A Sense of Doubt blog post #4001 - Maintaining Mental Health part two: Fight Against Misinformation and Fake News
WE SUFFER FROM TRUTH DECAY
This post has been in the hopper for quite a while.
Originally, I was going to curate it, but now I just want to get it posted.
.jpg)
We've already discussed how the Israel-Hamas war is the latest conflict where people are poring over social media and news channels looking for updates on what, exactly, is happening. After all, whether it’s news about our neighborhoods or communities on the other side of the world, the web is where we go to find updates.
And it’s another reminder that misinformation is often big business, and it’s everywhere: fake news and fabrications, half-truths and obfuscations, and flat-out lies and propaganda. The rise in AI-powered deep fakes has only made the problem worse and increased the amount of untrustworthy content out there.
So is it actually still possible to filter truth from lies online? We don’t yet have a foolproof way of checking—perhaps that’s a task AI could be trained on next—but there are ways to limit the likelihood of being fooled.
Some online sources are clearly more reputable than others: It’s right to be
more skeptical about a post by an unknown X user than it is about something from The New York Times or The Washington Post (or WIRED). That’s not to
say citizen journalism can’t be useful, because it absolutely can, but be wary
of taking it at face value.
It’s not just the source that’s important, it’s the number of sources.
Like Bernstein and Woodward, you need to get information backed up and
verified by more than one source whenever possible. If you’re looking at a video
of an event, for example, look for more recordings from other people, taken from
different angles.
If you’re not sure about a particular source, check its history—which is
fairly easy to do on social media. Does their most recent post match up
with what they’ve posted before? Are they posting a lot of generic content
that can’t really be authenticated? How many followers do they have, and how are they interacting with them? These can all be useful factors to consider.
As well as checking the sources of particular stories, photos, and videos,
examine the context around them. You can look at whether a video clip is
one of a series, for example, or something that seems to have appeared out of nowhere.
Context can extend to whatever the content is showing. If it’s a demonstration, for example, check to see if there’s any other record of it elsewhere on the web and ask a few questions—do the photos and videos match up with where they’re supposed to have been recorded? Are there any pieces of evidence (like police uniforms) that tell you where this is happening?
Sometimes there are context tools built into the platforms themselves: You might see false information warnings on Facebook, for example, if a post has been flagged by other users. You might also see what are called community notes attached to posts on X (formerly Twitter), adding extra context about what has been posted. These can be useful signals to consider, though they're not infallible.
Fake news is often designed to spread as quickly as possible: If something is shocking, inflammatory, or surprising, we’re more likely to pass it on to other people. On social media especially, that can quickly mean inaccurate content starts trending, which of course means it’s then shared by even more people.
With that in mind, look for posts that seem engineered to go viral—to provoke a reaction—rather than to provide information. Misinformation and fake news will often come without any real context attached, such as a source, a location, or an accompanying link that directs you to something similar (like a longer version of the same video or a related story).
Be particularly cautious with posts and media that are furthering a particular cause or course of action. Sometimes a little bit of cynicism is all you need—and sometimes you just need to take a beat and evaluate what you’re looking at again, rather than instantly assuming it’s correct and sharing it elsewhere.
Courtesy of the Annenberg Public Policy Center comes FactCheck.org, which does exactly what its name suggests. It examines claims and counterclaims put forward by governments and other organizations and explains what’s true and not true about them. Here’s a story about an online video that misrepresented how Ukraine conscripted women into serving in the military, for instance.
There are other resources, including another fact-checking service from Reuters, that can be useful, especially when it comes to photos and video. There’s no guarantee that the content you’re unsure about is going to be covered by one of these sites, but it’s certainly worth checking.
4 Tips to Spot Misinformation on the Web
NOV. 26 - 2023 - David Nieldhttps://www.wired.com/story/4-tips-spot-misinformation/
https://research.asu.edu/seven-ways-to-protect-yourself-against-misinformation
April 07, 2020
7 ways to protect yourself against misinformation
News outlets, along with everyone else in the world, are sharing their facts, opinions and advice on COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus. With the overwhelming information that’s available, how do you know how to sift through and find only what is accurate and necessary to keep you and your community safe?
