After the assassination attempt, media consumers aren't powerless despite a flood of polarizing disinformation
Many media consumers are feeling helpless and hopeless in the wake of a tsunami of false, misleading, hateful, and polarizing social media that followed Saturday’s assassination attempt.

These negative narratives filled the internet in the hours and days immediately following the incident in Pennsylvania. There were absurd conspiracy theories on both sides. On the left, one theory was that the whole thing was staged—ridiculous when one considers Trump came within a half inch of being killed. On the right, the predictable theory was that Biden and/or dark government forces were behind the attack. This is also absurd. If it were true, would they hire an untrained, 20-year old knucklehead to do the job?

In addition, “We saw things like ‘The Chinese were behind it,’ or ‘ Antifa was behind it,’ or ‘the Biden administration did it.' We also saw a claim that the RNC was behind it,’” said Paul Bartel, senior intelligence analyst at PeakMetrics. “Everyone is just speculating. No one really knows what's going on. They go online to try to figure it out.” (Spotlight.pa) 

Deepfakes also quickly popped up. After Trump was ushered offstage, his face streaked with blood, “a doctored photo of the scene began bouncing around on X, falsely showing Trump with a wide smile,” according to the Washington Post. 

It’s too early to say exactly what impact all of these lies and distortions have had on media consumers. It’s safe estimate that perhaps millions have fallen for hateful, inflammatory, polarizing disinformation. Of course, those who are media literate are inoculated against disinformation because they possess the tools to critically analyze media messaging. This includes asking the simple yet crucial questions:

What is the source of the info?
Is this source credible? Reliable?
What is the motivation behind the post/report?
How did the info/post make you feel? (If it’s angry, that’s one tip off that the content is mis or disinformation)
Who benefits from this info/post?
What methods are used to attract my attention, or to elicit emotion?

Average media consumers are not powerless in the face of negative, polarizing information. First, we can practice Peace social media, a close cousin to peace journalism. Peace social media is when content creators make choices that encourage an atmosphere that is more conducive to peace. Peaceful social media practitioners don’t create or share polarizing ‘us vs. them’ narratives, or hateful, misleading posts. Social media users can expose such posts and the often vile motives behind them, without reposting the hateful content itself. And we all can educate ourselves about media messaging so that we don’t fall prey to the fear mongers, haters, and propagandists in our midst.

We can’t control what news media or politicians say. But we can control both how we interpret and react to inflammatory content, and what information we create and share on social media.