Misinformation and fake news

Dimension of Facticity

It used to be easy to determine fact from fake, but in the world of AI and fake news, it is harder to discern what is fake and how much it matters.

Schwarz’s Big Five criteria that people use to decide whether information is true:

• compatibility with other known information,
• credibility of the source,
• whether others believe it,
• whether the information is internally consistent,
• whether there is supporting evidence

We know from social psychological research on misinformation that misinformation sticks, meaning it is hard to dislodge things from our brains, despite them not being true. Lewandowsky found that the mere presence of misinformation can negate the truth even when presented with correct information.

Citation: Schwarz, N. (2015). Metacognition. In M. Mikulincer, P. R. Shaver, E. Borgida, & J. A. Bargh (Eds.), APA handbook of personality and social psychology, Vol. 1. Attitudes and social cognition (pp. 203–229). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/14341-006

Lewandowsky, S., & van der Linden, S. (2021). Countering Misinformation and Fake News Through Inoculation and Prebunking. European Review of Social Psychology, 32(2), 348–384. https://doi.org/10.1080/10463283.2021.1876983

In looking at the dimensions of misinformation, we can no longer assume that facts matter, so what techniques can we use to help our communities understand that facts matter.

Read beyond the headline using lateral reading techniques

This technique is a strategic exploration of not just the source, but the factors that go into the source. This is best demonstrated by Mike Caufield’s SIFT method. Consider the following:

• Look at multiple readings on the same issue from different sources.
  • Watch out for clickbait.
  • How do the headlines differ?
  • How does the headline relate to the content in the article?
• Look to see who the article is citing.
  • Are the authors citing sources from their site, or other places?
  • What kind of sources are they citing?
  • Do they link to other sources?
• Who is the news source or social media quoting or retweeting?
  • Watch out for uncited sources.
  • Look for context.
  • Pay attention to if it is a retweet or a screenshot

Find the original source

• Author, quotes, and citations should give you an idea where to find the original source of the information.
  • Most reputable news articles will cite their sources - some even link to other articles.
  • Investigate chains of retweets, stiches and replies to follow the conversation
• Search for quotations in Google to check for accuracy.
  • Search results are not always accurate.
  • Check a variety of sources.

Be critical of images

Images are often used in the wrong context to tell a story.

• Look for AI created or “photoshopped” errors like blurriness, pixelation etc.
  • Images are easy to adjust with Photoshop and AI
  • Why false claims of AI generated images matter. (NPR)
• Use Google Reverse Image Search to search for the image source.
  • Reverse image searches look at the metadata of the image to find the origin.
• Search for images of the same event from multiple outlets to confirm truthfulness.
  • If you are seeing the same image or similar images on different sites, it likely happened.
  • Don’t forget about the context and how the image was used.
• Screenshots are easily faked.
  • Use web inspector/page source to change the HTML content.

Investigate where the site is published

Use the URL as an indicator of if the site is real or not

• It is easy to clone a website and get a similar-enough URL to create a fake site.
• Abcnews.com vs abcnews.com.co
  • .gov sites aren’t without bias. but do provide a record of the happenings of the government - in theory.
  • Congress.gov has all the legislation and publications from the government
  • The Federal Register is the main source for the Federal government agencies.
•  This interactive media bias chart ha relatively good information in it (but is biased!)
• When in doubt, Google it. Google can give you context and additional information about a site, author or subject.
  • Google also has its own problems by being ad and algorithm-driven.
  • The wikipedia page can also give good context about where and why a site was published.