Is it for Real?
I Mean, Really Real?
Fake news is not a new
phenomena. And it ain’t going away any time soon!
As a Communications
Agency, we have a heightened awareness of the fake news phenomena, plus the
implications of it. We’ve written about it, debated and spoken about it at
events (and over far too many meals), and we’ve worked with clients to overcome
the impacts of it on a variety of levels. But it persists, and with increasing
social media usage, it snowballs.
So, how do we all deal
with it?
A little more critical
thinking helps. But that too needs to be upped a notch or so, as the fake news
industry works fast on becoming smoother, more sophisticated, and more ‘credible’
to us consumers of information.
With the current state
of the world, and the confusion we all live in, it’s good to rethink just how
critical we are of the information that passes through our screens, and of
course, our newsprint too!
The following article
may be a couple of years pre-today (that’s an alternative fact term for old),
but it is still extremely relevant.
What do you think?
____________________
Four
tricky ways that fake news can fool you
What looks like (and
reads like) the truth may be riddled with lies if you look more closely, says
neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin.
We’ve created more human-made information in the last five years
than in all previous human history. Unfortunately, often found next to things
that are true are an enormous number of things that are not — in websites,
videos, books and on social media. This is not a new problem; misinformation
was documented in Biblical times and in classical Greece. The unique problem we
face today is that misinformation has proliferated. It is devilishly entwined
on the Internet with real information, making the two difficult to separate.
And misinformation is promiscuous — it consorts with people of all social and
educational classes and turns up in places you don’t expect it to.
Here are four
ways in which misinformation may hide in plain sight.
Lies are tucked in among truths
When it comes to snowing people, one effective technique is to get a whole
bunch of verifiable facts right and then add one or two that are untrue. The
ones you get correct will have the ring of truth to them, and any intrepid
people who decide to check them will be successful. So you just fold in one or
two untruths, and many people will haplessly go along with you.
Consider the
following nine-step argument:
1. Water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen.
2. The molecular symbol for water is H20.
3. Our bodies are made up of more than 60 percent water.
4. Human blood is 92 percent water.
5. The brain is 75 percent water.
6. Many locations in the world have contaminated water.
7. Less than 1 percent of the world’s accessible water is drinkable.
8. You can only be sure that the quality of your drinking water is high if you
buy bottled water.
9. Leading health researchers recommend drinking bottled water, and the
majority drink bottled water themselves.
Assertions
one through seven are true. Assertion eight doesn’t follow logically, and
assertion nine, well . . . who are the leading researchers? And what does it
mean that they drink bottled water themselves? It could be when it is offered
to them, they’ll drink it. Or does it mean that they avoid all other forms of
water? There is a wide chasm between these two possibilities.
The fact is,
bottled water is at best no safer or healthier than most tap water in developed
countries, and in some cases less safe because of lax regulations. This is
based on reports by a variety of reputable sources, including the Natural
Resources Defense Council, the Mayo Clinic and Consumer Reports.
Of course, exceptions exist (e.g., Flint, Michigan). But in general the
argument of pseudoscientific health advocates, as typified by the above string
of statements, does not, er, hold water.
Websites masquerade under misleading names
In a 2014 congressional race in Florida, the local GOP offices created a
website with the name of their Democratic opponent, Alex Sink, to fool people
into thinking they were giving money to her; in reality, the money went to her
rival, David Jolly. The site, contribute.sinkforcongress2014.com, used the
color scheme of Sink’s site and featured a smiling photo of her that was very
similar to the one used on her site. The GOP site did say that the money will
be used to defeat Sink, but many people might not have taken the time to read
such things carefully. The most eye-catching parts of the GOP site are the
large photo of Sink and the headline “Alex Sink Congress.” Not to be outdone,
Democrats responded by copying this tactic and creating the site http://www.JollyForCongress.com.
MartinLutherKing.org
probably sounds like a site that would provide information about the civil
rights leader. Because it is a .org site, you might assume that there is no
ulterior motive of profit, and the site proclaims that it offers “a true
historical examination” of Martin Luther King. Wait a minute. An old joke goes,
“How do you know someone is lying to you? Because they begin with the phrase to
be perfectly honest.” Honest people (or websites) don’t need to
preface their content this way.
If you read more
closely, you’ll see that MartinLutherKing.org contains a large assortment of
distortions, out-of-context quotes, and biased rants. Who runs the site?
Stormfront, a white supremacist, neo-Nazi hate group. If a site looks fishy to
you, click around until you see what entity owns it. Another quick way to check
out a site: do a Google search to see who else links to that web page. Type
“link:” followed by the website URL, and Google will return all the sites that
link to it.
Numbers are given without context
Even counting the airplane fatalities of the 9/11 attacks in the US, air travel
continues to remain the safest transportation mode, followed closely by rail
transportation. The chances of dying on a commercial flight or train trip are
next to zero. Yet some people avoid airplanes when they see statistics like
this one: More people died in plane crashes in 2014 than in 1960.
The statistic
is correct, but it’s not the most relevant statistic to consider. It turns out
that the number of airplane deaths was higher because there were so many more
flights in 2014 than 1960. If you really want to figure out how safe air travel
is, looking at the total number of deaths will not help. You need to look at
the death rate — the deaths per miles flown, or deaths per flight, or something
that equalizes the baseline.
Claims rest on false sources
Unscrupulous writers often count on the fact that most people don’t bother
reading footnotes or tracking down citations. Maybe a company wants its website
to convince people that its skin cream has been shown to reverse the aging
process by ten years. So an employee writes an article and peppers it with
official-looking footnotes that lead to web pages that are completely
irrelevant to the argument. Or they point to reputable articles on relevant
sites, like a peer-reviewed journal on aging or on dermatology, even though the
referenced article cited says nothing about the product. When a product sounds
too good to be true, you should look at its evidence before going any further.
The promise
of the Internet is that it is a great democratizing force, allowing everyone to
express their opinions and have immediate access to all the world’s
information. Combine these two, and you have a virtual world of information and
misinformation cohabiting side by side, staring back at you like identical
twins — except one of them will help you and the other one will hurt you.
The task of
figuring out which one to choose falls on all of us, and it requires careful
thinking and something that most of us feel is in short supply: time. Critical
thinking is not something you do once with an issue and then drop it. It
requires that we update our knowledge as new information comes in. Time spent
evaluating claims is not just time well spent. It should be considered part of
an implicit bargain we’ve all made.
Adapted from the new book Weaponized Lies: How to
Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era, by Daniel Levitin. Reprinted by
arrangement with Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, a Penguin Random
House Company. Copyright © Daniel J. Levitin, 2016.
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