To the Editor:

“Firehose of Falsehood” is a classic disinformation technique where messages are broadcast rapidly and widely, with little concern for integrity, to inundate the audience with so many lies that it becomes too exhausting to expose the facts. If a lie is repeated often enough, it becomes the truth. We now live in the age where “Say Anything” passes for political dialog and several recent letters to the editor exemplify that.

Sharing information without doing the work of verifying the truthiness of it is contributing to that firehose of deception. It’s too easy to stick to our information bubbles which provide a filtered view of the world’s events, usually what we want to believe. We should all challenge ourselves to step out of our echo chambers and start consuming information from various perspectives. Articles with grabby headlines and TV entertainment news telling us who or what to be angry at, are skewing our worldview. Conservatives and liberals should seek out stories from all ends of the spectrum.

With that, when someone writes angrily about who has caused inflation, crime rates, border crossings, and rioters, go look up whether anything in that firehose is based on reality.

Alenda Calderbank

Sandy Hook