Spotting Fake News Online
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, this screen shot appeared on multiple internet platforms. It received hundreds of thousands of “likes,” was spread by uncounted thousands and was shared by Joe Rogan, who has millions of followers on several social media sites. The screen shot is a fabrication, soon debunked by Steven Segal’s PR representative, who said it had “zero truth.” The image was found to be taken from a 2017 film called Cartels, in which Segal played a member of an elite special ops team. The CNN logo was placed on digitally.
This may seem humorous, but it exemplifies a serious problem. A Pew Research poll found that 16 percent of Americans said they shared news they only later discovered was fake. The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 52 percent of its survey respondents share or forward news items they find interesting, but of those only 25 percent have “good information hygiene,” defined as avoiding information echo chambers, verifying and refraining from sharing un-vetted information. An MIT study concluded that “Falsehoods are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted on Twitter than the truth . . . And false news reached 1,500 people about six times faster than the truth.”
Spotting fake news before accepting and sharing it is essential to democracy, but many people don’t know how or take the trouble to verify what they get. Thankfully, there are ways to do so.
· Fact-Check: a simple way to spot fake news is to fact-check it. In the Segal case, just going to CNN.com and entering Segal’s name in the search engine would show the story never existed. This table lists some of the most respected fact-check sites.
· Lateral Reading: Stanford professor Sam Wienburg’s research shows that professional fact-checkers read an article laterally to evaluate its truthfulness while most of us just read vertically, from the top down. That is, they take off-ramps as they read to verify the information they’re getting.
The Verified Initiative of the United Nations, part of the UN Department for Global Communication, offers a number of suggestions for lateral reading, especially of websites:
o Make sure the website is legitimate. It should have an “about” and a “contact” page as well as bios and perhaps photos of its staff, both of which you can verify by another lateral web check. Also check the URL, which may not even exist.
o Look for obvious bias. A focus on a specific political agenda or the use of stereotypes are warning signs to be careful.
o Compare the date of the article with the date of its sources. If the sources are very old, the article may mislead by using outdated or irrelevant information.
o Check out the author(s). Search online to find out whether they exist and, if so, their expertise. You can also do this with references cited in the article.
o Cross-check the article against others. If other reputable sources are saying something different, be very suspicious. In the Segal case, no other reputable sources reported the story.
o Watch out for click-bait titles. Titles with highly emotional content, exclamation points, and words such as “blockbuster report” are designed to get you to open and accept them.
There are other obvious clues you may be looking at disinformation: does the title/article promise something catastrophic or too good to be true? Does it have grammatical or spelling errors? Is it designed to ramp up your emotions using wild claims or loaded language? Our brains evolved to spot deviations from normality or we would not have survived as a species, so we are prone to pay attention to emotionally striking information.
· Learn Media Literacy. Lateral reading tips are just part of the wider topic of media literacy for all information sources. There are a growing number of organizations that teach media literacy skills. The News Literacy Project is one effort and includes a number of quick self-tests to develop these skills, such as “Should You Share It?;” and “Vetting News Sources for Credibility”. Civic Online Reasoning teaches the lateral reading approach.
· Inoculate Yourself Against Fake News. While sites such as Facebook and Twitter use algorithms and fact-checkers to spot and take fake news off their platforms, such debunking can’t catch everything. Pre-emptive or prebunking approaches are an alternative. Their goal is to inoculate information consumers so they become resistant to false information. University of Cambridge professor of social psychology Sander van der Linden and colleagues developed Bad News, on online game to help people spot misinformation in tweets and headlines. Tested on 14,000 participants, it improved their skill and that improvement lasted for some months.
“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” Mark Twain said. Roadblocks to that rapid trip exist – if we use them.
Photo Credit: hizinvideo@pixabay.com
