The following media literacy tip is from the nonpartisan League of Women Voters of Washington. Dedicated to empowering voters and defending democracy, the League works to expand public knowledge and understanding of media literacy and news education as both are key to developing healthy, civically engaged communities.
Identify Scapegoating, Stop the Spread of Faulty Information
Faulty information poses a threat. As with a virus, the threat is not just to a single individual, but to many people.
Faulty reasoning can accelerate the spread of faulty information. We are all susceptible to manipulation by faulty reasoning when bad actors try to take advantage of the brain’s limited ability to discern fact from fiction in a fast-moving social media environment.
To resist manipulation by faulty reasoning, it helps to be familiar with common tactics, like scapegoating.
Scapegoating involves blaming huge problems or even smaller ones on a specific group or a specific person when there is no evidence that either the group or person is to blame.
Two examples of scapegoating: Blaming low voter turnout on a single group of people in a population or singling out one junior engineer for a project’s failure when the project is the work of a team.
Learning to spot instances of scapegoating can help you reduce the spread of faulty information. If there is no evidence to support a claim, you can dismiss the faulty reasoning and thereby stop the spread of faulty information.