"News is only the first rough draft of history."

There’s an article from the BBC about the Chattanooga shootings and the viral social media posts that have come out because of it. They discuss one in particular which claimed a connection of the shooter to ISIS, and it’s brief, but the reporter notes that the FBI has yet to state a motive, and currently nothing connects the shooter to ISIS.

What they didn’t note was how quickly this post, and others, came up. We’re talking within hours of the shooting. I know this for a fact, as I (and countless others) were glued to twitter as reports started coming in. And why not? It’s immediate, after all. If you can’t be in front of the TV, it’s a quick way to find information.

It’s also totally dangerous. I don’t know how many personal accounts with the hashtag #chattanooga came up saying stuff that was completely wrong. And then connecting it back to a news site. The teacher in me says, “well, go to the original and confirm,” but if you’re constantly refreshing your phone to see news of a city right next to your hometown, you’re not going to stop and fact-check.

And there’s our dilemma.

Social media is amazing as far as advancing news. 2009 changed everything. Remember Captain Sully and the plane in the Hudson river? Twitter broke the story first, from some guy on the ferry headed to pick up the travelers. Remember the Iranian elections? People world-wide changed their location to “Tehran” so the government couldn’t locate the real protesters. It all changed from there. The world got so much smaller, man, and in some ways that’s a really good thing.

Except for when we take everything we see online as truth. And in a panic, it’s easy to do. We are used to the immediacy now, so when a news agency waits to release information and updates (because there are many instances where they, too, release wrong information in haste) we turn to people passing along what they heard from someone else, or people making guesses.

Sometimes hearsay and guesses turn out to be the truth. But a 50/50 shot doesn’t make the person who said it right.

This is all coming from spending 10 months every year going over quality research in the classroom. And it’s also coming from coming of age in the '90s, when the mentality was “trust no one” (and thanks for giving us the slogan, Chris Carter). You want me to believe something? You better have credible facts to back it up. Pictures or it didn’t happen, as the saying goes.

But even too much skepticism is dangerous, because it leads to things like the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists. It’s a thin line we tread these days, and on one side is ignorance, and on the other is mass hysteria. Somehow we have to stay in the in-between.

Title quote from Alan Barth