This past weekend I missed almost every local event I wanted to go to.

Not because I didn't know about them ahead of time. Because I'd stepped away from social media for a stretch, and that's where the info lived. No app, no email list, no flyer on a wall. Just an Instagram page I wasn't checking anymore.

That's the tradeoff that comes with not trusting your feed. And I don't, not by default. If something shows up there, whether it's from a news outlet or a stranger's account, my starting position is that it's not true until I go check. I still think that's the right instinct. It cost me a weekend of local events, though, and that's worth sitting with.

But the bigger issue isn't whether I personally trust my feed. It's that the thing that used to tell all of us the difference is gone.

The checkout line used to tell you

Walk into any grocery store in the 90s and the checkout line had a rack next to the gum with the National Enquirer on it. The cover might say the president is an alien, and there's proof. You'd stand there for two minutes, read it, laugh, and put it back. Nobody thought it was real news. It didn't look like real news. Different rack, different font, different everything about how it reached you. The tabloid told you what it was before you read a single word.

That system is gone now. A fabricated image and a wire service photo show up in the same font, on the same feed, in the same size card. Nothing about how it reaches you tells you which one you're looking at.

A fake image that moved the market

In May 2023, a fake image of an explosion near the Pentagon spread across social media, shared first by an account with a blue checkmark calling itself "Bloomberg Feed." It looked like a real photo because it was built to. It carried a verification badge because the badge just meant someone had paid for it. The S&P 500 dipped before anyone could confirm that nothing had happened, and it recovered once the hoax fell apart. Nobody stood at a rack with two minutes to laugh it off. It landed in the same format as everything else in the feed, wearing the same credibility markers as the real thing, and it moved money before the correction caught up.

That's different from something like a gossip site. TMZ, The Shade Room, places like that still tell you what you're getting. You know you're reading gossip when you click. The fake Bloomberg account didn't tell you anything. It borrowed a real name and a real badge and counted on you not checking either one.

Once that label disappears, you end up at one of two extremes: believing everything you see, or believing none of it. I've landed hard on the second one, and for a while I thought that was the safer place to be.

Turn skepticism into a blanket default, though, and it's just as exploitable as gullibility. It just takes a different route to get there. Distrusting everything doesn't protect you, it just moves your trust somewhere else, usually to whoever manages to seem the most authentic to you personally. That person now has the one thing everyone else lost: your guard, completely down, because you decided in advance they're the exception.

Why your feed rewards outrage

None of this is an accident either. Feeds are built to maximize time on the platform, and time on platform comes from engagement, and engagement comes from emotion. Researchers found that false stories spread about six times faster than true ones on Twitter, and the reason wasn't bots. It was people, reacting to novelty and to anger. Outrage, guilt, and embarrassment move faster than a good headline ever could. Nobody's optimizing your feed for a story that makes you feel calm.

What I check before I believe something

This is where I've landed. I don't extend default trust to anything that shows up in a feed, source or no source. What I do trust is a short list: outlets and people with a track record I've checked against reality more than once, not just ones that sound right in the moment. When something outside that list grabs me, I go find it somewhere else before I believe it. A second outlet. An official statement. Anything that isn't just a repost of the first claim.

That's slower than scrolling. It's also the only thing that's worked so far.

I don't think the answer is deleting the apps, even though I've done exactly that more than once this year. Social media is still where I find out about the things happening two blocks from my house. The answer is going in knowing that nothing on the screen is going to tell you what it is anymore. You have to bring that question with you every time, because the feed isn't going to ask it for you.

- Kan