Calling bullshit on the internet 101
Quit blaming Facebook and the fakers feeding you news that you believe without cross-checking; it's time to take responsibility for our own critical thinking in a digital age, says strategist Dave Bathur in this guest post.
Abasche Tunde wasn’t having a good day – and considering he was an astronaut, a day can last a while.
Abasche, a Nigerian working on the Salyut 8T secret Soviet space station, was finishing his rotation and was looking forward to making the long drop back to Earth.
It wasn’t to be. His place on the Earth-bound shuttle was instead taken by cargo, and due to rather unfair contract requirements, Abasche needed to raise three million dollars to nab a ride home. Which is why his cousin may have emailed you already…
This story is, of course, not true – one of the more imaginative email scams doing the rounds.
The point? Personalised fakery is a fact of the internet. It’s the trade off for all the benefits of an interconnected world. What we do with it is what counts.
If you choose to give money to a stranded Nigerian astronaut, fine. If you read fake news sites and decide to vote for an orange demagogue, then that’s fine too. As long as it’s your informed choice. That’s democracy, right?
The problem arises when we turn off our critical reasoning and let ourselves be manipulated by emotionally compelling guff. The even larger problem is that too many of us lack the tools to spot fake news – or the willingness to assess it sceptically.
Blaming Facebook for manipulation misses the Mark. All you need to do is look at the images liked by Mark Zuckerberg, and you see that if he was trying to sway the election result, he failed.
Just like when we get asked to give money to Nigerian astronauts, it’s up to us individually to critically assess the information we receive in our nNewsfeeds if we plan to base decisions on it.
Luckily, there are some really simple things we all can do when faced by stories that honk a bit…
1. Be by-curious. Who’s the story by? Does their bio indicate an agenda? Could the sender account be fake (e.g. recently opened, they have far fewer Twitter followers than the number they follow etc)? Does the url look legit? Did you actually read the article before you shared it?
Most of these things can be determined by a glance or a single click.
2. Try triangulating. Want to be really sure? See if you can verify a piece of information from other sources. For instance, a Google image search will tell you if an image you receive has been doctored from a stock library, where else it exists, and the likely source. Try it next time you receive a shockingly sharable photo.
3. Snopes it. You’re probably familiar with Snopes.com – so use it. Many of the most persistent fake or inaccurate news stories, like the Heineken dog fight, keep cropping up periodically – and often still get a run.
4. Talk to the other side. This is the big one – and the most difficult. In my view, fake news is less the issue than the echo chamber that personalised content algorithms create.
In ‘On Rumours’, Cass Sunstein writes how echo chamber effects don’t just reinforce, but amplify the strength of misinformed beliefs. Other recent research shows that echo chambers increase the rate of spread of such beliefs.
However personalisation makes Google, Facebook and lotsa others lotsa money. Our filter bubbles are here to stay – so we need to know how to pierce them.
This means actively searching for different views. Looking for news sites that you may not necessarily agree with. Seeking out friends who you know have different views on issues, asking them why, and really listening.
This will all start to puncture the hermetic seal of your newsfeed as Facebook and Google recognise the wider range of sites and profiles you have affinity with. It’s also common sense.
These tips offer a few obvious starting points – and if you want more information on managing misinformation then there are some truly magnificent resources.
It’s worth exploring. ‘Post-truth campaigns’ are now conducted at such scale that they sway presidential elections. But misinformation and propaganda are old cons given new life by the fact that technology progresses faster than our education systems and cultural instincts.
The convenience of the internet comes with a price. We should not totally outsource responsibility for critical reasoning to journalists. Nor should we rely on social media businesses to fix the gaming of their algorithms. Their responses – such as censorship or increased human editorial guidance – often come with their own issues.
Our best defence – and frankly democracy’s best hope – is curiosity, and our capacity to question. There’s no security patch for gullibility.
This article appeared originally here, and is republished with the author’s permission.
Dave Bathur is a founding partner, strategy at Simpatico, a Sydney-based consultancy that provides digital training and transformation support to brands and agencies.
Thank you for a healthy dose of common sense.
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great piece Dave. I remember two decades ago reading a piece discussing the rise of search engines as a form of research for school pupils. The example given was a search on American Civil Rights which resulted in pro KKK websites as well as the expected information on MLK Malcolm X etc. The commentators made the exact point you are dicussing here; namely what was to stop pupils taking away the negative messages rather than the true picture. Speaking to friends and colleagues at the time the overwhelming response was “that wouldn’t happen”. What we all didn’t foresee was the echo chamber effect you discussed above. Where we are now is a difficult place, algorithms confirming myopic views. Thanks for stepping up and putting this out there.
