Author: admin

What Responsible media use means?:

Responsible media used can a lot a lot of things like how you use websites, online platforms and overall what you do. Everyone who is online needs to be aware of what they are posting and what they share because people will see what they post and react to it. The most important aspect is making better decisions when it comes to being online and knowing that potentially what you post will affect you and others.



Why should everyone think twice before posting or sharing something online?:

Everyone should think twice before posting anything online because up until I’ve been learning more about social media, I keep getting reminded that everything is permanent online and it could be hard to take back what you post as you are creating your digital footprint. I think it’s super important to think about how ones words can affect other people as people should be more aware of how people might react and whether their information is appropriate or even necessary

How misinformation and fake news spread:

Misinformation and fake news spread like wild fire now on any social media. People can share posts no matter what they are interested in and sometimes headlines or even the story itself can sound real when really it’s misleading and might be all false. Since people share a lot of false information people start to believe it more and more because they see it. It is crucial, that people check their sources and really make sure how accurate the information is before sharing it with others.

Why respecting others privacy is important?:

Respecting other peoples privacy is important as everyone has the right to protect their personal information to themselves. I think if people do not share sensitive information with things like photos and personal information it would make them feel uncomfortable and can lead to further problems.



Communicating respectfully online:

Communicating respectfully online means you would treat people kindly, even when people don’t have the same opinions and sides with you. Any type of bullying or hurtful words online really is no good and could hurt others but going back to one of my points earlier, you are just adding more things to your digital footprint.

How can people change and use any social media positively?

People can use social media in a good way by sharing accurate and honest information, staying connected with friends and family, being as positive as one can be and using social media to discover new things and staying up to date with any world news. Using social media to argue, spread hate, share misinformation is a waste of time and energy. If used responsibly, social media is a great tool for any communication, building strong connections and above all learning.

Credit for images:

Sites used to create images were,
Grok.com and istockphoto.com

Respect Others: Everyone is welcome within this community. Everyone’s opinion is respected and everyone should feel welcome. Respect people by avoiding bullying, hateful language, harassment and being toxic.

Give accurate information: My blog mainly will focus on digital media literacy and will have a lot of research involved. Having accurate information is super important so when sharing information, please double check to make sure it’s accurate.

Keep chats appropriate: All comments should relate to the blog topic and to any conversations here. Please do not spam, have no threats or posting misleading information on purpose.

Persons Privacy: Do not share anyone’s personal information on here. This may include personal messages, photos or any other information.

Supporting Claims: To the best of your ability, please give reliable sources or valid sources when sharing information.

Be Open Minded: Be willing to here what others have to say and listen to other peoples own personal unique experiences and opinions.

Give Credit: If you use other peoples work, please claim it as theirs or sight your work. Giving credit to someone else’s work is very important.

Respect Peoples Boundaries: If people tell you they feel uncomfortable or don’t like something, please respect that wish and be respectful to what they want.

Hello everyone my name is Gio Morey and I am interested in learning more about digital media literacy. I think in todays world people will see horrible things online or will just keep swiping instead of keeping up with world events. One thing about digital media that people should understand is that it affects more and more people and knowing anything about media is important in todays world. As a student, I want to learn more on how digital media affects people and understand how people will communicate and learn from it. Through my blog, I hope I give useful information to inform people of how they can use media responsibly and be informed about this issue.

Have you ever come across a post you have read online and ever questioned if it’s real? I’m here to tell you, what you are reading, might be fake news from a fake profile or website that looks to be real with comments, and a whole social media page. You might be thinking to yourself, “Oh I know how to spot fake news, oh this post here is clearly fake just because I know it is.” It’s deeper than that as the spread of fake news happens because of how people think, how information is shared to this day, and how social media works in general.

A major reason why fake news spreads online is because of how social media algorithms are set up. For example, platforms like TikTok and Instagram are designed to show users their own content that they are interested in and keep them actively hooked while keeping them on their app. As said in Oxford academic article, “There are many interrelated causes of the misinformation problem, including the ability of non-experts to rapidly post information, the influence of bots and social media algorithms.”

https://academic.oup.com/heapro/article/40/2/daaf023/8100645

So from this we can only assume that these bots that are created find what ever information they want or make up information and just rapidly post about it to get people hooked on it and for people to believe it. As what I can see, problems like bots saying problems and spamming all these fake messages to agree is making people agree as well and thinking the information must be correct even though there is no fact checking with them is a problem. People just need to be aware of what our world is today and how much AI is growing.

