We’re inundated with more information than we can possibly handle, and not all of it is true. How do you parse it out? Who do you trust?
What even is fake news?
The simple answer is made up stories that have no basis in fact. The complex answer is that there is deliberately fake news, but also misleading headlines, misinterpreted studies, conspiracy theorist groups, incorrect information on social media and more. The term “fake news” fails to encompass all the false information issues we deal with.
The cost of being not just uninformed, but misinformed, can have dangerously high stakes like anti-vaxxers exposing immunocompromised people to preventable diseases or that credulous man deciding to shoot up a pizza place or even death threats sent to the parents of a Sandy Hook victim. These are the big obvious costs, but even on a smaller level, shouldn’t the information you believe be true?
Let’s break down where false information comes from.
Fake news sites
There are websites that don’t bother with research or decent reporting because they’re in it for the sweet, sweet clicks, not spreading real information. You’re more likely to get frequent visitors when your target market keeps hearing stuff that they like or supports their worldview. Their stuff is cheap to make (no time spent researching, no real journalists, etc.) and encourages more consistent engagement from their target market than real news sources, which don’t have the luxury of ignoring inconvenient facts.
Fake news websites may have URLS that mimic a legitimate news site, e.g. MSNBC.com.co., or they may have developed a type of brand that makes them seem like the sole purveyors of truth, and attempt to discredit other news sources.
I visited Info Wars, a conspiracy website, and it’s set up to look relatively respectable with lots of eye-catching headlines and photos. It also has an online shop full of expensive supplements.
If you’re unsure about a news site, ask yourself how they make money. If there’s a shop full of pricey stuff or articles that require a lot of clicking, take what they say with a huge grain of salt.
On social media
Fake news isn’t limited to fake news websites. Once released on the internet, it often has a life of its own and is organically shared through memes and social media. If news is divorced from its original source, you can’t fact check it. But if you like what it says – whether it’s about organic eating or a horrible thing a politician said – you’re more likely to believe and share it.
It feels true to you, and it’s difficult to resist this kind of truthiness because it reinforces what you already believe. But I would say that the best policy is that if you can’t find and fact check the original source, chalk it up to nonsense in the primordial soup of the internet.
Via legitimate news
Sometimes untrue news trickles into otherwise legitimate news sources because sensationalism gets more attention than measured and reasonable reporting. Remember when everyone pounced on that chocolate weight loss study? (It was a hoax crafted to expose issues in scientific reporting.) Or that little boy dying in Santa’s arms story? (Completely unvetted with nearly no details confirmed, like at which hospital it occurred or the kid’s name.) But the headlines were nearly impossible to pass up, and many news outlets ran with them anyway.
A decent news source should inform their readers of their error, and stories like these should be few and far between. If you notice a trend of errors, it might be time to find a different place to get your news.
DIY fact checking
To start with, if you read an entire article, you will be ahead of the game. A headline like, “Mayor Fights against Disabled Children,” sends a sensational message and encourages people to click on the article. The story itself might be about a mayor who introduces new legislation after kids were disabled in school bus accident, but many people don’t read past the headline, even if they share the story.
The story above is all made-up, by the way. But if I put in a dummy link and gave the mayor a name, I could easily contribute to more fake news. Those who click on the link, which few people do, would be the ones to catch me. This brings me to sources.
First, sources should be cited via a link to an article or study, a description of the study and who did it, or an interviewee’s credentials. If no sources are provided, you’re either looking at an opinion piece (not news) or junk (also not news).
Follow the sources and see what they actually are. Is it someone’s blog? Not necessarily bad, but certainly not independently fact checked. Does it lead to people trying to sell stuff, especially expensive garbage like supplements or an online certification course from the Institute of Useless Certifications? They want your money, not to inform you. If the source is a study, things are a little trickier.
A study should say what their study methods are and what the limitations of the study are. Those conducting the study should say who funded the study as that may affect the outcome. The conclusions of the study in nearly all cases use hedging language, like “findings suggest” or “shows a correlation.” Saying one study definitively proves something is ridiculous, especially if that study is only done on mice, less than 30 people, or undergraduate students at one university.
Unfortunately, it is time consuming to do your own fact checking, and even if an article doesn’t have misinformation, it can also be missing pertinent information. But as long as you have a critical eye, an omnivorous news diet (which should probably include some non-U.S. publications), and choose sources that you have found to be trustworthy, you’ll be less likely to be someone’s dupe.
