Earlier today I had a long back and forth with a journalist about the health care debate and I was pointing out to her how little fact was in what she had been writing and that what Americans need now, more than ever, is _good_ information. This video, in a weird way, reinforces the worst part of social media – its ability to turn data that is incorrect into accepted “fact” for the larger community and _that_ has the potential to be very damaging. Do we care deeply about the actual percentage of businesses that use LinkedIn? No, not really. But we do care when social media creates straw bogeymen like the birther movement, the death panels canard, and 9/11 conspiracy theories.

I certainly don’t want to equate this video with those issues (and other, far more nefarious ones, like the long sordid history of the Protocols of Zion) but I think that the popularity of this video shows how statistics, well presented and passed along socially, distort our understanding of the world we actually live in.

I would like to remix the video and add a last stat: 99% of viewers will never fact check these claims.

I use it for lifestreaming and to keep my friends updated on projects I am working on. I have a personal account plus accounts for all my projects so I don’t overload people with updates on things they aren’t interested in.

Twitter is easy and convenient and you don’t have to spend a lot of time on it (where as writing a blog post can be a bit more time consuming).

Thanks,
Jesse