Another huge reason why we see misinformation all the time is because of how fast information can move online. Since the start of when phones and electronics starting coming out, it was a lot harder to make believe in fake news sources cause their was not many places you can go to for answers. In today’s world, there are so many sites, news sources, people to trust, all of this just to make money. One interesting point said in MIT News is they say, “the spread of false information is essentially not due to bots that are programmed to disseminate inaccurate stories. Instead, false news speeds faster around Twitter due to people retweeting inaccurate news items.” With that in mind, I can only assume that people are very close minded people and do not care about other opinions and will post whatever they want without doing little to know research on the problem.

In this video we see multiple of examples of people talking about the news, weather or just crazy events. Within this video at first they show two news people talking and take turns showing each video and it’s for sure hard to tell what’s fake and real especially when you’re in a rush or don’t care what you’re seeing and it’s scary. The fact that videos like this come across people page everyday and nobody seems to care about this issue is not good. Fake news is becoming our worlds “real news” and it’s a scary time. Eventually people won’t even turn to news anymore because they will think it’s all fake.

The biggest factor of all of this is really just bias and peoples emotions. As said in Georgia’s state news hub “studies largely pointed to belief in fake news as confirmation bias, which is the tendency to believe information that supports your existing worldview. But this new study suggests something deeper is going on, especially during times of uncertainty like the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that people do consume fake news differently than tabloid news, which is largely consumed for entertainment and not taken seriously. With fake news, people are believing and sharing it because it feels useful either emotionally or informationally.” It’s sad to think that in todays world that people will believe whatever just because they have strong opinions on it and based off what they hear from the internet in which is a very bad place in general to talk and hear things now.

They not not even question the fact that it’s fake news and just always accept the fact that they are right. This raises a new issue of lack of digital literacy, meaning they do not know how to accurately or do not know how to verify if that information is correct. with this skill people might become more able to spot fake headlines, fake images, edited ai images, deep fakes, however, is getting harder and harder everyday.

The internet is becoming a more and more powerful place and it is really scary of what people can do. Fake news is taking over everyone’s heads and is corrupting people’s minds and turning them wild. The spread of fake news cannot be overlooked and is a very important problem we still face to this day. I think fact checking and looking into multiple news sources can help but also really important, don’t believe everything you see online. It’s the internet, and anything can happen online good or bad, real or fake!

I am sure you have come across posts where you are not sure if what the people are posting are true. I am sure you have also come across posts where you maybe are skeptical on the user posting the video or the comment section. Misinformation can’t always be caught and in some cases people will not know if what they are saying is even true just because they simply believe it at first site. But I am here to say there is an easy fix to this for TikTok and Instagram.

According to TikTok’s safety policy, their rule is “We have robust policies around specific types of misinformation like medical, climate change, and election misinformation, as well as misleading AI-generated content, conspiracy theories, and public safety issues like natural disasters.” A little further down on their page and they say “We also address disinformation by removing accounts that repeatedly post misinformation that violates our policies, and have expert teams who continuously monitor for disinformation campaigns, inauthentic behavior, and influence operations.”, meaning they monitor these accounts and if they see more fishy activity they get removed or get a temporary suspension.

Now for Instagram they are bit more professional when showing their rules about misinformation. On the official Instagram Help Page they say, “We use both technology and feedback from our community to identify posts and accounts that may contain false information. We also work with third-party fact-checkers across the globe who review content in over 60 languages and are certified through the non-partisan International Fact-Checking Network to help identify, review and label false information.” So not only do they use third party sites and review it through fact checkers, they have community forms for people to fill out and send it in for posts that are not real as well.

Now for what Instagram does, Accounts that repeatedly share false information on Instagram may be restricted in other ways, such as:

:”We disable accounts that go against Instagram’s Community Guidelines. Learn more about our policies on these false information in Instagram’s Community Guidelines.

:If someone tries to follow one of these accounts, they’ll see a warning letting them know that the account has previously posted false information.

:We may also make posts by accounts that repeatedly share false information harder to find.”

From my own experience I have seen tons on peoples profiles on TikTok get taken down because they repeatedly spread misinformation and hate at the same time, but also because tons of people were following the account and it seems that people were trusting that account not knowing that it was just some random account with no proof. I did also notice when went back to this persons account, the account was removed because people notably saw that the account kept posting false and fake information and their account got removed. I think what’s hurting these sites is that they clearly don’t just want to remove peoples accounts or give people warnings for no reason, but I think people are making it harder and harder overtime to spot these fake accounts and to tell if people are really trying to share false information on purpose vs the people that want to spread false information and TikTok won’t know who to deal with because it feels like the same.

