Critical Thinking — The top skill we need to teach our kids to fight against *Fake News* — Wayfair and Children trafficking.
First, to clarify — this is NOT a political debate about *Fake News*. This is about help our next generation to have the right mindset to handle the constantly growing misinformation and disinformation across the whole Internet.
About 2 weeks ago, Wayfair suddenly got *hot* since there was a conspiracy spreaded from Instagram to Reddit, then TikTok eventually everywhere on social network — I learnt about it since my teenage daughter showed me a TikTok post about it during the lunch and said to me with a serious face “Dad, can you believe Wayfair is doing this bad thing, unbelievable!”, I knew she fully believed it as true from her face.
Immediately I asked her “Wait, it does NOT make any sense to me since the Risk is too high than the potential economic Gain from Wayfair’s perspective as a doing-great public online furnituring leader”, and I continued, “do your own research first before you believe it, please”. She returned me with her face trying to say “Why!? Everyone on TikTok is sharing this news, it must be true.”
That really concerned me about our next-generation who were born as digital native generation, online social network is the only source of *news* and *truth* for them. It reminded me that as parents and in general a responsible member of the society, every adult should actively help train our youth to learn a key tool to determine which news are truth, and which are disinformation. The key tool is called Critical Thinking — until you have enough trustworthy info/evidence, you should NOT believe in the information you receive EVEN it’s broadly shared on social network.
And thanks to the great effort of fact checking like below one by USA Today, my critical thinking based skepticism led me to the right conclusion even without 1st hand evidence — Wayfair was innocent.
While, to be honest, Wayfair already forced to pay a big price — their brand is deeply affected among young generations since not many kids would have done their own homework to connect the dots to the truth — they already moved on to the other topics.
Again, I want to call every adult especially every parent, please fulfill your responsibility for your kids to help them become a great Critical Thinker — it’s partially essential as part of education today because of the easiness to start and spread a fake news or false information today online!
Btw, do you remember another false info like the #BroomChallenge one? :) As I know, there are a lot adults all over the world also believed it.
