Information Illiteracy is a Real Problem

Someone makes a post that's a funny pop culture inside joke, but the real punchline is that they put "Share if you want to honor his heroism" so they can snicker behind their hands when Boomers unfamiliar with Die Hard share the post unironically.

So Snopes and Facebook's "fake news" algorithm debunk it, and people I know are mad at the internet about it.

Why? It's literally doing its job, trying to keep your grandma from being fooled by every troll meme the anons throw at her. "Haha, this one's obviously a joke!" Not to her, it ain't. She's the normie-est normie that ever normie-ed. If a website has non-potato photos and the word "news" anywhere in its URL, it might as well be the straight-up Reuters news feed, as far as she's concerned.

Maybe if they'd had this feature a few years ago, West Point cadets wouldn't be in danger of having their careers aborted in the third trimester for playing the circle game.

The problem under discussion here is the tendency for informationally-illiterate people to believe that a well laid out page with non-potato photos and the word “news” somewhere in its URL is telling them the gospel truth, simply because what it’s saying fits their biases.

Then when CNN or the BBC or whoever comes along and points out that it’s made-up bullshit from a click-farm in Macedonia, they get assmad and yell about the biased MSM and its "fake news".

Google before you share. Google the URL of the originating site, too, if it's not one you're familiar with. If just reading a headline is so bias-confirming that you get a little shot of dopamine when you click "share" because you're excited about how it's going to Own The Libs/Show Trump's A Moron, think about why you're clicking "share".
.