Arizona State University researchers provide a few quick tips to protect yourself from fake or misleading news during this time.
1. Pay attention to where your news is coming from.
“If it's coming through your Twitter, Facebook or Instagram feed, don't think of it as information from those platforms, because it’s not,” said Scott Ruston, a researcher in ASU’s Global Security Initiative.
"Ask yourself, 'Who is this coming from and what is the background?' If the article you read makes accusations, ask yourself, 'Who does this benefit? What’s the underlying source material?' For example, the U.S. Department of State recently identified disinformation campaigns about the coronavirus in Europe," Ruston said. In those cases, strident claims about dangers to residents were made in order to undermine the government.
2. If you get information from social media, check the original source.
“When someone asks you where you heard something, if your first inclination is to say Twitter, you need to stop and check because Twitter itself tells you nothing,” said Kristy Roschke, co-director of the News CoLab in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
“Twitter gives people a feed of people who will tell you things," she said. "Ask questions like, ‘What's the actual post?’ ‘What's the thing that's telling you this piece of information?’ ‘Who is that person?’ 'Is it a media organization you've ever heard of before?’
"You can find all of that information in a Twitter profile. There's basic information you can find with a millisecond of extra effort. People who have credibility generally put information in their bios to bolster their credibility.”
3. Within news articles, examine the sources and how they are included.
“Look for how sources are treated and referenced,” Ruston said. “Journalists that work for traditional news outlets like AZCentral, CNN and the New York Times have a set of professional ethics guidelines and will assert their sources. The best is when the sources are named, the next best is when the names have been concealed for the protection of the source. However, it’s appropriate to be skeptical of articles that depend solely on unattributed sources without any kind of corroboration.”
4. Read beyond the headline.
“It's important to read the story fully," Ruston said. "Very often, headlines are misleading and are not there to inform you. The purpose of the headline is to get you to click on the link or to buy the newspaper, or to tune in if you're channel surfing.”
5. Get your news from a variety of sources.
People should check with additional news sources to confirm information they feel strongly about.
“If you read something and if your reaction is any sort of extreme emotion, outrage or unmitigated joy, that’s a clear indicator that you should definitely read more deeply,” Ruston said. “Many of the disinformation examples we’ve come across in our research are designed not to inform but rather to activate a strong anger or fear response.”
6. When you see your friends and family share misinformation, correct them.
“Always be kind when helping people identify misinformation. Don't insult people's intelligence," Roschke said. “Don't repeat lies, because when you emphasize the thing that they got wrong, they're actually cognitively more likely to remember the thing they got wrong. You want to provide them with new information that comes from a source as reputable as possible.”
7. Find out what other information is out there.
“I really believe in expertise, which is why I really like NPR as a news source because there is deep expertise both from perspective of journalistic integrity and in selection of credible sources,” said Nadya Bliss, executive director of the Global Security Initiative. “I've actually done this where somebody will tweet something and I would think, ‘That's interesting, I wonder if it's true.’ Then, I will go separately into a Google search and pull up the news articles on it and see what's written about that topic.”
READ MORE: Bliss gives further insight into combating misinformation about the novel coronavirus in the ASU Now article “How to combat misinformation when you need the truth the most” and on air with KJZZ.
The Centers For Disease Control and Prevention has the most up-to-date information about the status of the novel coronavirus in the U.S. Members of the ASU community can also check the Health Services Novel Coronavirus page for regularly updated information.
Written by Madison Arnold
What is Mis-, Dis-, or Malinformation (MDM)?
In the
digital age, information flows freely and swiftly, especially during election
seasons. As we’ve seen, the rapid dissemination of
information can significantly influence public perception and voting behavior.
