No Phones or Politics at the Dinner Table!

"Oh my gosh! Morgan Freeman is dead!" exclaimed my mother, looking up from her Facebook page.

"I'm sure Morgan Freeman is still very much alive, mom," I said, rolling my eyes at her gullibility.

"Jacqueline, it says it right here." She pushed her phone into my face, showing me the article headline she had just read and instantly believed.

I sighed. A quick Google search revealed the truth that, once again, a hoax had gone viral insisting a beloved celebrity had passed. Despite my mom's higher education and protests throughout my teenage years that she "wasn't born yesterday," she was yet another victim of fake news.

"Fake news" fueled the infamous 2016 Presidential Election, the first election I got to participate in and one that completely mucked up most of the progress America made since a time when it was only safe to be yourself if you were a straight, white male. The use and abuse of digital and social media transformed the way the world conducts politics, giving people an alternative and arguably more effective way to spread their personal beliefs and agendas, regardless if they were spouting truths or lies.

Within Clay Shirky's 2012 TED Talk, "How the Internet will (one day) transform government," he preaches that with the creation of the Internet came "a new form of arguing . . . [since] it's large, it's distributed, it's low-cost, and it's compatible with the ideals of democracy" (17:51). This was certainly the case leading up to the 2016 Presidential Election, which proved just how nasty candidates and their followers could be towards their opponents through digital campaigns.

In Sam Sander's NPR article, "Did Social Media Ruin Election 2016?," he includes images from a petty Twitter exchange between Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, which garnered tens of thousands of comments, retweets, and "hearts" on just the social media platform alone. Clinton and Bush's "snarky" tweets combined with the many articles that covered this online duel "seemed totally normal in a campaign season like this one, and in the digital age in which we live" (Sanders).

Donald Trump also used and continues to use his Twitter accounts (both his POTUS one and his personal one) to spout negativity and incoherence in addition to his Facebook page. (Note: In case my stance on Trump isn't already abundantly clear, his social media accounts are linked as evidence of his inability to lead anything, let alone a country, and not to promote his twisted, hate-filled ideas.) According to The Economist, Trump's team "understood how the Facebook and Twitter-driven media landscape worked," and took advantage of people's willingness to believe whatever supports their political views because "whether a piece of news spreads online does not depend on whether it is true and coherent, but whether it is surprising, shocking and confirms prejudices."

Team Trump "'essentially hacked Facebook's algorithm,' says Matthew Hindman of George Washington University," which "spewed out pro-Trump propaganda, as well as a steady stream of fake news" to people who they knew would be receptive to anything anti-Clinton, Sanders, Black Lives Matter, women's rights, and equality (The Economist). The Left did the same, but not to the same degree of intensity at Trump's camp, and both sides massively influenced a countless number of people with reports stating that "nearly half of American adults now get their political news on Facebook" (The Economist).

As if that isn't frightening enough, the Russians also bought many ads on Facebook in 2016, which Scott Shane reported on for The New York Times. Representative Jackie Speier deemed this "'a problem...[that] Russia was able to weaponize your platforms to divide us, to dupe us and to discredit democracy,'" and it really is (Shane).

The Internet is a gift that is unique to today's generations. It should not be used as a tool to tear others down or an "okay" to let ignorance reign supreme. Just like my mom, we need to think critically about the digital media we consume on a daily basis, especially regarding decisions that lead to our country being in the (tiny) hands of an orange, nuclear bomb-crazed billionaire.

PS. I apologize for how long this is. I never realized I had so much to say about politics!