot of people it's easier to them to just accept anything that feels right or has fancy words on it because they don't want to do the booooring job of searching for information and check sources, as long at something feels logical they just accept it, what you descrive in your post feels more like people are ragebaiting more and more, or they make controversial statements just for attention, We humans are social creatures, and sometimes as long as someone listens to us, that is enough to satisfy our desire for interaction, what is the best way to get attention but to stirr up the hornet's nest?

Tiktok has created a new rule for people to question if specific videos or pictures are AI.
As those who are not familliar can easily believe in forged or fake content if it looks realistic

You do this if you wanna know if what you see online is real

@grok dis true?

If people didn't do this, then MAL forum would be even more deserted.

I'd say biggest reason is the shift in usage and how widespread the internet is now compared to 25 or so years back.

Back then you'd make the conscious choice to hop on the net and do some stuff, but it was far fewer people and even those people that used the net regularly spent only little time there and the majority of their time in real life in real social interactions with friends and family. Also you had to boot up your clunky, slow pc to even start browsing.

Nowadays everybody is on the internet and probably the first thing lots of people do is a single tap on their phone each morning to be online.

The thing with "believing everything the read online" is just a manifestation of usage. Before that, it was "believing anything you heard some chap talking in the pub". Just another form nowadays, but the same underlying mechanic. People have always been lazy and always will be.

The difference between back then and now is that a lot of people's social lives these days work online. Back then up to the mid or even late 00s, there was no phone or something constantly notifying you of new messages, texts were limited severly in characters and had to be paid extra, people only really got online for a few hours but still spend most of their social life meeting with other people in person

Now when a lot of social interactions start to be mostly online with people you mostly only know online, there comes an effect into play in which people grow more emotionally affected by them. Hence why people end up taking things too seriously even with things that look like trolling. Plus, it seems like the longer immersion with Internet communities has faciliated getting into bubbles with people who think like oneself so instead of having more moderate people trying to get along for the sake of harmony because otherwise there would be no chance at socialization, we get more and more people freely expressing themselves on the one hand, but also having higher standards when it comes to what the other person's mindset should be on the other hand. So the real reason things get more heated these days is because due to a lack of proper bonds in person and a lack of need to moderate coupled with higher standards on the opinions of the other person, people take things too seriously way too early with people they only know through text

"Believing Everything You Read Online"

Sounds like a Republican.

@LifelineByNature It was just a joke Lol.

Nah Republicans are worst. Sorry to go off topic.

@LifelineByNature Definitely don't wanna lock it lol. I hate all that politics stuff. Funny all the stuff I been seeing lately.

Answer your question I agree with MissHeed and Rohan. I fact check everything, Research everything then I find evidence then I'll believe it.

@Zarutaku I think we just need a cultural shift where we can discuss things normally without rage being the catalyst.

That would probably result in less engagement, though.

@Noboru I agree in some ways, but I think with net access being so easy now, we should be able to fact check things even easier. Instead, we've reached a compounding effect where people need to think and speak faster and faster than before. You can access the information quicker, so you need to opine quicker. No time to check, just regurgitate.

The lack of proper bonds is also a good point - and also, as a result, the lack of empathy for other people. Folk don't view other people as humans these days, and it's really obvious in how they speak to others (or about the misfortune of others).

@LifelineByNature The issue with "fact check" is that people seem to have forgotten how to use their common sense and instead trust in some sort of authority even if it turns out that that very "authority" has lied. Otherwise, the whole circus from 2020 to 2022-2023 couldn't have happened. But yes, you can say that there is more pressure to position yourself, too

It's potentially harder to properly feel into the shoes of other people when you can't even see their expressions in person. There's also the thing that socialization used to also be more about just being and doing things together if and when needed, like with renovations and such, in which cases it wasn't really useful to behave antagonistic to others when their help could be useful. If it's just online, then it seems like people can be easily replaced as soon as they stop being entertaining or don't seem to be on the same wavelength anymore. That's the crucial difference here

im sure most become a victim of fake news too myself included its just the nature of the internet right now so all we can do is become more cautious and less wrong

Part of it is because most of such replies are bots, and part of it is because of the replies that are from real people, a lot of people are just too lazy to fact-check things. There is a political angle to it as well because a startling number of people will reject any piece of information that does not fit their worldview; here the issue is not that people are too lazy to fact-check, but that they simply reject information that doesn't confirm their bias. Why would they care about facts if they've already decided that the facts are wrong?

@Noboru The whole circus from 2020-2023 happened because instead of actually just twiddling their thumbs for a month until the virus died off, folk couldn't stop breaking curfew. That's the unfortunate reality.

Scientific illiteracy is also to blame, to be fair - folk continually try to bring up "but they changed their minds!" as if that's not exactly how safeguarding works in the first place. It's almost like most of these people have never worked in a professional setting at all: which, for the most part, is exactly correc.

In fact, I think this is becoming less common.

@Noboru The whole circus from 2020-2023 happened because instead of actually just twiddling their thumbs for a month until the virus died off, folk couldn't stop breaking curfew. That's the unfortunate reality.

Scientific illiteracy is also to blame, to be fair - folk continually try to bring up "but they changed their minds!" as if that's not exactly how safeguarding works in the first place. It's almost like most of these people have never worked in a professional setting at all: which, for the most part, is exactly correc.