However, the spread of false or misleading information—categorized into three
types: misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation—can, when
unchecked, pose a significant threat to the integrity of elections
and democracy itself. Understanding these terms and their
distinctions is extremely helpful when working to recognize and combat their
harmful effects.
What is Misinformation? The
Unintentional Spread of False Information.
Misinformation
refers to false or inaccurate information that is spread without the intent to
deceive. Individuals who share
misinformation often believe the content to be true and may spread it out of
concern or a desire to inform others. For instance, during elections, a person
might share an incorrect closing time for a polling location, thinking they are
helping others.
The
danger of misinformation lies in its potential to mislead large numbers of
people unintentionally. Even without malicious intent, misinformation can cause
confusion, reduce voter turnout, and undermine trust in the electoral process.
Once misinformation takes root, correcting it becomes challenging because the
initial false message often spreads more widely and rapidly than subsequent
corrections.
What is Disinformation?
Deliberate Deception for Malicious Purposes.
Disinformation
is false information that is deliberately created and spread with the intent to
deceive. This type of information is
typically crafted to manipulate public opinion, influence political outcomes,
or cause harm to specific groups or individuals. During elections,
disinformation campaigns might be orchestrated by political operatives, foreign
actors, or other entities seeking to disrupt the democratic process. For
example, Russia is known to use this tactic on social media.
Disinformation
might involve fabricating news stories about a candidate’s criminal activities,
falsely attributing inflammatory quotes, or creating fake social media profiles
to spread untruths. The deliberate nature of disinformation makes it
particularly insidious because it exploits people's trust in each other and the
rapid spread of information on social media platforms.
The
impact of disinformation can be severe, leading to polarization, voter
suppression, and violence. It undermines informed decision-making by creating
false narratives that can sway elections and erode confidence in democratic
institutions.
What is Malinformation?
Exaggerated or Misconstrued Information Based on Reality.
Malinformation
involves the sharing of genuine information with the intent to manipulate
context to cause harm. Unlike
misinformation and disinformation, malinformation is based on reality but is
used selectively or out of context to mislead, harm reputations, or incite
violence. During elections, malinformation might include selectively edited
videos or true information exaggerated to appear more sinister.
The
danger of malinformation is its ability to distort public discourse based on
truths taken out of context. For instance, the fact that a single polling
location temporarily ran out of ballot paper might be used to argue for
widespread election interference. Malinformation thrives on the strategic
presentation of facts that can mislead and manipulate the audience by framing
reality in a misleading light.
The Collective Threat to
Democracy
While
each type of false information poses its own risks, their collective impact on
elections – and democracy generally – can be significant. Misinformation can
create confusion and distrust among voters, disinformation can manipulate and
polarize the electorate, and malinformation can sway public opinion through
selective truth. Together, they undermine the core democratic principle of
informed decision-making.
What You Can Do
A
coordinated effort between governments, tech companies, civil society, and the
public is crucial to address the multifaceted nature of these threats. Sharing
knowledge, resources, and strategies can enhance the effectiveness of combating
false information. Here is what you can do:
1.
People need to be educated about the
distinctions and dangers of misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.
Whoever you are, you have a platform and a sphere of influence. Share this
blog post or this resource from the Election Infrastructure Government
Coordinating Council and help elevate critical thinking and
media literacy skills as essential for discerning the credibility of
information.
2.
Sign up for the News Literacy Project’s RumorGuard.
RumorGuard email alerts give you timely reminders to help push back against
viral mis, dis, and malinformation.
3.
If you are a Jewish
organization, join our
network! The Jewish Partnership for Democracy was built
to support institutions interested in working together to protect and
strengthen American democracy. In 2024, we have a specific focus on helping
ensure free, fair, safe, and accessible elections – including a number of new resources
(including funding!) on combating MDM meant to disrupt the electoral
process.
Note:
Elements of this blog post were written using the help of generative AI. As
with anything, not all AI is good and not all AI is bad. We encourage you to be
conscientious consumers of information regardless of the source.
