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beliving on stuff on the internet

Last posted Jan 21, 2015 at 08:43PM EST. Added Jan 19, 2015 at 06:18PM EST
14 posts from 9 users

My brother(12 y) lately has been roaming on the internet alone, i do not worry about what he browses because he likes music and he mostly searches for music related stuff but about a month ago he starts seeing youtube videos about michael jackson being alive,he belives that and today he said he is not drinking milk anymore because it causes cancer ,i ask who told him that and he said it was my father who saw an article on the internet stating that.then

i realized that some people belive on evrything on the on the internet ,from the chain e-mails i recive from my grapa about stuff that is probaly a troll .
How i can do show my family that as a lot of lies?

PS:i wrote all of this from a cellphone i posted the first post by mistake.

Tell him that people can go on the internet and lies as much as they can irl; and make sure to watch what he browses online.
Inform him about reliable sources he can trust.
He's 12 right, that means he might not be old enough to distinguish myth from reality; if so, aiding him tell myth from reality might be necessary.

Tell him that if you want to learn something educational about what causes cancer, read a scientific journal. Else, tell him that reading the internet causes cancer and make an HTML page on his computer that just says "Reading stuff on the internet causes cancer!"

thanks for the responses, i will for sure try them.
As for you Dr. Coolface hell no!!!!!! i don't want my brother to see nasty stuff like i did when i was younger than him(at the time i only searched for porn ,play sim girls, read doujins).

That's a bit hard for someone who's young and/or uneducated to prove to someone else.

One way is to find a more reputable or trusted source that counters whatever unfounded information you're dealing with.

For the most part, you can try something like Wikipedia. Even though it's mostly editable by anyone, the information is a good starting point and blatant lies are usually edited to be more correct fairly quickly.
 
You can also try sites that have good but free information. For cancer and milk, for example, you can look up the keywords "milk" and "cancer" on PubMed Central. You get all of the fancy academic articles of health-related information without having to subscribe to extremely expensive academic journals. It's hard to read since it tends to be dense, but I'm pretty sure the PhD's and MD's there hold more clout than your average YouTube video.
 
But your best and most easily accessible resources for fighting off lies of the Internet are, oddly enough, the Internet combined with common sense.

It's cool (great, even) to look up information online from Google. But trust your common sense and use more than one source. Make sure that the information has more than a couple of sites citing it. Look into the credentials of who makes claims. Check the official site of a product to see if it confirms the claims of a product you've seen elsewhere online. Browse various forum threads with that as the title. Ask some trusted friends you know online.
 
And in cases like microwaving your phone to charge it, sometimes, you just can just guess that something is fishy or needs a little more research before you try it.

Skeletor-sm

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