Spinning off into angry rants, cancelling friendships, putting health at risk. Wanna avoid some of that? After a few of those experiences, here are a few hard-earned lessons on filtering out fake news, and avoiding trolls.
I’ve lived and/or worked in 14 countries, seen propaganda, helped negotiate some tricky deals (including extricating a client from a scam- quite a story, complete with flights to London, calls to interpol and Nigeria). I’ve had the benefit of a great education full of look-at-the-data and question-your-assumptions drills, and considered myself a well read, fairly thought-full person, aware of various outlets’ slants and people’s motivations. That said, I also became guilty of sharing fake news in 2016. After a few embarrasments, I developed a practice of checking out things that made me feel angry, sad… or also overly warm-fuzzy. I learned some interesting things about how internet trolls cultivate communities, to then sow division. And I starting paying attention to the multiple ways displaying statistics can make or muddy a point.
A friend shared a video the other day, questioning some of the decisions made years ago by certain leaders, which started a conversation about how to filter the news. This WhatsApp group is full of well-traveled, well-educated folks, and the challenge of filtering the news is real, for all of us.
Me: Always good to question our assumptions. There’s no doubt she has some smarts, but she’s a known conspiracy theorist and anti-vaccine activist… so take this with a grain of salt. Also, the source should give you a clue that it’s fringe.
Friend #1: I don’t know who 2 believe. Everyone seems 2 b lying. In the morning I have placed 2 links on the same subject – from BBC & CNN. Did anyone see the obvious discrepancy right in headlines of these most “reliable” sources?”
Friend #2: “Who can one believe? It seems that all media is not being upfront about things?
The conversation continued with a few memes about the series of catastrophes in 2020, a note clarifying that the BBC and CNN statistics coming from slightly different contexts, and my below summary of a few things learned in reading, researching, then filtering the news… before returning to sharing photos of our new pandemic cooking skills, and various jokes (we need to keep laughing, to keep going!).
The major outlets have journalistic standards. These are commonly accepted principles most learn in a critical thinking, philosophy, or journalism class, if they have the opportunity to take one. The core journalistic principles were developed in early 20th century, in reaction to “yellow journalism” , aka sensationalism (instead of verified facts), which led to all kinds of misunderstandings, including most famously (contributing to) a war between US and Spain in Cuba and Philippines.
Battle of Las Guasimas, near Santiago de Cuba, Cuba. June 1898. Spanish-American War. Chromolithograph by Kurz and Allison.The core principles= report the facts. Offer some interpretation without (with minimal) spin. Cite your sources. If you’re going to state a claim, get it verified by two or more, independent sources. Use anonymous sources only when it would put the source in danger.
Everyone can make mistakes. The major outlets will follow these standards, and will issue retractions or corrections on details they get incorrect. FYI, subscribers can look up each media outlet’s “code of ethics” and their retraction rates. If you’re interested in understanding how to filter the news, I can share a short article (or a few) or list of recs from a journalism professor. The extra short version of how to filter =
- Check in w your gut, or does this pass “the smell test”? ie does it seem plausible in the real world?
- Does it make me feel especially angry, sad, or warm-fuzzy? (trolls place triggering content to cultivate a community, they start with softer things and then scale up to more divisive posts)
- Are other, reliable sources reporting similar things?
- Does this source have a particular “bent” or axe to grind? or will they also look at evidence disproving their thesis? talk with experts w range of views?… or simply channel “confirmation bias”?
- What do the nonpartisan, truth researchers say? Snopes.com politifact.com are the best known. Wikipedia has a good list of fact checking websites around the world. And public libraries and community colleges often have a low-cost or even free course.
We all make mistakes, (& when called out, hopefully learn) but I’ve been surprised how challenging critical thinking can be in this social media, video/audio editing era. There is an explosion of information and sources, and people are overwhelmed. So, I’ve researched the cognitive shortcuts and biases, the motivations and biases of outlets, social media with big data and accurate customer targeting, who shares what, how trolls cultivate their unwitting communities. By the way, something like over 60% of fake news is shared by adults >65 years old, and on Facebook (NB it’s not 60% of the older adults sharing, but a subset in that age group which overshares & propagates most of the fake news). That really surprised me, but then again, if they grew up in a democracy, they grew up with reliably sourced TV news… and likely still have a default tendency to trust what they see on a screen. It’s always good to run through those 5 Qs I shared above – the smell & trigger tests, are other majors reporting it, is there an incentive directing (corrupting?) reporting, and what do the fact checkers say?
Check out this helpful chart, admittedly focused on US and UK outlets, but there will be similar ones in each country.
And here is the 2023, interactive update, mapping media bias & reliability link here.