So you might be asking do these rules really stop misinformation and do people get annoyed about how good these rules are? The short answer to this is no. TikTok is one of the biggest social media platforms out right now and they simply do not care as much for fake news because they control what is allowed and what’s not. In How effective are TikTok misinformation debunking videos? They are not even talking about how bad TikTok’s rules are and how their tools to stop misinformation does not work. They more or less talk about ways to stop these accounts from spreading and how to reduce the impact on the spread on the mis information.

Improvements I would recommend for both Instagram and TikTok would be to spend more money on bots that are able to recognize both bot accounts and fake news and have the bots scan for little details that they are able to see from past victims and it keeps learning that way. Some people would say stricter rules but TikTok doesn’t really hold up to these rules and the rules would be useless so last rules I would suggest are better detection of AI content and more warnings and the warnings for repeating offenders get worse over time if they keep doing it.

Is vaping safer than smoking? We have all heard of smoking and trying to figure out which is worse. I personally started vaping at the start of freshman year in high school because I was bullied and was forced into doing it otherwise I would get beaten up but I can say not I have been sober since January 8th, of 2026. The first time I had ever heard about comparing vaping to smoking was a little bit before covid in my drug ed class. They would be talking about how they both are dangerous and what it could lead too and things like that.

My first genuine reaction to this was it has to be safer because smoking cigarettes has clearly killed tons of people and causes cancer and will make your lungs black from inhaling the smoke. In 5 Vaping Facts You Need To Know, I believe this is a genuine site. This page doesn’t seem biased, It has great sources of reliability, and the featured expert on here has tons of good reviews. Lastly, this seems legit as the article goes deeper in the problem rather than just answering the question asking things like, “Does vaping lead to smoking?”

Is Vaping as Bad for Your Health as Smoking? Well according to Blue cross Blue Shield, “Vaping can actually make it harder to stop. Studies show that vaping is just as addictive as smoking regular cigarettes. And about 28 percent of smokers who use vaping are less likely to quit.” Smoking cigarettes are bad for you but I think even if you switch to vaping than smoking, that is a very good swap in my opinion, and you can slowly reduce the nicotine level to 0 and finding new alternatives to smoking when reducing your nicotine level.

Lastly, This site has also said that this newly vaping disease that people are getting is called popcorn lung, according to this website, “Vaping has also been linked to serious lung injuries, like bronchiolitis obliterans, often called popcorn lung.” Basically creates holes in your chest and making it harder to breath. However this is rare and doesn’t happen to everyone.

My conclusion to this problem is vaping safer than smoking, I would say yes, it is safer to vape rather than smoke. I would first make that claim because vaping was made to stop cigarette smokers and stop them from getting lung cancer and especially dying from it. In the John Hopkins medical post, they say, “E-cigarettes heat nicotine (extracted from tobacco), flavorings and other chemicals to create an aerosol that you inhale. Regular tobacco cigarettes contain 7,000 chemicals, many of which are toxic.” Now it’s true while vapes do contain medals and other lead like products in them, vaping exposes you to less toxins but is just safer rather than making your lungs fully black and having tons of people die every year from smoking cigarettes. Overall do not start to vape for fun. It’s not worth it and when you get addicted, it will be very hard to stop, or it might to late for permanent damage to your body.

The Bad News Game is a a very effective educational game for teaching people about misinformation and is shows the research aspect along with actual learning simply to show and tell people what misinformation looks like and the game gives people an experience of how it spreads so easily. Research based on this games can highly raise peoples ability to see or know fake news better and able to identify the fake news after doing this game.

This game is really effective as it also points out motivations behind sharing misinformation by focusing on gaining follower and gaining credibility by stealing peoples post. Players will see how misinformation spreads as it gathers way more attention and and gets a lot of engagement from people. The game does also have some limitations to it where it shows common tactics used by people but it doesn’t have newer or new tactics people use like the new AI forms are going around and deep fakes are advanced propaganda.

I do think educational games could help people with mis information and helping them learn about how people will create fake news to try and trick you to make money but it’s a good skill to have. Tools like this game, “Bad News Game”, is a good start with this kind of engagement as it starts people off with the basics. It helps show people what they mastered or what they learned which is a good refresher and just makes people think about those baselines when searching for fake news.

These online educational games are extremely accessible and easy to use. These tools can help reach their target audience and they are not as time consuming, it’s straight and to the point. This game took about 20 minutes for me to complete and fully understand and it gave me a good example with showing follower replies and comments from people replying to my posts about the fake news.

This gives schools and plenty or organizations to use in their lessons cause it’s quick, easy to understand, and it shows good responses that are very easy to visualize and it seems very real in some ways. Overall this educational game is very good to engage with and it demonstrates real world processes that do have moments where you need to make a decision of what to do and it makes people more informed and makes people want to look into things rather than just making a comment or start re posting it without knowing if it’s authentic news.

