OK, I know you don't want to, but try to remember back to the fall of 2016.
Remember when reality TV star Donald Trump was running for president? How about the moment you realized he might actually be electable?
In my social circle, at least, that realization was met with disbelief — as well as some legitimate panic. And as more of my friends started freaking out, I noticed a meme being shared over and over by them on social media.
In it, Trump on TV, in all his '80s businessman "glory," appears next to this quote:
"If I were to run, I'd run as a Republican. They're the dumbest group of voters in the country. They love anything on Fox News. I could lie and they'd still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific."
Image via Rude & Rotten Republicans.
There are various versions of this meme, but I must have seen it at least a dozen times across Facebook and Twitter.
I assume we all know by now that it's a fake quote. But it was just as fake several years ago as it is now. My friends who shared it are smart people. Why would they share something without fact-checking it first?
After all, my friends aren't like General Flynn spreading that Pizzagate conspiracy theory about a child sex ring being run by the Clintons out of the nonexistent basement of a pizza parlor. (This was before he was hired as national security advisor, by the way.)
Image via Politifact.
My friends also aren't Sandy Hook deniers clinging to the repulsive idea that the kids, parents, teachers, administrators, and community members in Newtown, Connecticut, were "crisis actors" who faked a mass shooting so the government could take away everyone's guns.
An Oxford study found that conservatives are more likely than liberals to spread misinformation, but no one is immune.
So, how does this stuff get shared so widely?
We live in a world where fake news spreads like wildfire, while the truth just ... smolders.
Last week, MIT released a study finding that fake news travels father, faster, and deeper than true stories do.
The study authors looked at approximately 126,000 tweets from 2006 to 2017 that were shared more than 4.5 million times by about 3 million people. They determined whether stories were true or false based on agreement between six different independent fact-checking organizations, and also looked at whether stories were being shared by automated bots or by humans.
What did they find? False information was 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories. Ouch.
The authors found that it took the truth about six times as long as falsehood to reach 1,500 people, and that fake stories tended to reach far more people. Accurate stories rarely made their way to more than 1,000 people, whereas the top 1% of false stories regularly spread to between 1,000 and 100,000.
The study also found that automated accounts actually share false and true stories at the same rate, which means that humans — not bots — are responsible for the proliferation of fake news.
Ugh. Let's do better, humans.
Apparently, the truth is simply too boring to share.
One way the study authors explain these results is that people like novelty. Real news stories are picked up by most major news outlets, and if they're doing journalism right, those stories aren't sensationalized. The truth is everywhere, which removes the intrigue; false stories are alluring because they're new, exciting, and unique.
Fake news also frequently has a strong political or ideological bent. People are drawn to stories that confirm their biases and evoke emotional reactions, which explains both the meme with the fake Trump quote and the obsession with Pizzagate.
It's pretty easy to cover the bases of novelty, bias, and emotion when you make stuff up out of thin air.
But we don't have to fall prey to sensationalism or our personal biases.
It may seem impossible to make people realize they're spreading fake news, but I refuse to give up hope that most people can discern the difference between fact and fiction.
I think it boils down to all of us calming down a bit and embracing — and sharing — slower stories.
When the news cycle of the 2016 election reached peak frenzy, I did a little experiment: I sought out the most reliable, unbiased, factual news sources I could find. No 24-hour cable news channels. No outlets with a clear agenda. I scoured Media Bias/Fact Check to find sources with the most reliable reporting and the least amount of bias.
I also narrowed my television news watching to C-Span and PBS News Hour. And you know what? It was surprisingly unexciting. Even with all of the upheaval going on in our politics, hearing accurate reporting largely unfiltered and without commentary was, frankly, fairly boring.
But boring news is not a bad thing.
It's a wonder how someone can complain so much about fake news while also actively promoting it. Photo from the Daily Show's Trump Twitter Library via Scott Olson/Getty.
We can all do our part to uphold the truth by making use of various fact-checking websites like Politifact, FactCheck, and Snopes. Every meme or link from a source we're unsure of should be run through these checks. There are people out there doing the digging work, so we should take advantage of that.
But most importantly, we need to check our own reactions to stories. According to the MIT study, people's emotional responses to real stories and fake stories differ. The authors noted that "false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies" while "true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust." Taking note of how we feel when we see a story can give us a clue as to its reliability.
Check memes and stories. Check your reactions to them. Check your biases.
We may not be able to stop the spread of fake news, but we can definitely keep from spreading it ourselves.
A Generation Jones teenager poses in her room.Image via Wikmedia Commons
An office kitchen.via 
An angry man eating spaghetti.via 
Gif of baby being baptized
Woman gives toddler a bath Canva
An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
- YouTube youtube.com
Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.