Norman Jr. M.

Pablo

BSBIO 1-2

COMM 1100

Responding to Multimodal Materials from Social Media

Have you ever shared a Facebook post that was tagged as "this information is not available; it contains
misleading and false information or it has been deleted" If so, how was your experience? To be honest,
I've had that experience a few times when I was younger, and the largest misinformation I've shared
online is the post that blames China for the incident of COVID-19 virus.

The multimodal material use by the author was very catchy, informations which serve as evidences to
their claims was detailed and logically arranged. If you would read the article, it would make you believe
that China really plans the COVID-19 pandemic for global supremacy. That time I didn't know that the
information I post was misleading. Evidences that support their claim makes sense but it is baseless.
After realizing that I shared this king of information, it makes me feel embarrassed that time even I am
the only one who only know that my shared post is misleading. Knowing that I was one of the
contributors why false information is widespread online. But these experience made me learn
something, it taught me that as one of the receivers of information about the issues happening to the
society, we should be responsible of assessing that information before sharing it.

Fortunately, Media and Information Literacy subject is available in High School. Back when I was on
Senior High School, this was my favorite subject and I learned a lot. I learned how to asses information
we get from second hand sources and how to locate reliable sources of information.

People share some reasons. The first one is that they didn't know that they are sharing false or
misleading information. Many people especially Filipinos didn't know how to access the information
they shared. They also can't locate reliable sources of information. Second is that, false information is
manipulative. People create false information in accordance on what people want to believe. Foe
example, if people want to believe in fairies, false news creators will created an interesting story about
fairies.

In the fight for misinformation, our parents and relative are the most common victim of misinformation.
It's because that they didn't know that we can't trust any information on the internet as long as it is
shared by reliable sources.

To fight misinformation and fake news we should equip our self in becoming a media and information
literate who has the ability to asses informations and locate realizable sources. We also have to educate
our relatives about these issue. We should also use our social media to spread authentic information
and fact checks to fight fake news.