The groups include the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the digital rights organization Access Now, and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). The subpoenas represent a new chapter in the legal war Musk launched after advertisers fled X, and are part of a lawsuit Musk and X first filed about a year ago against Media Matters
This Puzzle Reveals Whether You Can Correct Misinformation
EDIT: Thanks for everyone's feedback on the puzzle! I've updated the video to remove "E" to be less confusing. New video is now embedded above!
Hey patrons! Enjoy this video early and ad-free until next Wednesday!
Transcript:
I hope that if you’re a regular on this channel, then you are more likely than average to adjust your beliefs when presented with compelling evidence that you’re wrong. But is that true? A new study suggests that we might be able to tell, based on whether or not you can solve this puzzle. Okay, that is a gross oversimplification but I’m a dork who loves these kinds of tests so I figured that would be a fun place to start. Feel free to pause on this screen to try to work it out, and at the end of this video I’ll tell you the right answer.
Okay, so that is a figure matrix, and you may have encountered similar puzzles if you’ve ever taken an IQ test. Real talk up front: I’m sure we all know by now that IQ tests in general are highly problematic, because throughout history people have used flawed and overly simplistic measures of cognitive ability as an excuse to discriminate against, punish, and even kill large groups of people who are deemed “other.”
Many of those tests are no longer used after scientists figured out they weren’t measuring cognitive ability as much as things like how wealthy your family is, what your cultural background is compared to the culture you live in, what language you speak, your access to education, whether or not you have issues like dyslexia, whether or not you’re autistic, et cetera.
In full disclosure, I hit the jackpot on all that stuff and benefited from it by being really good at taking tests, so I got to start school early, skip ahead in certain classes, and eventually test out of a full semester of college courses thus saving thousands of dollars on my student loans. On the other hand, I was left with Former Gifted Child syndrome (I'm joking but this may be a real thing?) in that I had to learn and accept that I was average and needed to actually work hard as an adult and I constantly feel that I’m not living up to my potential and now I’m on antidepressants, soooooo….a mixed bag. But overall, yes, I benefited from debunked ideas about IQ tests.
These days, researchers who study cognition have a better, more complex, more nuanced understanding of what intelligence is, how we can measure it, how it can be improved, and how it might positively or negatively impact a person’s life.
The puzzle I showed you, the figure matrix, is one way that researchers can score a person’s “fluid intelligence.” In the 1940s, psychologist Raymond Cattell developed the idea that general intelligence can be split into two categories. “Crystalized intelligence” is what IQ tests mostly focused on when I was a kid: knowledge and strategies that you accumulate over time through learning and experience. It’s heavily reliant on your language abilities.
“Fluid intelligence” refers to your ability to solve problems you’ve never encountered before, thinking that doesn’t rely as heavily on prior learning. Cattell created tests to measure this that are completely nonverbal. That makes it a much more even playing field for testing people regardless of their culture or language abilities, which is funny because that may lead you to assume Cattell was a cool guy but no, like a lot of people obsessed with intelligence in the 1930s, he was a real piece of eugenicist shit who thought that better IQ tests could help us figure out which races should be “phased out” of existence. Nonviolently of course! Like with birth control or whatever. Yikes. As with Margaret Sanger, today we can keep the good ideas and discard the eugenicist tripe in the trash can of history.
Anyway, that’s fluid intelligence: the ability to think laterally and novelly. Fluid and crystallized intelligence influence one another, and so aren’t necessarily opposite ways of thinking. A good example of the difference would be how a person might solve a puzzle, developed by Cattell’s student, John L. Horn: "There are 100 patients in a hospital. Some (an even number) are one-legged but wearing shoes. One-half of the remainder are barefooted. How many shoes are being worn?"
You can figure out the answer using crystallized intelligence if you learned algebra in school. But you can also figure it out using fluid intelligence by reasoning that “if half the two-legged people are without shoes, and all the rest (an even number) are one-legged, then the shoes must average one per person, and the answer is 100."
