Avoiding Misinformation on the Internet

In a previous post I gave an explanation of misinformation on the internet and the dangers that can come with it. I also went over some examples of what it may look like and how it spreads. Since then I have continued to find more research on the subject and figured out more ways false information spreads through the web and especially on social media. This has come up a lot especially with covid and the vaccine becoming a very popular subject with a lot of fallacies on platforms such as facebook and other sites. I think people should be more careful while browsing these sites so they make sure they don’t get tricked into believing something incorrectly presented that is put out online. MIT made an informative article about this problem and solutions with the election back in 2020 that could be helpful for maybe some context on this issue.

For my agent of change project though, I decided to make a video and put it out on youtube, in which I speak about how to recognize and avoid misinformation on the internet. I decided to do this because if I were trying to reach my target audience of people online looking for some insight on this topic, I figured the best way to do this was to post a video online with me giving out some things I learn/advice on the subject. I enjoyed putting the video together and rounding up the information, it was overall a good experience though the results are yet to be seen. This is because I just recently posted my video and the goal of this project is to help people over time as if someone were to search up this topic a year from now, hopefully my video would pop up and then I would know if this project was successful or not.

After completing and uploading everything I feel as if I have learned a lot from my research for this topic. While putting my posts and video together I believe I actually learned some pretty useful tricks for the future as things become more heavily reliant on technology (Zoom and virtual learning is an example of how things could go that direction). If I had to change anything I might have reached out to more people to talk to them and get their opinion on this topic, but I’m not sure how I would have fit that in my final video. As I mentioned before this project has been a helpful thing for myself and I hope that I can see my project become something helpful to others going forward.