Introduction
There is a hype ongoing about AI, ChatGPT, and other smart tools to make your life easier… and at the same time there are other channels documenting, that we unintentionally has put ourselves at risk for being manipulated to believe and reach to what we see without giving it a second thought.
It can be overwhelming these days to watch your feeds at the Social Media channels or News channels whether it is public news, business news or the insider news – there are so much information thrown in to your face that you generally get overwhelmed and start to be selective putting you at risk for missing the important stuff relevant for your personal well-being and/or the important relevant for your business.
Having all this information available in front of you it will require some competences in being able to sort out the relevant from the non-relevant and then again to prioritize what to read first.
In college during the 1980s (before the Internet) we were taught to be critical to the news and how we could verify the source before we would share/ discuss/ trust the news.
This kind of skill set happens to be more important than ever these days, but which source to trust?
Since 2020 new scenarios has popped up, but these still remains active…
Just picking a few areas which I find have values for each of us:
- Information about potential/ documented foreign interfering in the national elections pointing in each direction, either “true” or “fake news”
- Customer data including personal details being stolen and published on-line by the ransomware operators
- Payment Card information stolen from the service handling your payments when purchasing from a Web-shop (e-commerce website)…
- Data “stolen” from a non-protected database containing enough personal data to clone you (pretend to be you on-line while buying/ commenting/ and so forth)…
- Attacked organizations stating no personal data of value were stolen…
- AI has been dubbed both “the most impactful invention” and our “biggest existential threat
- YouTube being the source for feeding conspirational theories in to the public
- Our culture of SoMe sharing (emotional reaction) are used for distributing attacks on personal or company level
All this leads to the question: Who, what and which source can I as an individual person trust?
I noticed on LinkedIn in 2020 David Sable using this tag: #thinkbeforeyoushare – maybe we should change our general behaviour to wait – giving it a second thought – and then first share tomorrow?
On the other hand how can we then warn other people, when there is a live campaign from a fake Microsoft Support Team calling you in order to get access to your computer…
– or when a fake payment service is calling you to conform your credit card details?
In general we all should agree to, that you only agree with the message provided via the individual post – not necessary the comments to the content.
I believe this behaviour will have a long term positive impact:
read, reflect, take a deep breath, read again, give the content some thoughts like “Would I personally stand up for this content in terms of trust, credibility and message?”
and then press the button either itʼs 👍 ❤ 👏 💡 or 🤔
It is always my intention to follow this simple guidance, but being human sometimes I fail and press the button before thinking…
Please feel free to share in the event you are confident in me as a source 😉
This article was published initially on LinkedIn on 4 March 2020 – minor revision of the text in this version has been executed.
Image Credits:
| Question Marks | Dreamstime Free |
| It’s complex | Dreamstime |
| Time for reflection | Photo by Rob Schreckhise on Unsplash |
Thank you for having read this article – hope you have enjoyed it and that it has given you some ideas of where to start improving your own business or individual role, when it comes to the use of IT.
Best wishes for the future.