We posted a story to Facebook this week about the province banning all off-road vehicle use in the Elephant Hill wildfire area.
Reading the comments, you’d think the province made that decision to prevent new fires from starting.
This is not the case.
The ban is in place for the purpose of restoration activities.
“The closure aims to support wildfire-recovery management strategies, and is in response to an anticipated increase of unmanaged recreational off-road vehicle use and camping pressures on sensitive ecosystems in the area,” according to the release.
“Unauthorized off-road vehicle use can have many negative effects including soil compaction, erosion, increases in invasive plants, garbage accumulation, and pollution from camper trailer holding tanks. This affects grassland health and wildlife habitat, as well as quality and availability of water for wildlife and livestock.
Whether or not you support that decision I’ll leave up to you, however, the primary purpose is clearly not to reduce fire risk.
This is indicative of a lot of Facebook activity and it seems to be becoming more common. People ask questions that could easily be answered by reading the story. People make assumptions about what a story is about. People make assumptions about the justifications behind a story.
Obviously, nobody’s going to read every story that comes by on Facebook (although I remember reading a story at one point about a man who was keeping his Facebook feed empty by hiding posts after reading them).
However, this presents a real danger as it could lead to people being substantially misled without the story being incorrect or even without the headlines being sensationalized or click bait.
The spreading of “fake news” is not just Russians or propaganda sites. It’s very much us twisting the perception or understanding of factually accurate stories to the point that someone just scrolling by may come away with “fake news.”
I’m not exempt from this. As a user, unless I’m familiar with the writer of a story, I often check out the comment section on a story to see if it’s biased or misleading.
This is despite knowing, based on my experience from the journalism side of things, that it’s far more likely that the comment section is misleading/poorly informed than the story is.
The real takeaway here is that we really should be reading the story and leaving the comment section alone a lot more of the time if we want to be well-informed.
