If we’ve realized something because the COVID-19 pandemic upended all our lives practically 2 years in the past, it’s easy methods to sanitize our palms, houses, workplaces, and absolutely anything we encounter to cease the unfold of the virus. Seems, we additionally want to keep up that vigilance when encountering details about COVID-19 in our social media feeds. Because the pandemic endured, harmful misinformation about remedies, cures, and the vaccines flourished. This surroundings has underscored the significance of consuming and sharing on-line content material with care. And that method applies not solely to a public well being disaster, however to all data we encounter. We have to take steps to make sure a publish, picture, or meme is “sanitized” earlier than we belief it, prefer it, cross it on, or put it up for sale in any manner.

The News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan nationwide schooling nonprofit, has created steps you’ll be able to observe to make sure that you apply good data hygiene. NLP, a information literacy schooling chief since 2008, gives packages and assets that can assist you achieve the abilities, information, and mindset to be good shoppers of stories and different data. If we sanitize the method round our data habits, we are able to stop deceptive and false content material — which may be hazardous to our well being and society — from being broadly shared and doubtlessly doing hurt.

You don’t want any particular abilities or expertise to learn the way to take action. NLP gives you with important steerage in its infographic, “Sanitize before you share: 4 quick steps to stop the spread of misinformation.” It may take solely 4 steps to maintain your self or others from changing into a “superspreader” of misinformation. And in case you discover credible proof {that a} social media publish isn’t true or the supply is unreliable, warn others in a reply to the publish, and if vital, report it to platform directors.

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