The problem
- Somewhere down the line, all information was produced by humans with incentives
- There is no place where you will always find the truth
- We are not proactive enough about the information we consume
- The social media algorithms don’t have our best interest at heart when deciding what to show!
- Attention = money, so they keep you on the platform by:
- Only showing information you already agree with! (Confirmation bias)
- Solve this issue by following people you don’t agree with!
- Showing false information that is likely to keep your attention!
- Only showing information you already agree with! (Confirmation bias)
- 50% of adults get their news through Facebook…
- Attention = money, so they keep you on the platform by:
- Even professors & college students can be bad at navigating digital information…
How we currently judge the quality of information…
- The design of the website…
- when something looks “official”
- Looks like a news article
- Well-designed logo
- Professional photography
- No grammatical errors or typos
- We think we consume high-quality information when this is included:
- Statistics
- Infographics
- References & citations (you don’t even check them)
- Whether we’ve used it before…
- Who showed it to us…
Solution: Lateral reading (Opening new tabs)
- Don’t just do it when you disagree with the information! (beware of confirmation bias)
- Seek MULTIPLE trustworthy sources when fact-checking
- Utilize click restraint (E.g. look at the available articles before deciding which article to click)
Consider the source
- Beware of catfishing (people pretending to be someone they aren’t)
- Consider their authority
- Educational or professional background
- How they gather information
- How they catch & fix mistakes
- Keep their agenda into account when considering the information!
- Maybe they want to:
- Sell you something
- Get your attention (because attention = money)
- Win you over to their worldview /Political beliefs
- Signal who they are
- Maybe they want to:
Who is trustworthy?
- Trusted news organizations (But remember they could have a hidden agenda)
- Many use people hired as fact-checkers!
- The New York time, wall street journal & Washington post has written about their editorial standards
- Fact-checking websites
- Snopes
- Politifact
- factcheck.org
- NPR fact-check
- WAPO fact checker
- Wikipedia?
- It got a bad reputation initially because it was so easy for anyone to edit
- It has gotten better
- Rigorous content policies
- Neutral point of view
- Verifiability
- No original research
- See notes at the top of the page, where they can warn if any of the 3 content policies were violated!
- Administrators oversee things and can lock pages
- Rigorous content policies
- A great place to start to get a birds overview of a topic
- BUT don’t stop there! (Don’t cite them)
- You can use them to look for sources
Consider the evidence
- Be skeptical when there is no evidence
- Is the sources reliable?
- Is the evidence even relevant?
- Spurious correlations (Correlations ≠ causation)
Evaluating photograph & video evidence
Deepfake: Can make videos look like you are somebody else!

They can frame the image:

Evaluating data as evidence
- Flawed humans gather, interpret & present data!
- Evaluating data visualizations:
- Are they based on real data?
- Is the data presented in a fair way?
Summary
- All information is produced by humans
- Do lateral reading (open new tabs)
- Evaluate the source
- Authority?
- Hidden agenda?
- Evaluate the evidence
- Is it from a reliable source?
- Is it relevant for the argument?
- Evaluate the source