There are at least two scary monsters lurking on the internet. One is the Green-Eyed Monster (more commonly known as Jealousy) and it likes to attack writers. For a blog post about that, click
here. The other one is Fear.
Fear can be a vicious, hungry beast. It can't be fed fast enough. And when it's fed, it has the potential to grow and grow exponentially, overcoming and overtaking everything in its destructive path. This kind of fear especially likes to lurk on the internet.
In the early days of email and the internet, fear crept up in those emails. Do you remember? The ones that your retired uncle liked to forward to every single person in his contact list. As the internet evolved, so did Internet Fear. Now it revels in "shares" on social media pages. Its hope and dream is to become a viral sensation.
We used to be able to rely on journalist integrity. It was actually a thing. Journalists and reporters were trained in finding multiple source support and finding and getting sources to go on the record. Remember the movie All the President's Men? It was like that.
But our world, and our news, has evolved. In the rush to be the first to post information, that integrity can't help but suffer. The larger outlets, and the more solid sources, manage this easily by constantly updating their stories. They've evolved from print to online formats, and I like to believe their integrity has evolved at the same pace.
However, it's so easy to forget that we can't always rely on journalist reporting in the same way we once could. It's so easy to forget, that not every source is legitimate, not everything you read is true. As a result, sometimes we are baited into reposting stuff that sounds like the truth, when maybe, just maybe, it isn't. Internet Fear LOVES when that happens. It jumps up and down and claps its hands shouting, "Yay!"
We've all seen THOSE posts. The ones that sound true on purpose and the first initial reaction upon reading it is, "OMG, that's terrible!"
This is slightly conspiracy theorist of me, but what if some of those posts came from people or groups that WANT us to be afraid? What if, those posts come from someone who knows how to manipulate fear to do exactly what they want, because they know that fear has an insatiable appetite?
Let's suppose I wasn't such a solid upstanding citizen, and I had a bone to pick with a company about something. Or maybe even say, I was a competitor of that company. Or maybe even, I believe I'm fighting the "good" fight and I want everyone else to be afraid enough to fight it with me -- it wouldn't be hard to establish an official sounding website and write a scathing report filled with lots of fearful accusations, designed to induce fear. Post it in a few social media outlets and viola! That kind of stuff goes viral in minutes and the target company takes a hit. Sometimes a big one.
If only, there was somewhere we could go. Some, universal place we could check out suspicious sounding reports to verify their accuracy before we fall into that trap so delicately laid by that ferocious Internet Fear beast. Oh, wait....there is!
If you have never heard of
snopes.com, it's time to check it out. Snopes is a non-partisan website, dedicated to verifying internet rumors. They collect rumors and reports, and research them. They verify sources and they stamp it with a result: True, False or Combination. I love it.
I love it because when I read a Facebook post that shares a mother's status that her little girl has been snatched out of a shopping cart by an evil kidnapping ring that lurks in Walmart pretending to be social workers, I can go to Snopes and read with my own eyes that it's not true. Whew. I didn't think our world was that terrible.
In this day and age, it's healthy to harbor a small dose of conspiracy theorist - it means we are thinking for ourselves and not succumbing blindly to the fear. When that little voice inside says, "that's too terrible to be true," maybe, just maybe, that little voice is right.
Call me optimistic - but never naive - for believing in the best of our world. And it doesn't mean that there isn't a time and a place for fear: It warns us of danger and can bring positive change. (Cue the drama over Donald Trump...but that's a post for a different day). For now, maybe, if we are all careful not to succumb to Internet Fear blindly, this world won't seem like such a scary place, and that will ultimately make it better.
