COMMENT | Different media sources bombard us daily with text, sound and visuals. Claims and conspiracies are laced with journalese, and are structured and packaged to read like real news.

The less experienced in sieving fiction from facts fall for these social media nonsense, and video clips that friends with good intention send us on WhatsApp.

Detecting bull on social media is not easy though, with search algorithms, clickbait, filtered news feeds and echo chambers playing to your biases and reinforcing our tainted take on reality.

You’ll become even more hostile to viewpoints that challenge what you believe or think you know for certain. I’m right, you’re wrong. Without you knowing it, the internet has taken on your online search habits, automated your reactions, and polarised your perspectives in an open space where opinions are more driven by prejudices and passion than evidence and reason.

Harder to detect, though, is the crap from public institutions with their political agenda, from private companies with their profit motives, from the workplace that you rely on for a living. A lot of this is hidden in our consumerist culture, our partisan politics, and buried in the structure of the loaded language we use daily.

Institutionalised crap is embedded in the values we identify our life with, and the hidden assumptions we make of people, events and issues. Because these assumptions are subtle, they are the wellspring of our prejudices, which shut us off from experiencing other cultures or understanding other arguments.

Antivirus programmes and junk folders can’t completely filter out the malicious content and propaganda. It’s left to the discriminating social media user to cut the crap, and desist from sharing, trolling and circulating conspiracies and unverified news. You are your own most trusted junk filter.

Be more sceptical of what you read

To cut out the nonsense from social media, first attend to your hidden assumptions, and recognise your own biases. Be more sceptical of what you read. Reflect on the context of who said what to whom, why, and under what circumstances.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Verify with different sources, especially those you disagree with. Multiple check the facts. And, above all these – self-reflect and observe before you pass judgment. You could be mistaken too.

More than 2,000 years ago, Socrates pointed out the importance of developing a capacity to examine one’s opinion, a capacity to know what one does not know. “A man is wise when he doesn't think he is wise when he is not.” This Socratic paradox, as explained in Plato’s "Apology," underscores the wisdom of humility that often escapes us.

To acknowledge that we’re ignorant and to be humble in the face of it is the beginning of wisdom.

To be wise is first to observe, investigate and then evaluate. This means to not react blindly to words, to not make hasty judgments like what we’re witnessing in the post-truth world where "alternative facts" are devaluing the meaning of objective truths, where anger and hate are just a mindless mouse click away, where social media is a double-edged sword. It can be used to engage and deliberate, or to exploit and intimidate.

Here’s where we can take a page from one of the drafters of the United States Declaration of Independence (1776), Benjamin Franklin. Of his aversion to dogma, Franklin wrote in his autobiography:

“I made it a rule to forbear all direct contradiction to the sentiments of others, and all positive assertion of my own. I even forbid myself… the use of every word or expression in the language that imported a fixed opinion, such as certainly, undoubtedly, etc, and I adopted, instead of them, I conceive, I apprehend, or I imagine a thing to be so or so; or it so appears to me at present.

“When another asserted something that I thought an error, I denied myself the pleasure of contradicting him abruptly, and of showing immediately some absurdity in his proposition; and in answering I began by observing that in certain cases or circumstances his opinion would be right, but in the present case there appeared or seemed to me some difference, etc. I soon found the advantage of this change in my manner; the conversations I engaged in went on more pleasantly.

“The modest way in which I proposed my opinions procured them a readier reception and less contradiction; I had less mortification when I was found to be in the wrong, and I more easily prevailed with others to give up their mistakes and join with me when I happened to be in the right.”

ERIC LOO is Senior Fellow (Journalism) at the School of the Arts, English & Media, Faculty of Law, Humanities & Arts, University of Wollongong, Australia. He is founding editor of "Asia Pacific Media Educator". Email him at eloo@uow.edu.au.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.