A scary thing is happening. Everyone is beginning to talk about it. It’s plastered all over the media. Discussions in your friend circles and familiar online spaces are being dominated by the new topic. You’ve seen it all before. Another media blitz. But how can you persevere through this new hysteria with your perception of reality intact? Here’s a look at ways one can ensure their access to information remains as uncorrupted as possible through the next big psyop.
Prefer primary sources always. Articles citing (or aping) other’s claims place them downstream from reality. Follow the information up the chain until you cannot go any further. You’ll find that many normie outlets simply rephrase or completely parrot upstream publications or witness accounts. And that’s not even taking into consideration scrapers and AI generated writings.
Avoid passively accepting aggregated news off of a feed, even if it is from your own crafted selection such as RSS feeds. Remain critical even of personalities you trust who gather and share topics. Their newsletters or video reports are no substitute for verifying claims through primary sources. For the real zombies out there, particularly avoid news “apps”, and commercial news outlets.
Be prepared to dig back with archive sites like web.archive.org, archive.today and hozon.site. Liars and psychopaths like to gaslight the public by changing their stories after publication. Prefer the oldest or original captures of articles as they were first written. If the article isn’t archived, pay attention to the most recent indicators. Did comments cut off after a certain date? Where is the oldest external hyperlink that points to the article?
Some other pertinent questions which any media literate person should be asking:
Actual real world events, since the dawn of the internet, have tended to be identified and discussed in online spaces, preempting the dinosaur media and, in turn, real world discourse as the information bubbles its way up through the normiesphere. I personally have noticed a lag time of about two weeks between first hearing about something online to overhearing people around me begin to drop it in conversation. Conversely, psyops have a tendency to follow this inversely, with IRL Karens shrieking about a new topic in unison before it generally had a chance to circulate organically among (non-corporatized) online spaces.
There is no magic rule that can universally be applied to determine whether a news piece is bullshit, but they can generally be sussed out by asking basic critical questions. I suppose this is braindead information to most anyone already reading this. But maybe the odd normie or somebody only just now waking up to things can find it useful. Basic media literacy is sorely lacking today.