In June 2016, researchers at Columbia University and the French National Institute published a study concluding that 59% of links shared on social media are never clicked and read and that people share news stories based on headlines alone.

To demonstrate the point, Yackler Magazine published an article July 2016 with a clickbait title: “Scientists Say Giant Asteroid Could Hit Earth Next Week, Causing Mass Devastation.” The first two paragraphs of the fake article were dedicated to the impending death-by-space-rock — about the number of words that would be scraped by automatic social media reposting software. In the third paragraph, author Elizabeth Bromstein conceded that she was “totally messing with you”:

In the last paragraph of the story, Bromstein asked readers to not to give away the trick, but instead comment using a color.

I posted a news story to my personal Facebook page at the time and shared it online. Thankfully, many Sedona readers said things like “this asteroid is coming out of the blue” or “thanks for the good ‘red,’” but unfortunately many others shared the story on their own pages or posted comments lamented the coming annihilation.

Social media was conceived as a means of human connection across long distances where friends, family and work colleagues could share stories, photos, thoughts and well-wishes. Companies and customers used it to connect, voters and elected officials used it to communicate about political issues and activists used it to mobilize.

But through exposure, use and habit, social media became less of a medium or a tool and grew into a place in an of itself. Now self-stylized “influencers” exist in the social media space divorced from the real world, forming parasocial relationships with “followers.” Careers are born, live and die in the digital space without ever touching grass.

When social media first emerged, people in the real word saw it as a novelty for connection, but not “real” in the traditional sense of other public and semi-public private spaces, that is, until the first people faced real-world repercussions for what they did online — getting fired for a tweet, disciplined over a Facebok post, divorced over flirty messages or outright sexting to a person outside the marriage or defeated in an election due to comments made on a microblogging page. All this long before YouTube grew from a place for cat videos into a media platform and a decade before TikTok.

Users warned each other that what they read or saw online wasn’t always real or accurate, and it was common at the time to remind each other that.

A tongue-in-cheek post or video is one thing, when people are in on the joke. We did that recently with our April Fools Day story, but planted enough clear clues throughout for readers to pick up that it was humor not serious, ending with the clear and unambiguous reveal in the last sentence.

But the intentional spreading of fake news via video, text or image with the explicit intent to deceive and continue to do so is quite another. For the last decade, election cycles are met with intentionally misleading or outright fake news intending to deceive voters in the space between an election’s start and the ballot box because political power is worth more than being known as a truthful and honest elected official.

Other users post falsehoods to social media not to elicit change, but purely because the social media itself is the revenue generator. One such person claimed falsely in a video that the city is being sued for millions, not because he wants the city to pay for legitimate damages or for judicial relief for an infringement but because the video itself generates money based on the number of views. The more outrageous the video title, the more clicks, the more pennies in his pocket which add up so he can make rent. It’s all part of a sad pattern of monetizing outrage from users who don’t know any better, won’t check for accuracy and will just move onto the next outrage clip when the video ends.

If something shows up on your smartphone that seems to shatter everything you hold dear, double-check the facts. Question the claims. Ask what’s not being included in the curated and edited post, image or video. Don’t trust the comments that only reinforce the outrage but don’t answer any of the questions you have.

If you can prove the story is false, do your social media friends a favor and post a comment linking to a real story rebutting it.

We should re-normalize honesty as a virtue for our elected officials instead of the raw political power they bring to “our side” — and the hellfire they can bring down on perceived political “enemies.” We should support social media creators who want to educate and illuminate, not those seeking to make a buck off our ignorance, outrage and short attention span.