In our society, due to the vast and practically required use of smart technology and social media, information is spread at exponentially increasing rates. I mean, we call something that gets popular on the internet "viral" for a reason - because, like an actual virus that causes disease, it spreads rapidly from person to person. While this is great for funny videos of cats and things of that nature, it's absolutely horrendous as to the effect it has on the spread of news.
Today, news that goes viral on the Internet basically turns into a giant game of "telephone." From person to person, information gets skewed, exacerbated, chopped and screwed until it barely resembles the original story. It doesn't help that for every legitimate news source, there's dozens of fake news sources that spread misinformation just for the traffic with click-bait headlines that read "OMG YOU'LL NEVER GUESS WHAT THIS PERSON DID!" As someone who tries his hardest to be a legitimate spreader of news in the giant chain of information, I just gagged a little bit from even writing something that clickbait-y, even in jest.
Recently, a story has come out that has to do with the ATO chapter at Indiana University being shut down after a video surfaced showing some pretty lewd acts.
Now let me just say: I am NOT defending their actions. Their actions definitely do not hold true to whatever ATO's values are (I'm assuming they're private and part of their ritual, as my fraternity's values are as well) nor do they hold to the standard values that all Greeks should hold themselves to.
But, this misinformation spreading I've been seeing is atrocious and needs to be pointed out. In their investigation, ATO's headquarters found that the person in question was in fact a brother, not a pledge. They further concluded that no pledge was involved in this act, meaning that this was not an incident of hazing. Now, if that wasn't the case, wouldn't they have said so? It's not like they could get away with a lie, when all eyes are turned on them at this point.
In my opinion, it all started with a tweet from Indiana University itself mentioning the word "hazing," and that's all it took to get the virus started. Like I said, I'm not defending their actions. However, the spread of misinformation can have devastating effects, when we most likely don't have anywhere close to the full story. We get so caught up in having lists - quick bits of info - that we can get what are essentially recaps of a story with which we make snap judgments on something. That is not a good way to go about things at all.
Remember when Rolling Stone published an article falsely accusing members of a University of Virginia fraternity of raping a woman as an initiation right? The story was eventually found to be false and was completely discredited, but it still devastated the lives of the guys that were accused. It impacted the lives of those guys, the people involved in the case, and Greek life as a whole.
The simple point is, we have almost always lived in a society that believes people are "guilty until proven innocent" despite what our court system is supposedly built on. Modern day technology and social media have simply exacerbated that horrendous belief, and can possibly destroy the lives of innocent people.
So, before you post an article from some un-credited, click-bait news site; before you tweet about how evil someone is without knowing what they've exactly done; before you cast down your judgement, get your facts straight and do a little bit of research. That goes for everything in life.
