Trust (almost) No One
Recently, my better half got a legitimate looking text, telling him UPS was holding a package for him and he needed to contact them at the link provided.
I asked to see the text and at first glance it looked legit, but there were definite signs he was being phished.
- We didn't order anything recently that required UPS.
- The text didn't provide a tracking number. A company that runs by tracking is always going to give you a tracking number.
- The link had the standard UPS.com url, only with a lot more letters after it.
I told Greg to delete it.
I am infamous for not trusting the internet.
Evey so often, Greg reads me some Facebook post that pushes his buttons. I keep telling him it's deliberate. Someone or some AI is deliberating baiting people to interact. My hunch is it's AI, accumulating data on what spurs people to comment.
AI survives on accumulation and collation. If you feed it anywhere online, it remembers and reallocates as needed. Methinks, it is ultimately for nefarious purposes.
If it's on social media and not an original post from one of my friends, I can almost assure you it's a fabricated post. Sadly, even friends can be led astray too. That's why I said it has to be a post originating from them, not something parroted from someone else.
The same goes for full articles. If you read an article and it doesn't answer the most basic of journalistic questions, ie, Who, What, Where, When, Why (and sometimes How), it's either extremely poorly written, or it's written by AI.
When I read a story and it provides me with only vague details, I get suspicious.
A common thread goes like this: A woman, a child, or an elderly man (someone vulnerable) was accosted, and bystanders, instead of helping, robbed this person. Yet it won't tell me when this happened, what city, or the response from law enforcement. --because honestly, why wouldn't you call the cops?
Facebook is full of these bull crap stories. I dismiss these stories without a second thought. Why waste my time?
I don't know about you, but I think this kind of manipulation is getting worse. And the most annoying thing of all is that so many people take it as dogma and run with it without ever bothering to question its validity.
If I know you well enough to know your kids' or your pets' names, I know I can trust you. Everyone else gets the side eye of suspicion.
What do you think? Is social media manipulation getting worse? Have you ever been duped by misinformation?
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Comments
But yeah. I actually saw a video about how social media feeds you what you want to see. They used as an example Stephen King's negative post about charlie kirk... and showed how many people saw that post. And then they showed his apology post... how many people actually saw it, which was very few. The algorithm clearly knew that people didn't want to see the other side and fed the negative opinion out to his followers, which is really frustrating. We live in an echo chamber. I very purposely follow pages from both sides of the political spectrum because I want to get the full story on everything that happens. I must drive the algorithm crazy.
And never click links y'all. In texts or emails. Nope.
re: FB
That's what their algorithms are for.
I keep a fairly liberal news website as my homepage, even though I'm not the least bit left leaning. Whenever I want to fact check their findings, I start researching both liberal and conservative sources.
And there's no point in using Snopes any more. They stopped being reliable several years ago.
For me, the most important thing is to teach children to be critical thinkers. It might be too late for the adults, but we can still teach children to question and research.
I've been getting a lot more financial phishing e-mails that look super legit (Paypal, my bank, and even Zelle.) I don't click on anything in the e-mail, but verify via another computer ISP provider that they're fake, and then I report them to the appropriate scam report addy for the actual legit service (and I'm sure they do nothing about it but warn me to be careful when they reply.)
We've gotten some really sketchy snail mail since we set up our trusts, some that pretend to be government-generated, but we just check with the attorney.
Being deaf really saves me from the telephone scams. My guy doesn't answer any number he doesn't know, so they can't talk to us. :)
I think it's unethical for companies to sell our information to outsiders. Even if we get a choice, there's no guarantee that they're abiding by our wishes.