The New Skepticism

I have noticed a new kind of skepticism creeping into my analysis of the items I see on social media. It doesn’t always operate, but I’ve noticed that I’m skeptical of certain things in a way I never was before.

For example, I saw a social media post by a friend that claimed a horrible roller coaster accident had happened at a Six Flags or some such amusement park. The post claimed that an entire roller coaster had gone off the rails and killed something like fifty people. Horrible, right? Well, I was skeptical.

You see, there was no link to an article. There was just a video link that supposedly was too graphic to be shown on the news. For one thing, I didn’t want to see that. More relevant though, I immediately wondered whether or not this was real without some kind of other citation.

I checked my various news gathering sites. I saw nothing about such an accident. I even tried searching them for any kind of similar accident in case someone had just decided that this wasn’t front page news. Nothing.

It seemed to me that if this had really happened, there would have been some other kind of reference to it in the news. It wouldn’t have gone by unnoticed entirely, especially since the video had supposedly been determined to be too graphic by some news source. As such, that should have meant they were at least reporting on the tragedy.

As such, I determined it hadn’t really happened. I’m not sure if the video was a prank or a scam, but someone was trying to appeal to people who wanted to see horrible things by making up something about a horrific tragedy. I wasn’t going to watch the video either way, but I really wasn’t going to watch anything about something that waved such red flags at me.

Something was fishy.