Don't use social network/media sites as your source of news.

...Especially not Twitter or Tumblr.

For fuck's sake, this should be common sense already, so I honestly can't help but laugh and facepalm when people take Tumblr or Twitter or other sites seriously. Because those and the like are the most common places where misinformation and fake news run rampant. Or the news is heavily construed with opinions and not actual facts.

I cannot emphasis enough how much of a disservice you are doing to yourself by getting your current events from fucking Tumblr. Social media sites like Tumblr should be viewed as a place of opinions on current events...Not an accurate source of news about current events. Almost everything on that site is taken out of context or exaggerated like fuck and is heavily biased...Even more so than the mainstream news outlets. As someone else put it very well:

Yes, because the website that "leaks" posts, such as a KKK rally in Ferguson, and has these posts spread like wildfire, when in reality the image was not a KKK rally in Ferguson, but a four year old image of a KKK rally elsewhere in the United States, is the place to rely on information from.

Let's ignore the fact it could take possibly hours or even days for the truth of the situation to come forward and even when it does, the original misinformed posts has hundreds of thousands of notes.

Let's also forget the fact about how gosh darn easy it is to fake a tweet, news article, or any other post.

This is why I have a few trust-issues with people in general. I don't go by people's word on anything that happens. For all I know, they could be exaggerating or lying. So I take everything I hear on the Internet with a grain of salt, until I actually talk to someone about it IN PERSON or I see it happen for myself.

For example: this past summer, I got to see the difference between what's reported on TV and seeing it happen live before me. Before, I didn't really see wildfires being too threatening on TV...I definitely felt concerned about the people who were threatened by it, but as I was sitting comfortably in my own home, it felt less threatening for me. But that was until I got to have a front-row seat in watching a real wildfire in action, while being stuck in traffic on a road that was not too far from the burning hillside. That's when the disaster looked ten times more terrifying (and rather fascinating). I was that close to it and in full view of it myself, in reality...and I wasn't viewing it from a TV/computer screen.

Do mainstream news exaggerate their reports too? Yep. If I learned anything from my Media Culture class last year, it's that even news media/journalism is competitive. Most news outlets compete for who can get the latest scoop on breaking news faster and then will often exaggerate it to appease their viewers, which is how misinformation starts to spread. They will tell you what you want to hear about, but not always tell you what you need to hear.

But Tumblr and Twitter and all other social media sites do that 3x worse, because almost all of those news posts on there are heavily biased and even more exaggerated from the person who's sharing it. Even the articles they link to you to are heavily biased. I once saw a post on Tumblr about an old photo from the 1960s or earlier, featuring a beaten up black guy and two white guys standing next to him. The original post made the two white guys out to be racist, implying that they beat up the black guy then posed for the picture. It went through several hundred notes of reblogs/faves and a few angry comments on it before someone finally stepped up to stop the misinformation by posting the original photo and another from the same incident, then commented with the original story of the first photo that the two white guys had actually stopped to help the beaten and bloodied black guy during a civil rights rally.

That's why you shouldn't take social media sites seriously. The mainstream news media will often misconstrue information like that too, but not as bad as Tumblr or other social media sites do. So you're really better off taking your news from the lesser of the two evils...The mainstream news outlets.