The Urge to Spread Lies

a long but important message I needed to share before I check out and watch football

On election day, I deactivated my personal Facebook and Instagram accounts. I’ve been a faithful Facebook member/contributor/pawn since Facebook first became public. A young mom at the time, with no friends and no close family, the platform drew me in with its possibilities to connect to old friends I’d lost touch with. In my case, I was hopeful to find a couple elementary friends. After decades of being a nomad, I’d been terrible at staying in touch with people and Facebook was a bright and shiny new way to track some of those people down. I was hooked.

As years rolled on and the platform changed repeatedly as it got its footing, I not only reconnected with friends from elementary to college, I began to add new friends. Writers I met at conferences, authors whose work I admired, and sometimes complete strangers–friends of friends. There are a handful of current people in my actual life whom I met solely through Facebook. I’ve had the moms of young readers of my books reach out, teachers and librarians, and when I went viral a while back for an article about my husband’s cancer diagnosis, I received a ton of well-wishes from strangers. (and some not-so-well-wishes, but whatever)

I still love the early mission of social media: to connect people. I also still enjoy the way I use social media for my work in tourism: to inspire and inform.

However, I think we would all be better off if most platforms went dark. Some of the more conversational and cultivated media are maybe not as harmful but Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and all their spin-offs, fun as they can be, are truly damaging. And this is one reason why:

After over three months of not so much as a peek at Facebook, I wanted to visit Marketplace because I’m on the hunt for flower pots. Spring is on the way (after a couple more punches from Winter) and we’re building a little greenhouse that I intend to fill. Marketplace is an easy way to find used items locally and I’ve used it many times for everything from furniture to firewood to fiestaware. But before I searched listings for castoff treasures, I, of course, had to scroll a bit and see what my friend-list was up to. How were they handling the new administration? Any new book deals? New babies? Deaths in the family? All of that was there, as to be expected. But the truly disheartening part was the amount of democratic, liberal, like-minded, smart friends posting misleading information or straight out lies.

We tend to think the “other side” is the culprit. That “they” are the ones spreading misinformation and telling lies about people they disagree with. But that’s not the case. This is an epidemic of social media that has no party line. There’s one level of it in which people knowingly post AI created images and videos for likes and views. And then there is another level in which I suppose some people are just lazy. They see a screenshot or a meme and share it because it’s funny or infuriating. They don’t think about conducting a simple google search to see if there’s any accuracy to it or if it can be truly cross-referenced. (By the way, cross-referenced does not mean the same screenshot shows up on several social media platforms. I wanted to share a couple I’ve seen, and then decided the last thing they needed was more platform views.) Maybe posters think it's harmless, just sharing to their personal friend list for a good laugh or rage cry or to incite some kind of emotion. Or maybe, and this is the one that scares me the most, they think it’s true.

Given the current political upheaval and absolutely insane things that come out of our commander in chief’s mouth (not to mention the rest of his administration and a good deal of our senators) it can be difficult to tell what someone has truly done or said. It all seems possible. But sharing a piece of information, however innocuous it might seem, just because it seems possible is extremely irresponsible in 2025. Maybe in the early days of socials it didn’t matter much, but we live in a different world now. A single post can travel to thousands of accounts, and with the way people incessantly scroll, they see headlines, scraps, single words of a post and it’s committed to memory and belief. And what comes next? Action.

If I can’t convince you, maybe science can.

In 2016, NIH (one of the organizations currently under scrutiny by our president) published a study about subliminal messages. I’ve been obsessed with the idea of subliminal messaging ever since I saw the 1988 movie They Live, and had a unit about subliminal messages in everyday print advertising in one of my junior high English classes. (Thank you arts and education!) The NIH paper written by three Psychology professors from the University of Bern, Switzerland, discusses “long term effects on decision making”, and specifically they were looking to see if people forgot these flash-in-the-pan messages and images or if they were committed to memory. And the findings: “... unprecedented evidence of the longevity and impact of subliminal messages on conscious, rational decision-making.”

They studied how “subliminal presentations…would guide later conscious decisions” and long story, a lot of means and modes and percentages later, they proved themselves right. A concept that I have been aware of since I was about 12 or 13:

Our decisions (and actions) are affected by what we consume.

