Surviving Your Feed When the World’s on Fire
This guide offers 10 media literacy tips to help you process what you’re seeing, spot manipulation, and stay human.
🔍 1. Pause Before Sharing
The algorithm thrives on urgency—truth doesn’t.
Slow down before reposting breaking news, emotional content, or graphic footage.
Ask: Is this verified? Who posted it first? Could it be manipulated?
🧠 2. Understand the Architecture of Misinformation
Wars are fought with bombs and narratives.
Learn how propaganda works: repetition, emotionally charged visuals, dehumanizing language, and omission of context.
Recognize that governments, militaries, and media outlets all use information as a weapon.
🗣 3. Diversify Your Sources—Radically
No single outlet tells the whole truth.
Follow independent journalists, especially those on the ground.
Seek out Palestinian, Israeli, and Iranian perspectives directly.
Use tools like AllSides.com, Ground.News, or Bellingcat to check bias and verify reporting.
⚠️ 4. Be Wary of AI-Generated or Staged Content
Deepfakes, recycled videos, and fake accounts are rampant.
Reverse search images and videos.
Look for unnatural visuals, shadows, or timestamps.
If it seems too perfectly shocking to be real, it might be synthetic.
📱 5. Practice Emotional Media Hygiene
You weren’t built to carry the weight of global tragedy alone.
Take intentional breaks.
Notice when you’re reacting from guilt, pressure, or fear.
Center your nervous system before engaging.
🧱 6. Ask Critical Questions About Every Post
Media is never neutral.
Who benefits from this narrative?
What’s missing from the frame?
Is this empowering action or just sensationalizing pain?
🤖 7. Know the Role of Algorithms
The most visible content isn’t always the most accurate.
Algorithms promote what shocks, divides, or keeps you scrolling.
You’re being shown what makes you stay online—not what’s true.
⛔️ 8. Don’t Equate Visibility with Legitimacy
Just because it’s trending doesn’t mean it’s true.
Some voices are amplified, others suppressed.
Shadow banning, content moderation, and geopolitical bias shape what gets seen.
🧹 9. Context is Resistance
Understanding the why is just as important as knowing the what.
Share timelines, explainers, and frameworks.
Help people think critically, not just react emotionally.
❤️ 10. Protect Your Humanity
Bearing witness matters—but not at the cost of your capacity to care.
Stay rooted in empathy, not just rage.
Refuse to let propaganda harden or numb you.
Being informed isn’t the same as being consumed.
🔎 Bonus: Misinformation vs. Disinformation
🔹 Misinformation = False or misleading info shared unintentionally.
🔺 Disinformation = False info spread deliberately to mislead or manipulate.
A Note from Callie
This guide is my ChatGPT chat after seeing a deepfake audio on TikTok of Trump saying “world war 3? Hard pass” and stalking the Iranian military on twitter.
I looked into it and thought the audio was fake, but wouldn’t be surprised if it came out to be true tomorrow?
In order to process, we have to understand we are not just processing what we are seeing. We also have to process the additional context that information carries.
I really appreciated the line “context is resistance.” It might take some hunting and gathering to find new sources and follow different people and take things with grains of salts and drink enough water and manage our nervous systems to keep up with being informed, but it is worth it.
We do not want to lose our capacity to care.
My IG post caption