Last year, before I moved overseas, a few friends told me to follow them on Facebook so that we could stay up to date with each other's lives. At that point, my Facebook account had actually been deleted, but I did want to stay in touch with people, so I reactivated it.
I should mention that this was early 2016. The US presidential campaign was kicking in to high gear, and it was getting ugly. Whenever I would log in to Facebook, I would have to scroll my way past many fake news posts. It was absolutely ridiculous. These were people who knew what Snopes and Politifact were and how to verify what they saw, but they weren't doing it. Critical thinking seemed to go out the window whenever politics was involved.
Initially, I tried to ignore it, but there was a ton of it, and some of it was coming from a few relatives close enough that I didn't want to block them. I foolishly thought that perhaps education was the answer. I started off by calling out some of the more obvious lies with comments below their posts, but it didn't work. Whenever I would point out something provably false, they would ignore what I'd said and change direction. Never mind that their new claim was equally false and not related to either what I'd said or what the original post was about.
I should probably mention as an aside that I had some friends who were posting intelligent, well thought out critiques of politicians on both sides of the aisle. I'm a big believer in understanding both sides of an argument. I was also not a Clinton fan. I was even less of a Trump fan, but I was willing to listen to a reasonable argument. One of the reasons that the fake news pissed me off so much was that it made it nearly impossible to find the intelligent conservative arguments. Genuine well thought out critiques of Hillary Clinton's policies were buried below bizarre tinfoil hat conspiracy bullshit like Benghazi and Pizzagate.
Still, I tried to watch and read this stuff. My personal rule was that I'd stop whenever I saw something that was obviously, provably false. I rarely made it past the second paragraph of articles or the second minute of videos. (Another aside: I detest political videos. Give me a transcript any day.)
Meanwhile, "Fake news" was becoming a big story. One of the things that a lot of people were discussing was the way that social media sites made the headlines bold, but the debunking comment, often as not, was either hidden or much smaller. There was some thinking that we needed to start debunking the fake news with headlines at least as big as the original news.
This made sense to me. For example, let's suppose that someone falsely claims that Trump eats babies. ("Look. I'm not saying he does. I'm just asking the question.") Which of the following is a more effective rebuttal:
Option 1:
Person 1: Trump eats babies!
Person 2 in comments: No, actually, he doesn't. See this link for more information.
Option 2:
Person 1: Trump eats babies!
Person 2: Trump DOES NOT eat babies.
The second seems to be a more obvious rebuttal to me, so that's what I did. When I saw a false post, rather than engaging in the comments, I made a counter-post of my own. The only downside: If you never saw Person 1's post, my reply posts looked kind of strange.
Did it work? You'd better believe it. My wingnut relatives Lost. Their. Minds. The comments below my posts were filled with the same angry, disconnected ranting and personal attacks as before, but now it was on my turf. Why does that matter? Because I have a lot of smart friends from across the political spectrum. I didn't have to fight this crap alone. Some of my friends even disagreed with my politics, but they weren't willing to stand by while logic and truth were used as toilet paper. One (and I have tremendous respect for this) even called me out with detailed correct examples when I said something wrong in one of these exchanges.
My own tactics were pretty simple (assuming that I was able to keep my temper): When ridiculous claims are made, ask for evidence. When fake news is presented, present a rebuttal. When people go off topic or start to make personal attacks, call them out on that.
One of my more distant relatives even started calling me names over Facebook messenger. This is a service that I almost never use (the notification before this was from a nephew who died several years ago), so I had to figure out how to clear away that message notification without deleting any other messages. She was busy calling other people names and ignoring warnings from them, so I finally had to figure out how to block her. I'm pretty sure that I was subsequently blocked by one of the closer relatives I'd been unwilling to block in the beginning.
Honestly, though, I count this all as a success. Whether through shaming or blocking, the political lies that I was seeing when I logged in dropped considerably. A few people learned that, if nothing else, I wasn't willing to stand by silently while they spread lies. Perhaps there's a chance, however unlikely, that some of them will check their facts more thoroughly before posting in the future.
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