A recent international survey from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that in almost every country surveyed, people’s trust in media is decreasing. More and more people are avoiding news because, they say, it “has a negative effect on their mood.”

This is why allowing yourself some light-hearted content that evokes positive emotional responses such as curiosity and amazement, or surprise, is very important. But despite good news and positive content being beneficial to our mental health, like most people are aware of, our behavior tells a different story.

The researchers also found that, on average, negative news provoked much stronger physiological reactions and garnered more attention than positive or neutral news. And even though individual people’s reactions varied a bit, a minority of people respond more to positive news.

On the other hand, when browsing for any kind of information online, whether positive or not, it’s important to be aware of whether it’s real truth and real facts. But since there’s no foolproof method to separate truth from misinformation online, internet users must have knowledge and understanding that everything we read and watch online must be taken with a grain of salt.

In our previous interview with Daniel Markuson, the cybersecurity expert at NordVPN, we found out that a general rule of thumb is to check the source’s credibility: “This particularly applies to social media platforms because they are optimized to increase engagement and lack appropriate gatekeeping features that filter out misinformation.”

When asked about the reasons why fake news has become so widespread, the cybersecurity expert said that it’s “due to factors that concern both the content of the messages and the technological foundation of platforms on which the news is proliferated.”

“Fake news is usually related to current affairs and makes remarkable, emotion-inducing claims. This, combined with the fact that social media platforms collect data on what kind of posts users spend the most time on and feed them content with similar characteristics, provides the perfect conditions for the spread of misinformation,” Daniel concluded.