Why am I boring you all to tears with this when you just want to prep for your Super Bowl party? Because I implore you to take a social media hiatus. I realize many of you use it for work, as do I, but in your personal life it is not a necessity. Stop consuming so much of it. Stop contributing to it. And if you can’t go cold turkey, at least make a solid commitment to never post a piece of political, scientific, or social information unless you have sourced, cross-referenced, and otherwise proven it is true. If you can’t do that, do not post it.

Here are a couple actions I have taken to fill the void of social media socialization:

~I took a job working two days a week at a local coffee/retail shop to force myself out of the house, out of my head, and to talk to people. Obviously I don’t expect everyone can run out and get a third job. But by forcing myself to bring that online conversation to more in-the-flesh people, I’ve been reminded that there are a trillion other things going on in our communities that have nothing to do with our inept president. I’m reminded that despite what I see on socials, people are resoundingly trying to do their best, and sometimes just trying to make it through a day. I can relate whole-heartedly to that and connect with people on some of those tiny universal truths of being human.

~I’m making an attempt to return to visiting schools. As a children’s author, school visits are pretty common for a lot of us, but since 2020 I have mostly stepped out of that particular part of the career—partially because stepping out was forced upon me with a global pandemic, and partially because they are hard! But over the last year or so I’ve been rethinking the ease with which I left that behind and the realization that I have something worthwhile to share with kids. If not my own story, the story of the subjects in my books: women who have changed the world by taking action. The whole reason I write (other than the fact that I just enjoy it) is for readers to know what is possible, to empower them to reach for what they want and to know they are not alone. But if I never interact with them in person, how can I spread that message or connect in a heartfelt way? This goes for young readers and adults, therefore:

~I’m starting a “support” group for women writers. Ten years ago when I went on a feminist binge and was reading all of Gloria Steinem’s work, one of the most resounding concepts that formed her political and personal life was an exceptionally simple and nearly impossible task for many people: listening. She and other women would gather in a “talking circle”. No one was at the head, no one was more powerful or any better than the other. And they each talked and listened. Basic grassroots efforts underway–personal connection. If you want to make a difference, you listen.

“We need to balance our time online by being and organizing offline with actual human beings.“ Gloria Steinem, 2015

Unless you have a massive platform or experience/expertise in something, you are not going to accomplish a thing on social media other than to receive incestuous cheers from inside your bubble and boos from the opposition if they even see what you post. Is that really what you need? Is that what anyone needs? Even as I write this, I’m well aware that the people who read my Substack are people who probably already agree with a lot of what I write. In that case, my call to action for you is to help encourage your circles to take a step back, disengage from socials, and re-engage in your local communities whether that is a job, your hobbies, your church, school, etc.

If you stay on socials–and I’m not judging you if you do, I will likely return and share updates myself and am, in fact, pinning this essay to my FB–just be responsible about it. Don’t automatically share posts from people you admire or respect or assume know what they are talking about. Look into it. Research. Fact check. Hell, fact check me! Go read that subliminal messaging paper yourself. Get to the bottom of information and if you don’t have a researcher’s heart like I do, then DON’T POST IT.

Think of it like wearing a seat belt. Back in the 80’s and 90’s when mandatory seatbelt laws were put into effect (except New Hampshire, apparently,–live free or die, literally) people lost their minds. They didn’t want to be told what to do. Frankly, I admire that about Americans. None of us want to be told what to do. Sometimes that leads to amazing advances and sometimes disastrous consequences. But these days not many of us balk at the idea of buckling up–except maybe those freebirds up in New Hampshire. (I have no idea—if you’re from NH let me know in the comments!) I believe it’s time to start buckling up online. Although these platforms are not going to go away and there will always be ads and content creators and a lot of adorable kitten videos, I think it’s (past) time we become much more responsible about what we post.

I don’t mean it should all be serious and academic. On the contrary, I love adorable cat videos.

I only ask you think deeply about your online interactions and please do not contribute to lies. Do not give in to the urge to share messaging that affects the way people think, believe, and act unless you know without doubt that the politically or socially themed post that you are sharing is true. If you post a meme/screenshot/photo/long-rant-from-some-rando you better believe I’m looking into it. As should everyone. We are quicker to shoot down racist, sexist, and other hate speech on these platforms, but it’s important to also combat false and inaccurate information. If META ain’t gonna do it–we must. Or even better—simply leave socials behind and do the work in your real-life communities where it actually matters.

And, please keep in mind, good fact-checkers are those who keep themselves in check.

Here’s a handy guide for kids that presents some basics of fact checking. If children can do this, you literally have no excuse.

Now let’s go watch some football!