Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Don't be too concerned over videos on Facebook




To get eyeballs, many News sites will "steal" videos and repost it as their News when something similar happens.

This usually makes a lot of people over react when they see something that happened a few years ago. Sometimes an event occurred elsewhere or it may be even staged, but it can be worded in such a way that it creates a different context and create fear and anger.

In 2018, What Now posted this video on their Facebook page and talking about it like it just happened, getting a lot of anger and outrage. However, I did find the same video on YouTube 4 years ago.

This is not an isolated incident. Many other Facebook pages and other news sites often post other videos out of context to create more clicks from the outrage. One main reason is because such videos and News create a reaction which makes you click on them, and drives traffic which brings them revenue.

So before you get outraged and share that news or video, you can easily search for the news online to see if it really happened or if it happened elsewhere or long ago, before you share the news. You should not share the fake news and encourage such behaviors.

-- Robin Low