How To Tell When You Are Being Manipulated

It's getting harder and harder to find objective news. It seems that almost every site now is pushing an agenda and trying to get you to think their way or make you do something. 

Here's a good article from The Big Picture that offers some basic techniques to help you tell when you are being manipulated.. 

To avoid falling into the manipulation trap when consuming media, I like to remind myself of the first two tenets of journalism ethics:

Seek the truth as fully as possible

Seek to minimize harm

Anyone who isn’t doing these things isn’t performing ethical journalism.

More practically, when someone tells you a story, look for an attempt to fulfill these two elements—seeking the truth as fully as possible, and seeking to minimize harm. If you don’t see it, you should be skeptical of what you’re being fed. And you should use it as a trigger to employ extra critical thinking.

There are lots of ways to manipulate people with storytelling. But there are three big ones right now in mainstream news and social media that, once you start noticing them, you’ll have more power to see when you’re being manipulated—and hopefully, help others see too.