I shared an article on Facebook recently and was soon notified it was taken down because it was proven to be misinformation. I posted another article that had a caveat added that some of what was in the post had been determined to be inaccurate.

Who is the arbiter of our speech on social media? (FYI, it is FactCheck.Org on Facebook.) My arbiter, whoever it is, at times has a different perspective on the truth than I do. My religious views may be questioned, my political views filtered, and information that I value from other people removed. Shouldn’t each of us have the right to decide what is true or not?

I hear what our nation’s leaders say and it’s sometimes laughable. The problem is, many people don’t take the time to do their own fact checking. Trump, Biden, press secretaries (past and present), senators, members of congress and our state officials all lie at times. If a democrat says something republicans disagree with, it is quickly pointed out. And vice versa. I want to be able to make my own decision without someone, an arbiter, filtering what I read.

I love it when people think about what I say. That’s part of why I post “stuff.” But oftentimes the public hears something on the news or reads it on social media and voilà…it must be true. Does anyone:

• Ask for proof
• See if the information was fact checked by a reliable, non-partisan source
• Use the internet to research the claims
• Look for experts to provide information?

Nah, most of us don’t do that. Either we agree with what we read because it fits our social, political, religious views or we reject it because it doesn’t.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had the Walter Cronkite view of the news? Someone to just report what’s going on without all the bias that we see in the news media? He never told us what was true and what wasn’t.