How to read an article on social Medias

For many years when one wanted to be informed on any news happening anywhere one had to buy a newspaper. Since the beginning of the 21st century things have drastically changed. Nowadays information comes to us and all we have to do is press the “read” link. Nothing less or more, how simple is that! Who does not like simplified work? Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and Snapchat have done the hard work for us. Constantly they are aggregating news for us and sending them on our doors.
But the algorithms behind the aggregation are not human. They cannot tell authenticity of the news and that’s where we come in. The best news is once you do this you won’t be doing this process again. The process is called “selection”. Here is how selection must be done:
1.          Read the title of the news
2.        Check the date of publication and the last update
3.        From which news media does the news come from?
4.        What is the reputation of the news media?
5.        Does the media specialize on the topic?
6.        Does the writer a professional on the topic?
7.        Does the author a contemporian of the story? (Is he alive in the moment he’s writing the article?)
8.        Does the writer an actor in the story?
One main thing to avoid is to not look at the image or thumbnail video that goes with the article. Images or thumbnail videos most of the time does not tell the main story. They are what geeks call “click baits”. Living in a millennials era there is a serious need to pay attention on how we are informing ourselves.

Special thanks to Kevin Sefu for contributing to this article.