Spotting Disinformation: Bellevue man's social media video shared out of context

Scrolling, sharing, liking and commenting it's something we all do. Whether it's political or not, misinformation and disinformation can spread easily on social media, in fact it happened to a local man earlier this month.

BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:
It started with a video that John Jankovich took and posted to x outside of the Tim Walz rally in Omaha earlier this month.

"I was scrolling through social media on my phone, I saw a post related to the campaign so I just decided to pull out my phone and take a quick video, a 10 second video of the line I was in to show the enthusiasm," Jankovich said.

His post was shared over 100 times.

"People were using the video to compare crowd sizing between the two different campaigns, all sorts of things," Jankovich said.

Someone misrepresented the video, though, sharing it saying, ‘Huge lines to get tested for monkeypox in Omaha, Nebraska’. That post was shared nearly 1500 times.

"When we share inside jokes on the internet, we are sharing that with the world, like the whole world can see that," Jankovich said.

X users could see that his name at the bottom which links to the original post, but it's easy to miss.

"The main point of monkeypox outbreak is what caught their attention and shared without doing further diligence," Jankovich said.

It's that further due diligence that Dr. Peggy Rupprecht, associate professor of journalism at Creighton University recommends. She says while there has always been disinformation and misinformation, social media just amplifies it.

"If you see something in your social media feed and it aligns with what you already believe you might say yeah, I think that is probably true so as a consumer you have to be really careful about the information you are looking at," Rupprect said.

Dr. Rupprecht recommends users consume a variety of news from trusted news sources and to do a little digging.

“This whole situation kind of got me rethinking about like what did I see that I thought was true that wasn't really true," Jankovich said.

Important lessons as more and more of us get more news online.