Junior Guadelupe Martinez has always tried to avoid misinformation on the internet and television about the upcoming presidential election. However, she has found it increasingly harder recently.
“I try to avoid misinformation by making sure that there are several articles covering the topic from trustworthy sources,” Martinez said. “I make sure that the sources I use don’t have a past of faking news. Now there are so many different people saying different things it’s hard to figure out.”
The use of social media has fueled many false rhetorics and falsified claims. According to an investigation conducted by NewsGuard in 2022, 20 percent of results given by social media platform TikTok about major news topics, including politics, contained some form of misinformation.
Users often post baseless claims that have been proven false. Elon Musk, the owner of the social media platform X, has made many false claims, including that the Democratic Party is responsible for “importing” illegal immigrants to vote in the upcoming presidential election. Due to Musk having over 200 millions followers, these false claims are further amplified.
“I don’t use social media that much, but I just don’t think it’s a reliable source from what I’ve seen,” sophomore Nadia Buer said. “Anyone can say anything and no one checks it. You have to base it off of previous information and articles and see if other people have co-signed on it and said, yes this is reliable.”
This election cycle, many people are in a similar predicament as all over the internet and television many false claims have been made and repeated, potentially misleading voters.
Former President Donald J. Trump has made an unsubstantiated claim that Haitian immigrants have been eating people’s pets in Springfield, OH, during the Presidential Debate on Sept. 10, even though they have been proven false by the township’s police chief.
Many students, such as senior Franklin Johnson try to stick to traditional news sources such as ABC and NBC News in lieu of social media due the perceived unreliability of it.
“I usually get the news about this election from places like NBC News,” Johnson said. “They tell a lot of reliable stories about the election and show the debates. Social media can have a lot of untrue information that’s biased.”
In order to remedy the issue of misinformation, organizations such as the News Literacy Project have resources in order to combat this growing issue. The NLP offers a comprehensive misinformation dashboard, where many types of misinformation are logged and analyzed, and show viral examples that have been proven false, such as the claim made by former president Trump about immigrants “eating” local resident’s pets.
“It’s super important to see what’s real and what’s not,” Buer said. “I think that misinformation is bad for everyone in general and we need to be able to have reliable information on these topics.”
