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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...

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