The internet is much like a spider web of all that exists, and all that is fictional. If you aren’t careful, you can get stuck in this web, in more ways than one. The internet, world wide web, etc, whatever you want to call it, is everywhere, all across the world. I am using it right now to save my writing on a laptop, to do research, to talk to my friends without talking to them, even you are using it right now, I presume, to read these words. The internet is everywhere.

The internet is everywhere for a reason, too. It’s because it’s a valuable source of information. If we don’t know something, we just ‘google’ it. Within seconds, we have (potentially) expert grade or firsthand information on any subject we want to learn about, right at our fingertips. This makes minorities look larger online, too. On the other hand, it can be too easy to get information sometimes.

I mean there is a lot of misinformation. There are people who, for jokes and laughs, their own beliefs, or to make someone look dumb, post misinformation on sites like wikipedia or spotify. This misinformation can go unnoticed and cause issues for a lot of people, students and adults alike. A modern example would be Joe Rogan’s Spotify podcast. It is becoming well known that he has been spreading misinformation, along with post Malone. 

Misinformation is a very wide umbrella term in my opinion, and this umbrella protects stereotypes from the rain. If there was a bad stereotype about a minority group, you could imagine that it would be really bad for their reputation. And it would not be easy to gain that reputation back, as they’re called a minority for a reason. A good modern day example would be the LGBT. They have a lot of general stereotypes, more bad than good. A big stereotype is that a lot of gay relationships are really toxic. There are no facts to back this stereotype up. I believe that there are an equal amount of abusive gay relationships as there are straight, ratio-wise. That doesn’t mean all information online is bad, just check your sources.

Speaking of sources, there are a lot of different sources for things like politics, too. Have you ever heard the term “fake news”? This is a term people use to try and downplay a news station that has their opponent’s beliefs. It may not always be fake news, it could be factual. I believe that news stations like that always have their own views, so I just don’t watch the news that much. The main 2 types of fake news I am talking about are False Connections, when the headlines and captions of a story are false, and False Context, when true stories are shared with false contextual information and evidence.

There is a lot of misinformation in politics. An example of False Connections in politics is from a story in 2018 posted to social media about Trump’s foreign immigration policies. While the story about the missing immigrant children is true, the picture that was given along with the story was from Obama’s 2014 term showing steel cages along the border with children in said cages. This made the whole story seem way worse than what had actually been written, and basically worse than what had actually happened. “Democrats mistakenly tweet 2014 pictures from Obama’s term showing children from the border in steel cages. They thought it was recent pictures in order to make us look bad, but backfires” (Flaherty & Woodward, 2018). This is a really good example of misinformation as a whole. It’s not just politics, it’s any and all information anywhere. 

My point is, people use misinformation because it is an effective and easy tool to falsely ‘prove a point’, or just make situations look worse or better, sometimes like a corrupt truth, or even just a not so blatant lie, so be careful where you get your information.