Searching and (mostly) debunking the things my mom forwards me has been a long time hobby of mine. Snopes has made my job so much easier, now I can just hit reply and paste the Snopes link back to her.
The internet is filled with so much easily accessible information, it's incredible, but you need the basic skills to determine what claims to believe in order to make any sense of it.
Now if only my family could believe Snopes. They are too set in their thoughts to believe not everything is some conspiracy theory.
Now when I debunk stuff off Facebook they continue to disagree with me because I don't have "all the facts", not like they do either.
Sometimes a simple thing is just too simple for them, those coin shortages really are some sort of mass government takeover and not just caused by people not paying with coins as much & places being shutdown and less likely to redistribute coins back into the economy. sigh
... Now for my actual rant.. While I feel pointless I like to show for contrast.
Now if I actually bring up the attorney general for the US state of Oregon suing the Feds for actually kidnapping people eh... That's apparently not an interesting story and protesters or rioters in their eyes deserve it. I understand I don't know the whole story, but I think there is something there to follow.
As someone said to me recently, this is basically Vietnam story wise. Extremes on both sides.
Lol, my URL links, despite not thinking it helps much because I start off with the bias thinking this is wrong, because of the many different videos across the country showing protesters are not all rioters. And the freedom to protest is a right in my eyes.
Violence begets violence begets violence begets violence.
And yes, I know Obama signed this into law so legally the Feds have the right to randomly nap you but I still think it's a very questionable law.
They need to understand that Snopes is not an authoritative source on its own. It provides links to other sources that provide information about the claim.
People also need to understand that those links are also not authoritative, and that what links are provided (and ones that are not) are a result of human choice, and humans are known to be fallible in many different ways.
The internet is filled with so much easily accessible information, it's incredible, but you need the basic skills to determine what claims to believe in order to make any sense of it.