i'm ready to pull the plug on fakebook, in particular since discovering this mob. & the main reason is not so much all the "fake news" as such, it's rather that everyone seems to be eager to latch onto them unquestioningly. i use to decide my truth by what i experience, more & more so, not by what i get fed pre-masticated (don't have a tv either). people on fakebook are drooling after that shit, & should i dare to post my own thought process .... void. here i get feedback, interest, response, encouragement. worlds apart.

i agree but am not sure i can even believe the factcheckers

If one gets upset at being proven wrong, they're immature and/or dishonorable. Course I've seen lots of adults that hate being proven wrong. So eh.

Please please please keep telling your nephew to seek out the truth. You don’t want him to become one of those people that don’t accept the truth! And there are people like that. It’s scary. I went on the comments of a conservative post once and someone had the same last name as a famous person. Is that so and sos brother they kept asking. I looked it up. It wasn’t. I posted that it wasn’t. They ignored it. Kept posting that it was his brother. I posted it again. It was like it was invisible and they couldn’t see it. It’s just so so dangerous. And it’s happening a lot. I was on a site with a man that not only believes Obama is a Muslim he truly truly believes that Michelle Obama is a man. Seriously. I asked him why he thought that and he said there’s a picture where you can see an indentation in her dress...!! I kid you not. Frightening.

If you haven't already, you could inform him about how to use Snopes or other fact-checking sites before he shares things.

fuck how they feel they need to know the truth in amongst the piles of crap.

I didn't grow up being taught to be skeptical of content because the internet wasnt around (in widespread use) when I was young--it wasn't an issue. I was about fifteen when I started using the internet, and in some ways mature for my age--so I was savvy enough to know that in a marketplace of communication that's open to every Tom, Dick, and Harry--with an anonymity option--people can and will say anything. I never took anything for granted because it was all new to me, and I was already mostly mature.

Today's fifteen-year-olds have grown up never knowing a world that didn't have such a marketplace of communication...and, I'm guessing, by and large have never been explicitly taught the appropriate attitude of disbelief with which to approach it. This sort of attitude needs to be a cultural thing. Schools can have a class, parents can give a "talk"--but if the attitude is not reflected in and supported by the broader cultural milieu, it's not going to stick.

Our social culture has not caught up to our technology. Story of the human race.

It's also a general intelligence thing: you don't know what you don't know. You can't understand things that never occur to you. Believing whatever you see on the internet just happens to play nicely into that dynamic. People are lazy; they don't want to think and will go to great lengths to avoid it. Never before have we had such a need to scrutinize and think independently. It's a constellation of factors.

Keep doing what you're doing. You're on the right side of history.

Maybe you can inoculate your family; I hope so. The culture needs to change, though, if we're to stem this tide toward idiotic credulity.

Re the flu: the flu shot always carries a certain probability of being ineffective because its formulated based on a prediction of which strain(s) will be active in a given season. They make their best guess from genetic analysis and mutation rates--and they can be wrong. Just because you got the flu after getting your shot doesn't mean any mistakes were necessarily made.

I know the current vaccine being given is not protecting against all the virus strains roaming around - but not sure about these kids , and what their status was ?

I appaud your tenacity...it is work! It is work, just keeping myself straight, on what is out there! Sometimes it feels like society has been twisted into a strange shape. What if, the mentally unhealthy have found their niche and now the rest of us have got to navigate thru the muck to find and keep the truth? Then we are forced to question truth! This is not easy...

I have adult friends who will forward BS around as accepted fact only because there read it on the internet, FB, in emails. I repeatedly direct them to debunking sites (Snope, Authority websites, etc) but it does absolutely no good. Confirmation bias is strong in all of us. (sigh)

Geee.... I hear it every night that this new flu is killing more people... where does it come from? It seems like it only comes around when the north wind blows cold air to the United States...

Who is leading him down that pathway? Is it coming from school? Church? Relatives?