Facebook is considered to be one of the largest social media platforms in the world today. People use it to see other people’s lives, what vacations friends are going on, to post about their new puppy, and to announce big life events. Facebook is also being used as a place to stream information about politics and current events that are occurring daily. While this is an easy way to get information, I have to question, is it the most legitimate and trustworthy way?

Probably not, honestly. How many times have you seen a meme or a photo with just a sentence or two of text about a certain event? I know I see that on the daily, probably 10 to 20 times as I scroll through my news feed. It's easy to read something and form an opinion automatically. But that's just the problem, we need to stop getting information ‘the easy way’ because that's most likely incorrect information or only half the story that we need to know. And I don’t think I can even say that its only our generation doing this either. Everyone that uses some sort of social media is so used to the idea of instant gratification - you post a picture and get instant ‘likes’ telling you that people enjoy your post. This idea might transfer over into people’s thinking skills where people form an opinion after seeing just one piece of information, instead of doing their own research. This worries me because remember that rule we all know? “Not everything is true that you read on the internet”? Yeah...I think a lot of people have forgotten that or they just push it to the back of their mind because "so and so" knows what they are talking about because they are really avid Facebook users who share a lot of memes and articles. I’ll bet that the majority of those people don’t look further into what ever they are sharing though. For example: someone shared a meme that had a picture of two criminals side by side. The text read, “This man was jailed for six years for growing weed in his backyard while this man raped a woman and was only jailed for six months: how is that fair?” After reading through some of the comments, I noticed a trend. Most people got all fired up at this “statistic,” if you could even call it that. But one comment caught my eye. Someone had done more research on both of these criminals, finding that the guy who had only grown weed in his backyard had actually been charged with multiple counts of armed robbery. It didn’t take much to find that information, just a few more clicks on google rather than just a click on the like button on the meme from Facebook without credibility.

So that’s the point I’m trying to make here. Ignorance is not bliss and reading something that a random person threw together on Microsoft Word cannot be trusted as a credible source of information. Do your research people, don’t expect correct information to just be handed to you because most likely that information is heavily biased as to what they want you to think. Which is fair, we all have freedom of speech and thought. But everyone should build some critical thinking skills and engage their own brains, if they care enough about a topic to share information. All I’m saying is if you want to form a full opinion please do yourself, and others, a favor and get your facts straight and find more information beyond your Facebook news feed. Finding an unbiased article is hard to come by these days, but if you read more than one source you can form your own thoughts on the situation at hand and make a decent contribution to the conversation about it.