Distorted information

Yesterday afternoon while I was walking I was called by two of my neighbors. Perhaps they had been talking for a long time and their spirits were quite upset. One of them asked me what I knew about the case of a baseball team of Venezuelan boys who took advantage of the moment to go to play in Spain and decided to ask for asylum and stay there.

The information my neighbors had said that the boys were in jail, that's why they were so upset, so they decided to ask me to find out. They know that I have a little more experience in these internet matters and that I try to check any information that comes to me before commenting on it.

I told them that the matter was not exactly as they were understanding it.

It was true that the group of boys had decided not to return to Venezuela and that they were trying to apply for some kind of asylum, perhaps thinking that there they would have more opportunities to be hired by the baseball teams that, although it may seem strange in a football-loving country, also exist in Spain.

I told them that in these cases, being a very large group, it was normal for the authorities to keep them together in one place while they made their investigations and took the necessary decisions. But that did not mean in any case that the boys were prisoners.

My explanation reassured them, they realized that in reality the boys were not the victims of any injustice. I advised them to always try to look for different information on the same subject, and that I was always at their disposal for any questions they might have.

Thanks to the Internet, we now have a great information space. We can have in real time first hand information of almost any event that is happening, anyone who has a cell phone can become a reporter of any important event.

However, that same advantage of having abundant information also creates a problem. Anyone can say anything and serve as a multiplier of unsubstantiated and even false information. Unfortunately, there are groups that have intentionally set themselves the task of spreading false information in order to confuse public opinion.

We are all vulnerable to this way of dealing with information, it is not easy to protect ourselves from those who misinform. This situation mainly affects the elderly who do not have the necessary tools to check if any information that reaches their phones is true or not.

I experience this problem every day. Every afternoon at 4:30 p.m. I receive a call from my mother. Two years ago my brothers and I bought her a cell phone so that she could contact us whenever she needed to. She lives in another city and is eighty-nine years old.

On every call we greet each other, she asks if I have any new information about my children who live in Europe, and then she begins to tell me the most unusual things she has read, or seen on Youtube videos.

In the days when Pope Francis was hospitalized there were many times when he would ask me with sadness in his voice if it was true that the Pope had died, that he had just read or seen him. I asked him to give me a few minutes to check because maybe I had not heard, I am not one of those people who look at the cell phone screen all the time, I check it at certain times of the day. After checking the information in the portals that I consider reliable, I answered that I did not.

This situation repeats itself day after day, my mother has no way to protect herself from those who spread false information on the internet. At her age she does not understand how to check the information, for her the cell phone plays the same role as the TV did in her youth, she believes everything she sees on the cell phone.

Like my mother, most of my elderly neighbors do not know how to discriminate whether what they read or hear on the cell phone is true or false.

I think there is little that can be done on this issue, I recommend to my neighbors not to give credibility to everything that comes to their phones, if they have children or grandchildren ask them to check the information. But this does not solve the problem.

Recently I was talking with some friends of my age about how different it was in the times when our country had three or four television channels and two or three important newspapers with national circulation.

Back then you knew that what was said on TV or read in the newspapers was generally true. There was no doubt about the information.

Of course, it could happen that some information was manipulated to be understood in a different way, but in general one had a reliable source of truth.

Thinking about all that makes me quite nostalgic. It seems unbelievable but now it is much easier to live in ignorance.

Thanks for your time.