All of this leads me to the actual study that was published this month in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications: Fluid intelligence but not need for cognition is associated with attitude change in response to the correction of misinformation.
We talk a lot on this channel about how to stop misinformation from spreading, so this is right up our alley. Previous research shows that in general, it’s really difficult to get someone to change their mind when they believe misinformation. Debunking with correct data seems to work a little bit, “prebunking” by giving people correct information before they see the misinformation seems to work a little better, and sometimes using more emotional arguments seems to work on some people. But that’s part of the issue: people are all different, so maybe different kinds of audiences respond better to different kinds of arguments.
So these researchers explored the hypothesis that maybe people are more likely to change their minds and drop misinformation if they’re better at fluid intelligence. They pre-registered two studies, which is great because that means they couldn’t change anything if they didn’t get the results they wanted, and both of them were pretty much the same. They took a total of a little more than 1,000 people and split them into two groups. The control group read about a company that experimented with giving its workers flexible hours and found that it was beneficial.
The other group read about the same company’s flexible work hours, but they were told that it had negative results. They were then given a fact check that debunked the negative results and explained that the result was actually positive.
The subjects took fluid intelligence tests, and sure enough, the hypothesis was supported: people who scored higher on those tests were more likely to accept the correction.
As the study’s title suggests, they also looked at “need for cognition,” so what’s that? Some researchers suspect that it’s actually a little more complicated to test fluid intelligence, because people might not do well on them simply because they don’t feel like putting in the effort to solve the problem. It’s boring, let’s just guess and move on.
Full disclosure, that was almost me for the puzzle I started this video with! I found it on a page of several puzzles and that was the first one, and it stumped me to the point where I got annoyed and scrolled down to the next one to see if I just suck at fluid intelligence these days. When I got the second one I decided to put more effort into the first one, and I am happy to report that I got it eventually. See? Former gifted child syndrome. Putting in effort is an active and painful decision sometimes.
Anyway, that’s where “need for cognition” comes in: that’s a person’s desire to think deeply about a subject. So they tested the subjects for that, too, and found that it didn’t have any impact on the results. You can be as lazy as you want, but if you have the ability to engage in that abstract thinking about novel problems, you are more likely to change your mind when presented with evidence.
(Hey, post-production Rebecca here. I was rewatching this and I realized I didn’t fully explain the importance of the “need for cognition” finding. It doesn’t JUST control for people who didn’t feel like working hard to understand the company’s experiment. It ALSO suggests that a person might be really interested in thinking about a topic but that doesn’t mean they will necessarily accept new information about that topic. They need the flexible intelligence for that. Okay, back to the video!)
At least when it comes to, um, a company offering employees flexible work hours. The researchers controlled for how people felt about flexible work hours before they read about the company’s experiment, so this was about as nonpolitical and unemotional as a topic can get. Obviously things are going to be trickier when it comes to beliefs that are deeply held, that people think of as being central to their identity. So, good news if you’re a psychologist out there looking for a cool follow-up study: try this out with, say, correcting US Republicans about whether or not immigrants are eating cats and dogs. Could be fun.
Okay, that’s the study, so now I’m going to end by telling you the answer to the puzzle. I debated putting this after the traditional video of Indy outro but ultimately decided that he’s way too cute and distracting and you’d probably forget. Here’s the puzzle one more time. The answer is B! The secret that escaped me for far too long is that the colors are reversed between the top two images. If you switch the top right image’s colors, it becomes much more obvious that that square has rotated once clockwise. So you take the bottom left image, rotate it, reverse the colors, and you end up with B.
Don’t worry if you didn’t get it! That’s just one example, and it doesn't actually say much, if anything, about you. You were probably just really excited to get to the Indy video, so here it is.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/08/election-disinformation-elon-musk-x-trump-harris/
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/02/is-it-illegal-for-the-white-house-to-fight-covid-misinfo-up-to-scotus/
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2602.28 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 3894 days ago & DAD = 548 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
