Don’t quit Facebook, but be more of a skeptic

Everybody get off of Facebook is the advice some are giving following news its users’ personal information was gleaned for such nefarious purposes as getting Donald Trump elected U.S. president.

The story about Cambridge Analytica’s unauthorized use of Facebook data is concerning.

Facebook’s slow response to the news shows it cannot be trusted to protect our data and governments need to step in.

In Canada, acting minister for democratic institutions Scott Brison has said he is open to strengthening privacy laws.

Federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien is investigating whether the data breach affected Canadians. Those are small, but good, first steps.

But don’t expect a mass exodus from Facebook. It has become too ubiquitous. It’s a part of people’s everyday lives, and there is a lot of good about it.

It’s a good way to connect with family, friends, social and hobby groups, like-minded people and to reconnect with people from your past you actually liked. If you follow the right people and groups, you will get information that’s useful to you.

To get to the good stuff , you often have to wade through a lot of junk. It’s like cable TV before streaming and Netflix offered new alternatives. Many liked to say there was only junk on TV, but that wasn’t true.

For starters, one person’s junk is another person’s gold. And in the multi-channel universe, there are a lot of quality programs out there. You just have to sort through the garbage to find them. That’s how Facebook works. So the reality is most of us aren’t quitting Facebook, Our governments should address privacy issues, but we users need to be smarter, too.

Stop sharing so much information. Stop mindlessly clicking “like.” That’s information that’s collected and analyzed.

Facebook asks us to tell our “friends” more about ourselves — our favourite movies, books, TV shows, etc. Don’t tell them.

Stop spreading the fake news that floods your feed.

Here at The Daily Courier, a lot of our readers are skeptical about stories we print and some love to call us out if they don’t believe us. We like the feedback, actually. It shows our readers are engaged and looking at our product.

In many cases, if our readers lean right, they think this paper leans left. If our readers lean left, they think our stories lean right. Our reporting, of course, isn’t perfect, but we and our news services largely do a good job of applying journalistic standards that include a healthy dose of skepticism, disbelief and double checking.

Yet, the skepticism readers apply to our paper vanishes when people go to social media.

A headline is good enough for many online readers to click “like” or “share” — or forward the story if they got it by email — even when the reporting is clearly false or, as is often the case, contains just a small grain of truth that is used to create a wrong conclusion.

Let’s be as skeptical on Facebook as we are when we read the newspaper.

Our subscribers would tell us it’s none of our business if we said we needed to know what their favourite movie was for our subscriber database. Tell Facebook the same thing.