Table of Contents

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!
- 50% of adults get their news through Facebook…
Even professors & college students can be bad at navigating digital 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)

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

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
    1. Neutral point of view
    2. Verifiability
    3. 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
- 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

Be skeptical when there is no evidence
Is the sources reliable?
Is the evidence even relevant?
- Spurious correlations (Correlations ≠ causation)

Deepfake: Can make videos look like you are somebody else!

They can frame the image:

Flawed humans gather, interpret & present data!
Evaluating data visualizations:
- Are they based on real data?
- Is the data presented in a fair way?