It would be foolish to suggest that the birth of the internet and digital media has had little to no positive impact on civic engagement in our country and around the world. Digital media is what gives me the power to write to you now, and gives you the power to read this blog. Yet there is the exact issue in using digital means: the power that the writer and reader have been attributed is inflated and can degrade those whose only means for speaking about their cause or political opinion.

The saying, “never trust what you read online,” exists for a reason. Anyone can post on the internet and immediately have it on the page and in the hands of thousands of people. To produce this trust in one’s opinion when posting, whether it be about one’s political agenda or an opposing argument’s fallacies, one posts references and data.

Yet when reading these articles, rarely do people go out of their way to investigate where the reference came from or the context. The argument instead caters to the reader who it interested, feeding them ideas about their side or the opposing side of an issue and subconsciously engraining the information as factual.

People on the internet have an impenetrable wall to hide their motives and even identity from the reader. Yet constantly, we can read nothing but an article title, or a brief post on social media with clickable links, and make it the topic of conversation

Pew Research Center article, states that in a telephone survey they found that, “33% of social media users have used the tools to repost content related to political or social issues that was originally posted by someone else” (View the full article here). This seems like a reasonable claim: the source even seems and sounds “legitimate.” Yet upon inspection of the methodology, it is seen this was a voluntary survey, meaning there is bias due to volunteers who have access to a phone and who use social media being more likely to answer in this survey, and there may be pressure, whether to preserve an identity or please the interviewer, that causes another source of answer bias.

As people with small but mighty internet voices, there needs to be a more formal recognition and conscious action to avoid such articles which are filled with falsified information. Consensus in the untrustworthiness of the internet is not sufficient. People must start trends of avoidance and hold digital media about political opinions to a higher standard. No one should receive blind recognition. Perhaps it is better if we went back to the rawer judgement of character. Perhaps we return to face to face.