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Great article Dave, couldn’t agree more!
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really good piece, thanks
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So here’s the thing Dave. Your theory is fine but only if you assume that everyone is as smart as you are and as curious. How do you explain the Daily Telegraph? They pretty much invented fake news decades ago but they are still in business! It would all be very funny if it wasn’t for the fact that people do not do as you suggest. And little things like elections, and who gets to run the country, can be affected.
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Agree with the points – also agree that media needs to be independently measured. I am not blaming facebook, I just don’t accept them telling me that I am getting what I pay for. Because I am not.
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Amen to that. And also look at the site it’s published on. There are so many home-made websites out there, that are designed to look like legitimate news sites and have the word ‘news’ in the domain….
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Hi Dave, our society is greatly damaged by persistent falsehoods that forever resist attempts at truth telling. Religion is the most durable but in our modern day we see Economics is misused to skew society and vested interests tell lies to make profits.
Mainstream economics is characterised by those in the know as a Theology, an old fashioned religion. Every statement by a politician is seeing false beliefs at work, almost without exception. I won’t go into detail here as its not simple to countermand.
Vested interests, say in the food and health industries sell fake foods and other unhealthy products with impunity even though the obesity epidemic is obvious to us all.
Big Tobacco is notorious for sowing doubt and getting away from culpability for cancers etc.
Lies are a big deal.
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Alex, you’re a gent – and I agree, there’s a missing piece in all this which is the source of our gobsmack. What I wrote about – echo chamber etc – is an facilitating part of it, but not the whole story.
That’s why I’m interested that psychologists have been strangely silent about this whole shebangabang – as it feels like there’s something Stanley Milgram-y they need to add… and suggest a solution to.
There was a permission, some kind of social proof for the anti-social, that the filter bubble reinforced – but didn’t itself begin. And I know, not all Trump voters were racist spittle-screamers – not by a long shot. But let’s face it, it’s the negativity which powerfully contributed to him getting all that news coverage in the first place.
And it’s that detritus of the mob that is what is now lying around, ready to stink up society’s – our kids’ – souls. Just like your Civil Rights example.
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Hey Laurie, totally fair point – this a kinda call to action missing at the end here: we need institutionalised media literacy, and probably political education at earlier stages so we all at least have the basic tools.
But here’s my thing – we don’t actually need everybody. We just need some – a few more – to give a shit. Instead of rolling past a story you know isn’t right: then check it, and call it out with a comment. And not in a dickish way, but in an honest way that points out that perhaps the story isn’t true, and this is why.
That way the piercing of the bubble commences (as you’re engaging with a profile of someone on other side), you may give them pause, and you’re giving a quiet finger to the forces of bullshit.
Everyone would be nice, but for now we just need more.
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Still the same principle as pre digital era..Don’t believe everything you see in the media..it’s now just easier to find the truth within the web!
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And how about climate change and our buddies at the Heartland Institute? We are literally only at the beginning of this drag race, John. 2017 is going to be a cracker.
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Hey Laurie, totally fair point – a kinda call to action missing at the end here: we need institutionalised media literacy, and probably political education at earlier school stages so we all at least have better basic tools.
But here’s my thing – we don’t actually need everybody. We just need some – a few more – to give a shit. Instead of rolling past a story you know isn’t right: check it, and call it out with a comment. And not in a dickish way, but in an honest way that points out that perhaps the story isn’t true, and this is why.
That way the piercing of the bubble commences (as you’re engaging with a profile of someone on other side), you may give them pause, and you’re giving a quiet finger to the forces of bullshit.
Everyone would be nice, but for now we just need more.
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Trump won because of the audacity of hope; a rational four-step parsing of the news would have had a less-than-zero effect on those who heard his dog-whistles. As it turns out, it is we elites who are in the filter bubble.
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Hi Dave – I have to agree with Laurie. This is all well and good for those of us who work in media & are paid to think about this stuff all day. But for regular folk who don’t give it a moment’s thought, it’s just stuff that pops up in their Newsfeed. Who could be bothered cross-checking if it’s true or not? That’s the problem Facebook needs to take responsibility for. They’re a serious political player, they need to grow up and act like one.
