>Take "facts" with a grain of salt, at the very least until you have read the article. Do not take headlines as facts. One consequence of social media is that

>Take "facts" with a grain of salt, at the very least until you have read the article. Do not take headlines as facts. One consequence of social media is that headlines now have outsized importance in relation to the substance of actual articles. Headlines, thanks to links and embedded snippets, get dispersed to 1000x more eyeballs than the articles themselves. So when they contradict or misleadingly oversimplify (which is often, especially since they are often written to draw clicks) it's the headline version of the truth that wins out, while the actual readers are left to chime in with "Hey, that's not what the article actually said..." in the comments below, swept away in a sea of respondents who commented only after reading the headline. Journalistic ethics haven't caught up to this. They're still playing by the rules of legacy media, where you can bend the truth a little to make a joke or to draw people in. The problem is that in the digital age, that unfortunately amounts to spreading a falsehood that usually overshadows the facts of the piece.