Be your own fact-checker

The biggest health claim is that cocoa lowers blood pressure, but no study has proven that it reduces the risk of heart disease or attacks. And considering the added sugars it probably does more harm than good. 

History offers a precedent. Collective anger at low wages and poor working protections can produce lasting social change.

• One study that looked at 15 significant pandemics revealed an increase in wages for three decades afterward.
• After the Plague of Justinian, worker incomes doubled.
• After the Black Death in the 1300s, textile workers in northern France received three raises a year.

The pandemic may be bad for workers’ rights.

• The pandemic might be blamed on outsiders - the Black Death led to massacres of Jews across Europe.
• In the past decades, many low-income whites have become allied with other whites, not with poor people.
• Organized labor is still far off. Busy employees at large retailers are spread across the country and don't have a centralized way to communicate.

It’s when media uses its reach and persuasion power to make people do or think things they otherwise would not. This often comes in the form of exaggeration, distortion, fabrication and simplification.

Media manipulation exploits the difference between perception and reality using the still remaining trust for truthful content it once had. But the current fast and hyper-competitive nature of the media business driven by clicks and often guided by untrained bloggers or malicious sources contributes to the spread of misinformation even among the mainstream media.