Nowadays, due to the spread of the internet and social media, it’s easier than ever to feel connected with the world around you. That being said, the amount of information you’re exposed to every day is phenomenally big. It’s often hard to distinguish between what’s true and what matters from all the noise.
The wildly popular ‘S**t You Should Care About’ (SYSCA) project is a beacon of hope on social media. The Instagram account features some of the most important pieces of news and insights that everyone should be aware of. We’ve collected some of their most powerful recent posts to share with you. You’ll find them as you scroll down.
More info: Instagram | X | TikTok | ‘The S**t Show’ Podcast | ‘Culture Vulture' Podcast | Substack | Book | Site
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People are hardwired to focus more on the negatives in life rather than the positives because paying attention to the former is important for our survival. This is known as negativity bias or positive-negative asymmetry. Verywell Mind notes that individuals who were more attuned to danger were more likely to survive.
Generally speaking, you’re more likely to react to negative events more strongly than to positive ones. It’s also why people tend to want to avoid losing something more than they’re driven to gain something.
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In other words, negativity is what we tend to focus on and what drives the decisions that we make. This is one of the reasons why negative news stories get more attention and why people tend to see them as being more truthful (even if they aren’t necessarily).
SYSCA has a massive presence online. On Instagram alone, the project has 3.4 million dedicated followers who eagerly await the latest bits of important news and positive posts.
Meanwhile, on TikTok, the project’s account has garnered over 174k followers and collected a mind-blowing 13.8 million likes across all of its clips.
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‘S**t You Should Care About’ presents itself as a media company that “cuts through the bulls**t.” They pride themselves on making the world “accessible and enjoyable” and quip that they have a particular fondness for legendary singer Harry Styles. Initially, the project was launched as a WordPress blog by three best friends “in the back of a political science lecture.”
The team running the project has also published a book, ‘Make It Make Sense: The Bedside Table Essential For Women In Their Twenties.’ What’s more, they also run a whopping two podcasts, ‘The S**t Show’ and ‘Culture Vulture,’ both of which you can find on Spotify.
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Media literacy has always been important, but it feels like it’s more vital than ever in this day and age.
These days, claims can go viral on social media lightning-fast because many people (re)share them without checking them, and AI-powered bots are used to spread biased ideas to meet certain groups’ and organizations’ goals. And so, source reliability is a massively important question.
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The reality is that unless you have unlimited free time, you probably won’t be able to double-check and cross-reference every single iffy-sounding claim that you find on the internet. So, it’s simply more practical to gauge how (un)reliable a source might be.
The long and short of it is that reliable sources do a lot of fact-checking, reference the sources they rely on for information, are transparent about fixing their mistakes, and don’t try to present opinions as facts.
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As we’ve covered before, most ‘legacy media’ organizations follow established journalism standards and are reliable.
Some main examples of trustworthy news sources include the Associated Press, Reuters, AFP, the BBC, CBC, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, PBS, NPR, the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, etc.
Some newer media outlets also follow these standards, e.g., ProPublica, the Hill, Vox, Axios, and others.
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Even the best sources and journalists make mistakes from time to time. One goal is to minimize the number and frequency of these errors. But another goal is to take responsibility for them and be open and honest about them.
A huge green flag for a source is that it not only fixes an error but also adds an edit explaining what information has been changed and why.
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Furthermore, reliable news sources also link to the information they reference. That way, you can read up on the topic yourself and evaluate the sources they’re relying on for yourself. This sort of openness is vitally important to prevent people from making things up to fit their agenda or presenting their opinions and predictions as established proven facts.
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Every year I go back & read the letter Holly Butcher wrote the day before she died.
At 27, Holly had a rare form of bone cancer, forcing her to consider her fate at an age far too fucking young. The least we can do is listen & live by Hollys words.
Hope you’re resting, angel 🤍🤍
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A good rule of thumb is to consider how a piece of news makes you think and feel. If you find yourself eagerly agreeing with the headline (whatever your political beliefs), then it’s likely that it’s quite biased.
On the flip side, if a claim sounds outrageous or too good or bad to be true, then it’s also very likely that you’ll need to do some additional digging to get to the bottom of things. If you can’t find multiple reliable sources reporting the same piece of info, it’s possible that the initial claim you read was either strongly exaggerated or made up.
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Which of these pieces of news, as shared by SYSCA, caught your attention the most? Were you aware of all of these events or were there any that came as a complete shock to you?
What news sources do you personally rely on the most? How much time do you spend reading the news each day? We’d love to hear your insights about everything. Feel free to share yours in the comments below.
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