If a week starts on Sunday, then when does it end? No, that’s not a trick question. It's Saturday.
Most of us can answer that without much thought. However, this exact question was the center of a viral debate on the internet, where one user repeatedly asserted the week would end on Sunday, which makes an eight day week.
It’s a funny but scarily familiar example. In the past few years, cases of confident incorrectness have appeared in every corner of the internet. While it isn’t always as obvious as how many days are in a week, there are countless examples of outlandishly wrong statements ranging from science to history to social issues.
And when these users are corrected, they often instead double down, creating arguments that shouldn’t have lasted over thirty seconds. No matter how great the evidence or how clear the reasoning, some people would rather bend reality than admit they were wrong.
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The First Click
One major reason for the rise of false claims is that many posters simply don’t care about if their information is correct. Social media is all about grabbing a user’s attention as fast as possible, sacrificing accuracy for flashy headlines. As such, there are many posts that are designed to trigger emotion immediately in users instead of providing thoughtful information.
Take one post on X, for example. A user posted a picture of them weighing a two pound box of grapes. They were shocked that the scale’s reading was only 1.045, writing that “It’s ridiculous how much advantage we are taken of [sic]”. The comments were quick to point out that the scale was in fact weighing in kilograms, which made 1.045 a perfectly normal weight.
Examples like these are extremely common across the internet, with an entire subforum of reddit called r/confidentallyincorrect being devoted to these examples. When everyone is competing for clicks, likes, and shares, the truth often gets swallowed underneath whatever sounds most dramatic. Especially since people are more inclined to click on posts in all caps and exclamation marks instead of a long paragraph, many incorrect users still act confident when posting.
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This has significant consequences. First, it is easier than ever to be misled by online information. Users have to be very careful about what they believe, and fact checking is often necessary.
Second, this also leads to other users having to spend their time correcting false information. When the original incorrect user doubles down, this leads to long arguments. Many have even had to resort to making “video essays” to prove trivial points. There are now several muti-hour long Youtube videos that prove the Moon landing is real, just to rebut conspiracy theorists. Energy that could be used for other tasks is instead wasted arguing points like these.
Finally, when mountains of misinformation are produced, the truth is often buried. Important and genuinely helpful information is drowned out, and the quality of what users see plummets.
Echo Chambers
While a wrong post about grapes or calendars is annoying, they are generally simple, low-level mistakes. Confident incorrectness starts getting dangerous as users stay in contact with incorrect takes for long periods of time.
Echo chambers are defined as places where users only encounter information that matches their own beliefs. Unsurprisingly enough, humans like to be right. We often seek out people or groups that agree with us and validate our thoughts, which reassure us that we are smart, logical, and correct.
Social media also encourages this behavior, with the algorithm designed to recommend videos and posts that are similar to what you like to watch. If Youtube sees you click on a video telling you aliens are real, it will happily recommend you ten more that support the point.
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A basic level of this behavior is sports. Fans rooting for a certain team tend to talk with fans rooting for the same team, and have the same thoughts about their team. They watch the same highlights, use the same statistics, and as time goes on everyone believes that their team truly is the best.
Other famous examples are the flat-earth theory, or the theory that birds are government spies. These are both ridiculous theories that are sometimes posed as jokes, but there are also groups that devoutly believe them.
Echo chambers can lead to much more serious consequences, though. Political extremism, hate groups, and radicalism are often conceived in these echo chambers, where users bounce their own extreme ideas off each other. As more and more people are sucked into echo chambers, big and small, people find it harder and harder to admit they are wrong and change their opinions. Generally reasonable people can feel an impossible divide between them after extended periods in echo chambers.
Solutions
So what can we do about this? In a time and age where misinformation runs rampant, how should you protect yourself? It’s impossible to delete every wrong post from the internet, but there are a couple tips you can use to keep yourself safe from misinformation.
First, fact check your sources. You don’t have to go to Wikipedia to correct every meme you see, but if you’re taking information from an unreliable source, it would probably serve you well to verify it with a trusted source Especially if the news sounds dubious or shocking, it generally doesn’t hurt to do a quick Google search. Jaw-dropping news without quoted sources from a random user online is probably not the best place to get your information.
Second, expose yourself to a wide spectrum of opinions. Even if you are only listening to facts, it is still easy to get a tilted picture of an issue. This is especially common in politics, which leads to a large amount of misinformation.
Make sure that you have thoroughly heard both sides of the story instead of jumping to conclusions. Try reading from multiple sources. You don’t have to agree with everyone, but make sure you’re getting the full story.
Most importantly, keep an open mind. Everyone makes mistakes, and everyone will be wrong sometimes. The most important part is to actively catch your mistakes and fix them.
When someone calls you out, don’t jump to being defensive. Consider that you may be wrong yourself, and be willing to admit it. The other person will often be wrong, but it’s always possible that maybe you got some faulty information somewhere.
While fake news has seen a surge in popularity in recent years, by following these simple tips, you can protect yourself from the pitfalls that so many other unfortunate internet users have fallen into. Stay away from echo chambers, check your sources, and admit your mistakes.
So the next time you’re on the internet and you see a user claiming that Spain speaks Mexican, you can just smile and move on, knowing how we got here, and how you’re avoiding this behavior.
