“Fake news” is one of the biggest concerns of our time; and with good reason.
If people can’t get the real deal on what’s going on in the world around them, then everything is skewed. Reality itself can start to look a little maddening.
Fake news is one of the primary tools of propagandists, liars and con men. But undue influence and coercive control are only effective tools when a person is unable to differentiate facts from fantasy.
People who don’t have our best interests at heart find it easy to spin a belief into something that sounds like a fact, such as “all vaccines are dangerous” or “homeopathy helped me, so it must work.”
These are just beliefs. But many people accept them as hard, cold facts and get into all kinds of trouble as a result.
Our modern news media hasn’t helped, because they have conflated matters by offering “editorials” and “opinion pieces” to fill in for actual news stories.
Whether it’s done on purpose or not, it can set up a viewer mindset that anything they hear on the news media is factual and reflects objective reality. When, in fact, they are just hearing one person’s opinions about current events.
Knowing the difference between facts and beliefs is the only way to tell if what you are being told is something you should pay attention to or not.
You’ll clearly see the difference between a fact and an opinion in this short video, which should help you develop your own “fact detector”, so you aren’t fooled by fake news:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6dGF12QyOo