Some time ago I made a post about the importance of verifying quotes. The information there is still relevant on how, before you claim someone said something, you should at least make sure they said it. Just doing a quick online search for the phrase will, in many cases, quickly solve the question, as many false quotes will quickly reveal themselves to be false because the results will be about people looking into those quotes. Not always, but plenty of times it will. I'm not expecting people to do too much of a deep dive (though that is preferable if possible), but at least do a quick search to see if maybe people are saying the quote isn't legitimate.
This post is on a similar issue which was somewhat mentioned there, which is not specifically on quotes, but claims. It may be of surprise to people, but just because someone makes a statement and puts it on a meme picture doesn't mean the claim, whatever it was, is true. And yet so many people seem to just see someone make a claim and immediately assume it's the case rather than do a little research and verify it. Far too often someone will make an image of some sort that makes a claim, and then people will just spread it around without anyone bothering to check into it (especially if no evidence is offered by the image).
I understand everyone has only finite time and cannot look into every single thing they see. But before you spread something around, you should at least do a quick search to verify that it's accurate.
This also applies to the issue of if you should see something in the news that seems absolutely outrageous in the news. Before you get too outraged, and especially before you actually go and tell others about this new and apparently outrageous piece of news, at least try to look a little more into it. So many pieces of misinformation would be solved if someone were to simply march over to a search engine, do a quick search, and glance over the first few results. Not all of them, of course; some require much more research. But some would. This is especially important in our current age where people try to make headlines or news stories sound more outrageous than they actually are in order to get people to read them.
There wasn't any particular bit of news that prompted this, so I don't have any examples to give. But an impetus for this post was just a general desire to try to remind people of this (well, there was one impetus, someone in a podcast I listened to mentioned their parents taking as serious a misleading headline, and how if they had just done a little search they would have discovered the situation was more benign--though I can't remember exactly what it was about). Much like my earlier post I linked to at the start, maybe this is fruitless; even if someone did see this post, most likely anyone who did would be someone who already is aware of these sorts of things. Still, I figured that spending a short amount of time writing this up would, at most, just waste a small amount of my time. Indeed, that's why people should spare a short amount of time to verify anything they hear about that seems outrageous--it'll take less time for you to do that than it did for me to write this!
(hopefully, the post to follow this one, whenever I get to it, will be of greater substance. Perhaps I'll post an examination of some kind of citation, which seems like it might work as a follow-up to this)
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