What to do about missinformation
Social media is full of miss-information, and unhelpful perspectives. Now more than ever.
These things can do a lot of damage.
It is easy to get overwhelmed with these perspectives, and the damage they will do.
Engaging in often wont help, and is very draining.
So what action helps support more positive messages, without costing you the emotion energy & time of engagement?
Perhaps the answer is simple don't engage, and focus on supporting positive messages.
Does evil prevail when good men do nothing? Does not engaging count as doing nothing?
"The moment you belittle the mind for believing in something, you’ve lost the battle.”
"Give the mind an out
We’re reluctant to acknowledge mistakes. To avoid admitting we were wrong, we’ll twist ourselves into positions that even seasoned yogis can’t hold.
The key is to trick the mind by giving it an excuse. Convince your own mind (or your friend) that your prior decision or prior belief was the right one given what you knew, but now that the underlying facts have changed, so should the mind.
But instead of giving the mind an out, we often go for a punch to the gut. We belittle the other person (“I told you so”). We ostracize (“Basket of deplorables”). We ridicule (“What an idiot”).
Schadenfreude might be your favorite pastime, but it has the counterproductive effect of activating the other person’s defenses and solidifying their positions. The moment you belittle the mind for believing in something, you’ve lost the battle. At that point, the mind will dig in rather than give in. Once you’ve equated someone’s beliefs with idiocracy, changing that person’s mind will require nothing short of an admission that they are unintelligent. And that’s an admission that most minds aren’t willing to make."
Punishment isn't the goal, change is. Change should be rewarded.
"Colombians adopted a similar strategy in the 1950s when the Rojas dictatorship collapsed. As I explain in my forthcoming book, although the Colombian military was complicit in the abuses of the Rojas regime, civilians deftly avoided pointing any fingers at the military. Instead, they managed to march the military back to the barracks with its dignity intact. They recognized that they would need the military’s cooperation both during the transition process and in its aftermath. So they offered an alternative narrative for public consumption that uncoupled the armed forces from the Rojas regime. In this narrative, which the military leaders found much easier to swallow, it was the “presidential family” and a few corrupt civilians close to Rojas—not military officers—who were responsible for the regime’s excesses. Were they to take a different approach, a military dictatorship—not democracy—may have resulted. "