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Hey b_e_t_a, as I mentioned to Laurie above, I agree we can’t expect everyone to become truth seekers – that’s unrealistic and maybe a but arrogant. But if a few more did…
All the crap in the newsstream I saw from relatives and a few friends during the election, I wish that I had simply commented on some of their posts with “hey that url http://www.abcnews1197.com (an actual one I saw) that doesn’t look right. You sure this is true?”
So lets say everyone who did work in comms marketing did do that. Suddenly you get a section of society that’s taking some of the lies to task. Making manipulation that bit harder. Making social media work that bit better. Especially during crucial times, like elections.
So if it was just the media and marketing people who did that because, like you said, we’re trained to think like that – well, that’d be exactly what’s needed. Don’t wait for Facebook / Google to fix it for us.
(Also check out this– kinda encapsulates it for me: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.a.....sofmx.html )
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People like their echo chambers. They like the reassurance, reinforcement and validation they provide. They like the sense of self-righteousness they get from hearing things and reading opinions that make them feel ‘right’. Asking for wider media literacy, higher editorial standards or encouraging people to be more curious is somewhat missing the point. What this whirlwind of the last week or so has shown us is that people prefer to see what makes them feel good and truth is, at that point, pretty irrelevant. And if that is the case how do you fight against human nature?
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It’s actually not that hard to fact check. I don’t work in this industry and I’ve been able to counter a suspect article on more than one occasion with a simple google search.
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Well, it does seem more than a little ironic that you seem to suggest that everyone become a sceptic “elite” citizen fact checkers that trolls the “false news” trolls. Trump vs Clinton online trolling for the last year has shown that just doesn’t work.
Regarding Facebook and their “responsibility” for false news, I think it is a really big issue, and they do need to make huge changes to the way they operate.
Facebook heavily filters feeds. Facebook controls the order in which information is presented. Their systems choose “popular” content for you to view. Facebook control how likely it is that you will see any piece of content.
False news is reaching enormous worldwide audiences, and Facebook is clearly the largest conduit for that false news being peddled to the public.
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“it’s time to take responsibility for our own critical thinking in a digital age,”
This is the issue though. Many policy makers want a ‘dumbed down’ society, so they can make their electorates fearful and get themselves elected, time and time again. Just tune into the ‘#chemtrails’ hashtag on Instagram to understand how amazingly insane some people truly are. They are all able to vote and guess who they vote for…?
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Hi Cameron, yep people don’t like that dissonance when their beliefs are challenged. People like comfort. No argument at all.
That’s not a good enough reason to accept the status quo – or where we’re headed. We’ve been fighting human nature since the first law got chipped into a stone tablet. We need to keep doing that now, just with different tablets.
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Hi Sebastian, nup – that’s exactly what I’m not saying. Nobody should be trolling anyone. You see a fake story, you should call it out and why – but reasonably and (important bit) without being self-righteous.
Otherwise the conversation stops, your comment gets deleted, and (the second important bit) no one else in the feed gets to see call-out of the fakery.
I agree, fake news is a big issue, but the breakdown between the different sides of opinion is as large an issue. That’s how the bubble-chambers are created, both technologically and socially.
And even if Facebook and Google do tweak an algorithm, more of us should still take offence at being hijacked by bullshit. We need to stop being passengers in all this.
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Hi Cameron, yep. People don’t like the feeling of dissonance of their beliefs being challenged. I get that. We all like comfy.
That’s not a good enough reason to accept the status quo – and where this is leading us.
We’ve been fighting human nature since the first law got chipped onto a stone tablet. And we need to keep doing that now, just using different tablets.
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A lot of really great information about this topic can be found on the web, and I appreciate your contribution to it. But it all addresses the same (wrong) problem: it tells people who are already intelligent and diligent to be intelligent and diligent, whilst completely failing to address the problem of how to reach the – ahem – less intelligent people who are making this crap go viral. We need some way to speak to people who are never going to fact check. A way that doesn’t just provoke snarling and unfollowing. I would freaking LOVE to hear somebody’s ideas about that, because I’m so lost. The only thing I’ve seen so far that makes sense to me is apparently a journalism trick: when you write something, you underline everything that is essentially a factual claim and then force yourself to verify or revise it. Can we somehow popularize the habit of underlining factual claims in popular memes just to make people notice them more prominently?
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