Travelling at the Speed of Lies

You may have heard us say that misinformation and disinformation spread faster and further on social media than the truth. Because of this, it must be the heartbeat of the Church to fact check and resist sharing "half truths", "mostly truths", and certainly "unknown truths".

Social media will expose you to an avalanche of "truths" but the MediaWise Church must inspect each claim, and hold it up to the readily available facts, whether we like those facts or not. 

Take for example this tweet.

It has garnered over 1,500 retweets (shares), while the follow up correction, has only received 1 retweet in the first 48 hours of sharing, and very likely will remain in obscurity.

Why is this? This is fundamentally a conversation concerning what the Bible affirms about human psychology, specifically that "people love the darkness rather than the light" (John 3:19).

The light doesn't justify the anger, fear or exasperation over the current world we live in, and so we refuse to hold any facts that affirm those feelings up to the light. We accept them without scrutiny, because we want them to be true. And since we like the story that that "fact" says, we repost and share it without hesitation or fact checking.

In this specific case, the response could be, "Well does it really matter if there were 42 in ICU or 282?" to which the Christian must respond with a resounding, "Yes, the truth matters!" 

If the argument that the misinformation is trying to win is worth making, then as believers we must make that case with the truth. No compromise. And if we can't make that case with truths, then maybe the case isn't worth making at all.