Throughout the game people will make choices on what type of stragies they want to use and makes them in order and allows them to succeed better. This game is about 2 things, credibility and followers which is the 2 main things we tend to see now in fake news. By experiencing these tactics taught by the game, it shows us and gives us examples of how they use manipulation tactics in which it can help the people spreading mis information or fake news more authentic news to post.

Gio Morey 3/27/26 Blog Post One

9:00AM I wake up and immediately go to my phone to watch some TikTok. Nothing special here just doom scrolling. I do this for about 20 minutes until I feel ready to get out of bed or until I feel satisfied with what my feed has.

9:37AM I go to my desk where I watch YouTube for about 25 minutes before I go to the gym. I decided to catch up on one of my favorite youtubers, Vlog After College and catch up on how his corgi is doing.

10:35AM I listen to music while I am at the gym. This helps me focus on myself and helps me push past hard sets and makes me stay motivated while I listen to the words and can relate.

12:08PM I sit on my couch and will enjoy whatever lunch I desire and throw on some Family Feud. Started watching the show when I got off my phone and started watching whatever my mom was watching downstairs and it really paid off because now I’m obsessed with the show!

2:30PM I scroll on Instagram to watch my friends story’s to see what everyone is up to and to watch some funny reels. Instagram always be making me laugh with whatever they have on reels now. Instagram really knows me to well because they be putting stuff that I like every time.

4:12PM I go back to my desk and I play games with my friends for about 3 hours. I typically don’t game as often but this was a random thing we did and caught up with each other. We played, War Thunder, and played some Roblox. Roblox has grown on me for sure over the past years of my life. I have met the nicest people and have been able to secure good connections and even have myself a rare limited on the game which is a Dominus Praefectus, which is a hat.

8:00Pm I do my daily homework and I read my materials given to me and focus on reading it properly and slowly.

9:25Pm I doom scroll TikTok again because I got bored and wanted to be done with school and wanted a chance to unwind.

10:30pm I went back to family feud until I got tired. That show really has me hooked and even has me shouting and really interacting with the tv at 11:45pm and probably waking up my neighbors for screaming.


REECLTION:

If there is one thing I have learned from doing this assignment again, it is that I spend way too much time on my phone or just looking at a screen. I keep telling myself I will use my phone less or not be online for long periods of time but I can never keep my word. I do notice that I go on my phone as soon as I wake up and I tend to go on my phone whenever I am bored so I might try and fix this trends and do something else with that time instead of being on a screen all day!

For this assignment I made some very small changes to my blog to make it look better and more appealing. Firstly, I removed some unnecessary widgets. Secondly, I am going to add a template to make my page stand out because I was looking at how they have everything organized on the page and it makes it look 10 times better with a template. Lastly I made sure everything was running ok and still working, but also you can now see all my other pieces on work on my blog.

Interstellar is one of the most popular movies ever made and personally one of my favorites! The movie came out in October of 2014 so about 11 years ago. Interstellar is a movie about how earth is suffering from many disasters such as climate change, food scarcity, and food loss due to fires and such. As a solution to this problem, they turn to space travel and try to find a new home on another planet through interstellar space travel. This film shows a new way for humans to just give up what we have on earth rather than staying and adapting to these new changes and trying to reform the current issue back on earth. This film is trying to make a prediction of what we would do if this problem were ever to arise on earth, it’s simply saying we would want to leave earth rather than fixing the problem.

The technology used in this film is clearly way to far out for this generation on earth. They fly into black holes, go through worm holes, and travel to different planets in another galaxy. A big highlight in the film was this robot called tars which is an extremely advanced ai robot that helped the crew threw those travel days and is a emotionally and intelligent robot.

While Interstellar is a movie based on futuristic events and and traveling through space, we do see some possible events that happen on earth if we do not fix or resolve current issues we are facing today. The movie is not for from real throughout the movie where it shows earth however in the movie it shows things like crop failures, dust storms, and a huge collapse of earth as a whole.

In todays world we are already seeing a ton of unfortunate things like droughts, higher temperatures, and things like food insecurity in some parts around the world. The events that happen in the movie are not far off from what is going on in our world today. The movie is very emotional and honestly really sad as people just wanted to leave the planet instead of trying to fix it. In the movie however they talked about a fix for gravity and in the scene that has the worm whole we see them go through it and when Cooper gets back, the old man at NASA as solved gravity thanks to Cooper and him going through space. Overall great movie and highly recommend to people who haven’t watched it.