Facebook Meme Fallacies

Dr. Bennett - thank you so much. I think you are correct. I believe social media made it easier for the country to become more divided / polarized. I see cognitive dissonance and "the back-fire effect" on full display every day. People substitute critical thinking and reasoning and evaluating the voracity of ideas with dispassionate objective standards for "source." George Will once commented to another pundit on a Sunday morning talk show, "You are a pyromaniac in a field of straw men." If someone has decided they will never trust a certain source, nothing they can say will ever matter.

Social media has made "reasoning" harder.

More of a cognitive bias than a logical fallacy (although there is much crossover), I would say by far the biggest problem with reasoning on Facebook is the confirmation bias . This often occurs when:

• Users block or ban other users for sharing ideas that are not inline with their own
  Following users with the same ideas as they have
  Following pages / liking pages that only (mostly) shares content with which they agree

This creates what has become known as an "echo chamber" that shelters people from different perspectives and tends to make people more extreme in their views. This is a big problem today with social media.