Social media has united us on a level like no other. It has given us immeasurable opportunities to do good.
This is powerful. Extremely powerful.
But the tales of history don’t tell us a story of how excessive power makes people better humans. Instead, it corrupts.
We can only walk so far whilst holding onto both truth and power; we will eventually carry only one.
In early 2020 it became abundantly clear that we had not learned our lessons about the catastrophically deep and calculated use of misinformation. Aka #fakenews.
When you show people what they want to see, you can make them believe what you want them to believe.
For years the waters have been slowly filled with the sediment of misguided sentiment. For the last few years, they’ve been vigorously stirred.
There are two ways to clear the mud and improve the clarity: filters and time.
In time, all the falsehoods will be laid bare as truth will always stand the test of time. The sediment will settle if we can stop the stirring.
But if we can’t stop the stirring, we need to use filters. We need to put boundaries in place to safeguard our integrity. We need to reduce the sizes of our trusted networks and treat anything outside of those with severe speculation.
If it’s digital, it can be manipulated. If we don’t trust the source, we can be manipulated. And that is why we are where we are. We have allowed too many versions of the truth to prevail at the cost of surrendering our personal power.
