Towards the end of April there was a webinar on “Fake News or Free Speech: Is There a Right to be Misinformed?” and I was able to view a recording of this webinar after my courses ended.
The webinar explored how social media plays a huge part in the dissemination of fake news and how false information spread online can muddy the waters and make it harder for people to differentiate between inaccurate and accurate news reports.
In particular they debate whether or not the willful spread of misinformation should be classified as illegal, if its protected by the First Amendment, or even if suppressing information that is deemed “fake news” undermines our democracy. Mary Minow talks about this point and discusses whether or not social media (Twitter, Facebook, Google+) are responsible for the speech on their platforms and if they can be legally held responsible for user’s speech.
Joyce Valenza talks about the different ways in which our social media try to assist us in making our own determinations on a particular post or articles credibility by introducing verification check marks, various algorithms that can rank information, etc. She mentions that these algorithms seem to be “pushing down news that people want to discover” (Valenza, 27:52–27:54).
Obviously, putting the our faith into a machine to do our thinking for us is not the end-all be-all solution for the fake news epidemic we appear to find ourselves in. Valenza goes on to talk about some suggestions she has for trying to tackle this very challenging problem. And one of the points she brings up is that instead of trying to cut down on the “bad” information that may be on the Internet and focus more on arming people with the skills of critical reading by looking for confirmation bias, how advertising can affect how media circulates, etc.
I agree with a lot of the points that Valenza makes here; I think that in order to have a better informed public we first have to teach people what to look for when reading an article such as the words journalists use in their articles, what websites may or may not be reputable, if similar stories/articles appear on multiple sites.
Is your head spinning? A little? Yeah, mine too.
Now, before we get too overwhelmed and think, “Wow, this is a lot of work! I just want to go to one place and get my news and call it a day”, let’s take a breath. These kinds of habits aren’t something that can be cultivated overnight. This is something that takes time, and requires us to actively think about the information we’re consuming and how we are consuming it.
I know that I don’t always think about things before I post them. A friend of mine made a point a few weeks ago that we tend to think emotionally online. Its very easy to get stuck in an echo chamber when all your friends post or talk about the same stuff or have similar opinions. We don’t approach something from a logical and skeptical perspective first; we immediately think from an emotional stance and get worked up (excited, angry, sad, etc.) and that’s usually when we share things that, if given a few more minutes of thought, we might feel differently about later.
We’ve all been guilty of these habits. I know I have. And if I’ve learned anything in the last few years its that I am responsible for trying to be better, to think more critically about an article before I share it, or being transparent with my posts if I haven’t researched something further.
In Nicole Cooke’s presentation she expands on this idea that “information can illicit a wide range of emotions both positive and negative” (Cooke, 40:39–40:46) and how this affects our ability to distinguish between real and fake information. She talks about how we have always had satire, propaganda, and fake news in the form of tabloids. This isn’t new information, we’ve always had channels like this, but what has changed now?
Cooke goes on to explain that information overload is definitely more of an issue now and that it may also be because of this that people tend to pick the information that is easiest/agrees with what we already believe. We are less inclined to look at things that drastically diverge from our own verge. She also talks about our current trend of instant gratification and how people may be trying to share things in order to get the most likes or retweets (i.e. attention) from their friends/audience on social media.
So how do we fix the problem?
Cooke mentions some suggestions like thinking broad like across disciplines, transferring skills we might have from other things we are good at towards this. learning how to think vs. what to think, learning how to process information that we are consuming and being critical of it.
There are many different pieces to this puzzle, but I definitely think that the first step comes at a local level. We need to be better at teaching each other how to critically examine the information we are consuming. I think we also need to be able to hold people accountable in some way; I don’t think calling people out online is necessarily the way to hold each other accountable because people tend to get offensive online when we remove the face-to-face communication aspect from the equation.
This was a particular issue that I dealt with when working collaboratively online for school. I did my entire graduate program online and never met face-to-face with any of my peers or professors until I met up with a few people at ALA in 2016. Making some kind of public post to call out someone’s error online before trying to reach out to them on a personal level (perhaps through a direct message or in person, if you can) can actually exacerbate the issue and it can become more of a problem than it needs to be. I think that it might also encourage people to stop following/listening to people that share different perspectives from their own and can reinforce the echo chamber effect.
If you get some time and want to watch the webinar yourself I have linked it up above but I will also embed the video down below. If you have any thoughts about this topic, or even if you have some anecdotes you’d like to share about your struggles with overcoming fake news or some handy ways you’ve discovered to help you weed out false information from verified information please drop us a note in the comments!
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next Saturday!
Adventures in Library Science 