Developing Critical Thinking Skills: A Guide to Success - Essay Sample

Introduction

Critical thinking is defined as the ability to think logically and clearly. It is a concept that involves an Individual's ability to participate in reflective and independent thinking. Critical thinking includes various skills such as rationality, trustworthiness, broadmindedness, discipline, and wisdom (Mulnix 474). Thinking critically, according to Mulnix, helps one to solve problems systematically, evaluate arguments, and to reflect on the validation of personal values and beliefs.

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Social media has changed how people receive news. Most people are getting news online, specifically from social media through online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, before even hearing them on a news station. They read a story on the various application on their phones the same way they could learn on the publication website or print version (Gentzkow et al. 211). Besides, many applications usually have a push notification enabler that allows the message to be sent directly to the phone.

Some of the consequences of relying only on social media feed for news is that some news misleads people since they lack accurateness, impartiality, or journalistic honesty. In an era when there are a variety of sources for information both credible and not so credible, the public is at risk of being misled. Social media is not supposed to clamp itself to similar journalistic canons that traditional news channels hold. It can be challenging to develop reliable and sensible news coverage if a station only concentrates on increasing its ratings (Kai et al. 22).

The ease of publishing on the internet has affected people's ability to find reliable information. This is because social media nowadays replace serious news with what is trending. There exist so many websites that display fake news competing for attention with sensational headlines and unreasonable storylines. Fake news is more likely to spread than the truth. It is, therefore, hard to get authentic content. To ensure that one is receiving the most reliable news, it is essential to identify reputable information sources and then support them as the primary sources of news and information (Kai et al. 22).

Identifying fake news is quite possible with the proper tools and techniques. One such device is known as google reverse search. For instance, if a photo or story has been recirculated from another website, it can be discovered with a reverse image search or google reverse search. While a reliable news source has to report facts without preference and rely on trustworthy sources, this does not mean that media consumers are free of blame. It is the reader's responsibility to verify the information they are reading (Gentzkow et al. 211).

A situation where I have been fooled by misleading information is during one episode on the television where the narrator states that the Lancaster County Police detained one of the main characters of the Lancaster Police, but in reality, there is purportedly no such law prosecution agency in Lancaster. These fake news deceived many people. Fake news gives the fabricated public information of untrue things, and if the public believes in them, it may lead to the destruction of human dignity and defamation.

Work Cited

Allcott, Hunt, and Matthew Gentzkow. "Social media and fake news in the 2016 election." Journal of economic perspectives 31.2 (2017): 211-36. Retrieved from https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.31.2.211

Mulnix, Jennifer Wilson. "Thinking critically about critical thinking." Educational Philosophy and Theory 44.5 (2012): 464-479. https://philpapers.org/rec/MULTCA-4

Shu, Kai, et al. "Fake news detection on social media: A data mining perspective." ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter 19.1 (2017): 22-36. https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.01967