Recently, someone has started impersonating me on Telegram. As I first heard this, I was quite confused. Over the next couple of days however, I finally understood.

For some additional context, someone named Drixit -- or more commonly known as Dragon -- has quite some...opinions. They are largely based on misinformation and prejudices, as portrayed by messages like these.

So, I can only assume that the person which impersonated me intentionally did so to provoke Drixit, which sucks. It has reminded me of a bigger problem however.

How Prejudices and misinformation affect our world

There are many ways in which actions like these can affect what we think about other people and the world around us, I don't think that surprises anyone. However, over time I have noticed not only how people can affect the way that we get information, but also how they can keep us from knowing the truth using trust.

This somewhat ties into what you would expect from propaganda and alike, however is not quite the same as this also involves public reputation.

I'll take the same things as an example as were discussed above, where I was personally impersonated. In that example, I was banned from a set of chat's with the banreason: "Zoophile"

Of course, anyone with more than two minutes of spare time would know that Furry != Zoophile and Zoophile != Furry, yet, Drixit still seems to believe that, and the impersonator is taking advantage of that.

From this, I can take that even though we discussed this privately, he did not take any of my words seriously, nor did he decide to actually research on the topic to confirm what he has been believing so far. In my eyes, this can only really come from one of a couple of things:

• Their trust in what somebody else said is higher than their trust in my words
• They refuse to check if what they are saying is even true
• They do not care to check, as they would rather continue harassing a group of people without real reason.

Of course, my case here isn't the only in which this has happened. All around the world there are tons of minorities being harassed or misjudged in similar ways, often due to the aforementioned prejudices. Many people still believe in stereotypes about homosexuals, about gamers, furries, whatever it may be, and let themselves get guided by misinformation that they were told by other people.

What does any of this mean to us?

To us, this should be a clear sign that something has to change with the way that we get information. Let me give an example of what that could look like:

As an example, on YouTube, whenever there is a highly discussed topic which is important to most people, they show little banners beneath the video. For instance, on most videos relating to information about Covid-19, they show a banner below the video where you can inform yourself independently.

I think that features like these should be available for much more than just Covid, or who a certain channel belongs to (e.g Deutscher Rundfunk-banner on YouTube) I firmly believe that fact-checking should be a thing that is accessible easily from places that people usually get their information from, which is (somewhat sadly) TikTok, YouTube and other social media platforms nowadays

Websites like these already analyse content to begin with, so I think this would be a nice way to directly benefit the users, and get some useful information out of it

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This post was a little bit rushed, so a lot of what I'm trying to say might not come across properly.

Yet I still hope that you enjoyed reading this, and I wish you a nice day, night, evening, or whatever other time you're reading this!

Oh, and also, tell me what you think about this! You can do so over on Telegram (I might add more options in the future)