Lies, Social Media, Relationships, and Fear

If this past election cycle has taught us one thing, it’s that the Internet is not a safe place to get your information. (The fact that I’m writing this on a blog is an irony I am intensely aware of.) Recently, the New York Times interviewed a gentleman who professed to make a six-figure salary writing news stories that he knew full well were untrue, where in the only measure of success (and income) was how many clicks the fake news received. The Times also runs a fascinating site called “Red Feed, Blue Feed” that displays just how radically different Facebook can be to people who display a preference for liberal vs. conservative media.

All that isn’t really important to a family law firm…or is it? Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is of course it’s important. If for no other reason than that couples who maintain different Facebook feeds can easily find themselves at odds over current issues because they’re getting their news from different sources, and there’s no way to tell which is reporting “real” news and which is “fake.” But there’s a much more insidious fact at work behind the scenes as well.

Fear is Not a Family Value
Far more damaging to the human relationships that we see come through our office is the existence of news reports that encourage people to be afraid. These come in a huge variety, but all of them boil down to the same essential message: ‘you are going to lose/already losing the things you value because of X group.’

It might be losing money because of lazy moochers, or losing security because someone wants to prevent you from being armed, or losing your job because of companies exporting jobs to China. The point is that there is an enormous cottage industry out there designed to keep you scrolling down that Facebook page and clicking on their links by scaring the crap out of you in any number of ways. (These stories come from both sides of the political fence, so don’t think we’re putting one political affiliation above the other here.)

The Stress Connection
Ultimately, the problem this causes is unnecessary stress, which is harmful not just to the person who is reading these fake stories and getting upset and afraid, but to their entire family. We’ve had people come into the office complaining that their spouses were addicted to Facebook for a few years, but it’s only been in the past several months that they’ve complained that their spouses were experiencing “Facebook rage.” And the scary part was that the rage was almost entirely based on fake news stories designed to keep them scared and angry.

It’s one thing to deal with a divorce that’s inspired by real-world problems and circumstances — those are painful enough. But watching a once-committed couple falling apart because of a purely fictional, purely profit-motivated social media phenomenon just tears at our heartstrings.

Facebook and Google are both currently working on ways to filter fake news out from everyone’s feeds, but unfortunately that’s not going to be a fast or a definitive answer. The only real way to prevent the artificially-induced fear-rage from causing problems is to learn, as individuals, that it’s possible and in fact incredibly valuable to step back from the fear-rage-scroll-click social media cycle and focus our attention on the loving and valuable people we live with every day.