Can't Believe Everything You Read

Last night Brett sent me this Twitter post.  Although I do agree that views on women's looks relative to age have changed over the years, the post seemed a little off to me.  I thought that the Golden Girls was popular on television in the 1980s.  Since Betty White just died at 99, I really didn't think that she could be in her early 50s when the series started.  I decided to do a little bit of research on the show and quickly found out that Betty White was 63 when the series started completely discrediting this post.  I texted Brett to let him know and he said "figures."

It has been amazing to me how life has changed in the past few years due to misinformation on social media.  The above Twitter post is an example of that, but is more funny than anything else.  What hasn't been comical recently is the amount of false posts about Covid 19 and the vaccination.  Recently, someone at the gym told my dad that he didn't get vaccinated because of the high death rates of those receiving the shot.  He pointed out the "fact" that Bob Saget and Betty White both recently died after getting their boosters.  There's no proof of that. In fact, Betty White's agent came out immediately discrediting that misinformation, saying that Betty had had a stroke six days before her death and died from complications due to that.  It had nothing to do with the Covid vaccine, but the group that really wants to believe that will and those making false posts about it can't really be stopped.  

Misinformation didn't begin with the pandemic and it won't end with it either.  Just yesterday, Lisa Bonet and Jason Momoa announced that they had split.  Instantly, Twitter users starting blaming Johnny Depp's ex-wife, Amanda Heard, because she had once been in a movie with Momoa.  It didn't make any sense, but I'm sure that a lot of readers believed it right away.  "It's on the internet, so it has to be true" almost seems like a motto of our country right now.  Unfortunately with Covid 19, it's hurting those who choose to believe the nonsense they read.  Is is sad that our hospitals are full of unvaccinated individuals who have contracted the virus because they read that the shot was bad for you.  Just like the Golden Girls age post, there will always be people who twist and turn information to gain either notoriety or to feel relevant.  A little bit of fact checking would end this social media phenomenon, but I don't think that will ever become a fad.