I recently saw a social media post from someone I went to high school with.
The post was advertising a home for rent at what appeared to be a great price. The home was in western Pennsylvania, near where I went to school. I didn’t know the original poster, but I knew the individual who shared the post. Having not lived in that region of Pennsylvania for nearly three decades and not visited in almost two, I had no idea what the going rate for a rental property in the area should be.
I thought it was an example of the disparity between the area where I live now and the area I grew up in. A coworker explained that it was a scam, intent on getting individuals to click the link, for what reason I am still not sure.
But it made me understand there is a lot happening on social media that I don’t understand. I wish others understood that also.
Recently I saw two, unconnected people in different states share the same Facebook post. It was a personal story of a driver who rented an electric vehicle. The story detailed how the car didn’t work, how the battery drained too quickly, how there were no charging stations, how the plugs at the places that did exist didn’t fit his rental car, how it took hours to charge long enough to go a few miles. The post covered and confirmed all the anti-EV talking points and it was a real story, from a real driver.
Except it wasn’t.
The post was part of a well-crafted campaign to vilify electric vehicles. Each of these people had shared it from a different source – a different person claiming to be the snake-bit traveler. The story was the exact same and had the exact same photo.
Likely, neither of them knew the person sharing the post. A friend had probably shared it first, so they assumed that friend knew the original creator of the post. It is the Internet version of “a friend of a friend.”
I think both of these people had good intentions of sharing a post warning others about the realities of electric vehicles. They believed this was a good, hard-working person sharing a real-life experience, not propaganda being pushed down our throats.
But that’s the problem. When we devalue real news sources, we are far more likely to become gullible targets when someone tells us what we want to hear. When we say we don’t trust credible news sources, simply because we don’t like the news, we create space for the untrustworthy sources.
The untrustworthy source will spend a lot of time and effort devaluing legitimate sources and any attempt to shed light on that will be trumpeted as proof that the established media is trying to silence those fringe voices because they are the ones telling the truth.
I truly don’t care where people stand on electric vehicles, or solar farms or any number of other divisive issues. But I do care that they inform themselves before sharing those opinions online. They must look into where the information is coming from and be able to recognize that propaganda comes in a variety of forms.
-Mac Cordell is a reporter for the Journal-Tribune.