OMAHA, Nebraska (KMTV) — Scrolling, sharing, liking and commenting is something we all do. Whether political or not, misinformation and disinformation can spread easily on social media. In fact, that’s what happened to a local man earlier this month.
TRANSCRIPT OF THE MISSION:
It started with a video that John Jankovich recorded earlier this month and posted on x before the Tim Walz rally in Omaha.
“I was scrolling through social media on my phone and saw a post about the campaign. I just decided to pull out my phone and make a quick video, a 10-second video of the line I was in, to show the excitement,” Jankovich said.
His post was shared over 100 times.
“People used the video to compare the size of the crowds between the two different campaigns and all sorts of things,” Jankovich said.
However, someone misrepresented the video and shared it with the comment “Huge lines for monkeypox tests in Omaha, Nebraska.” This post was shared nearly 1,500 times.
“When we share inside jokes on the Internet, we share them with the world as if the whole world could see them,” Jankovich said.
X users can see his name below, which links to the original post, but it’s easy to miss.
“The main point of the monkeypox outbreak is what caught their attention and passed it on without doing further investigation,” Jankovich said.
This extra due diligence is recommended by Dr. Peggy Rupprecht, associate professor of journalism at Creighton University. She says that while disinformation and misinformation have always existed, social media has only amplified it.
“If you see something in your social media feed that agrees with what you previously thought, you might say, ‘Yeah, I think that’s probably true.’ So as a consumer, you have to be very careful about the information you look at,” Rupprect said.
Dr. Rupprecht recommends that his users consume a variety of news from trustworthy sources and do a little research.
“This whole situation made me think about what I had seen that I thought was true but wasn’t really true,” Jankovich said.
Important lessons as more and more of us get our news online.
