You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. – Exodus 20:16
One of the things that troubles me most when I log onto my social media is the rampant falsehoods, half-truths and deceptions floating around and shared and re-shared by otherwise honorable and truthful people. I see this mostly in political posts but it is not strictly limited to such. Sad thing is most of it can be quickly debunked with just a couple of clicks and a Google search.
I can understand the strong feelings that you might have on one side of the political divide or the other. But does this really excuse passing on a usually blatant falsehood for the purpose of persuading the uninformed to support your side of a political debate? I see this from both conservative (Republican) and liberal (Democrat) posters. It is one thing to question the honor or suitability of a candidate, whether it be for president or congress or local alderman. But, it is quite another to pass on a patent falsehood in your own name. We owe our friends the truth, such as we are able to find.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. – John 8:32
When you see something you want to share, take the time to verify it before you put your stamp on it. Or, isn’t your honor worth it? Yes, it is hard and a lot harder than just clicking share. But this is what our Lord demands of Christians.
Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few. – Ecclesiastes 5:2
To aid you in checking such things. Let me share some of the resources I use to verify things before I post them.
Snopes – Snopes is a myth and urban legends debunking site. While it appears to me that they seem to lean a bit liberal for my tastes, I cannot find fault in any of their articles. They lay out the facts. There are some times that I disagree with some of their conclusions, but I can usually find that from just what they post. They tend to lay out the facts that both support and indict their conclusions. And their resources tend to uncover things that would have taken me days or weeks to find to on my own. They link back to their sources and conceal nothing about how they reach their conclusions, allowing us to follow the facts ourselves. This is usually a good start and often an end point for my research.
Urban Legends at About.com – This is similar to Snopes if less exhaustive. Generally they are right when they research it, but I find they are often days or weeks behind covering new breaking items. They are an excellent source on quotes that are attributed incorrectly that Snopes may not cover.
Tineye – This is a image search engine. This can usually help you find the originals of images or memes and trace their origins. It can be a bit daunting for a novice user. It also has plug ins you can add to your browser to allow right click searching on an image without downloading it to your PC.
Google – We are all probably familiar with Google. It and the other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, etc. can be a fallback if you are not having luck with Snopes or Urban Legends.
Many of the quotes sites out there have a few they have gotten wrong, so I usually set a threshold of being confirmed by three or more sites, before I will trust a quote.
