The spread of bad information online has been relentless. Photo / Glenn Harvey, The New York Times
False news is on the rise. We can fight the spread with a simple exercise: Slow down and be sceptical.
There's a disease that has been spreading for years now. Like any resilient virus, it evolves to find new ways to attack us. It's not in our bodies, but on the web.
It has different names: misinformation, disinformation or distortions. Whatever the label, it can be harmful, especially now that it is being produced through the lens of several emotionally charged events: the coronavirus pandemic, a presidential election and protests against law enforcement.
The swarm of bad information circulating on the web has been intense enough to overwhelm Alan Duke, the editor of Lead Stories, a fact-checking website. For years, he said, false news mostly consisted of phony web articles that revolved around silly themes, like myths about putting onions in your socks to cure a cold. But misinformation has now crept into much darker, sinister corners and taken on forms like the internet meme, which is often a screenshot overlaid with sensational text or manipulated with doctored images.
He named a harmful example of memes: those attacking Breonna Taylor, the Black medical worker in Louisville, Kentucky, who was killed by the police when they entered her home in March. Misinformation spreaders generated memes suggesting that Taylor shot at police officers first, which was not true.
"The meme is probably the most dangerous," Duke said. "In seven or 20 words, somebody can say something that's not true, and people will believe it and share it. It takes two minutes to create."
It's impossible to quantify how much bad information is out there now because the spread of it online has been relentless. Katy Byron, who leads a media literacy program at the Poynter Institute, a journalism nonprofit, and who works with a group of teenagers who regularly tracks false information, said it was on the rise. Before the pandemic, the group would present a few examples of misinformation every few days. Now each student is reporting multiple examples a day.
"With the pandemic, people are increasingly online doomscrolling and looking for information," she said. "It's getting harder and harder to find it and feel confident you're consuming facts."
The misinformation, she said, is also creeping into videos. With modern editing tools, it has become too easy for people with little technical know-how and minimal equipment to produce videos that appear to have high production value. Often, real video clips are stripped of context and spliced together to tell a different story.
The rise of false news is bad news for all of us. Misinformation can be a detriment to our well-being in a time when people are desperately seeking information such as health guidelines to share with their loved ones about the coronavirus. It can also stoke anger and cause us to commit violence. Also important: It could mislead us about voting in a pandemic that has turned our world upside down.
How do we adapt to avoid being manipulated and spreading false information to the people we care about? Past methods of spotting untruthful news, like checking articles for typos and phony web addresses that resemble those of trusted publications, are now less relevant. We have to employ more sophisticated methods of consuming information, like doing our own fact-checking and choosing reliable news sources.
Here's what we can do.
Get used to this keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+T (or Command+T on a Mac). That creates a new browser tab in Chrome and Firefox. You're going to be using it a lot. The reason: It enables you to ask questions and hopefully get some answers with a quick web search.
It's all part of an exercise that Byron calls lateral reading. While reading an article, step one is to open a browser tab. Step two is to ask yourself these questions:
— Who is behind the information?
— What is the evidence?
— What do other sources say?
From there, with that new browser tab open, you could start answering those questions. You could do a web search on the author of the content when possible. You could do another search to see what other publications are saying about the same topic. If the claim isn't being repeated elsewhere, it may be false.
You could also open another browser tab to look at the evidence. With a meme, for example, you could do a reverse image search on the photo that was used in the meme. On Google.com, click Images and upload the photo or paste the web address of the photo into the search bar. That will show where else the image has shown up on the web to verify whether the one you have seen has been manipulated.
With videos, it's trickier. A browser plug-in called InVID can be installed on Firefox and Chrome. When watching a video, you can click on the tool, click on the Keyframes button and paste in a video link (a YouTube clip, for example) and click Submit. From there, the tool will pull up important frames of the video, and you can reverse image search on those frames to see if they are legitimate or fake.
Some of the tech steps above may not be for the faint of heart. But most important is the broader lesson: Take a moment to think.
"The No. 1 rule is to slow down, pause and ask yourself, 'Am I sure enough about this that I should share it?'" said Peter Adams, a senior vice president of the News Literacy Project, a media education nonprofit. "If everybody did that, we'd see a dramatic reduction of misinformation online."
While social media sites like Facebook and Twitter help us stay connected with the people we care about, there's a downside: Even the people we trust may be unknowingly spreading false information, so we can be caught off guard. And with everything mashed together into a single social media feed, it gets tougher to distinguish good information from bad information and fact from opinion.
What we can do is another exercise in mindfulness: Be deliberate about where you get your information, Adams said. Instead of relying solely on the information showing up in your social media feeds, choose a set of publications that you trust, like a newspaper, a magazine or broadcast news program, and turn to those regularly.
Mainstream media is far from perfect, but it's subjected to a standards process that is usually not seen in user-generated content, including memes.
"A lot of people fall into the trap of thinking no source of information is perfect," he said. "That's when people really start to feel lost and overwhelmed and open themselves up to sources they really should stay away from."
The most frightening part about misinformation is when it transcends digital media and finds its way into the real world.
Duke of Lead Stories said he and his wife had recently witnessed protesters holding signs with the message "#SavetheChildren." The signs alluded to a false rumour spread by supporters of the QAnon conspiracy about a child-trafficking network led by top Democrats and Hollywood elites. The pro-Donald Trump conspiracy movement had effectively hijacked the child-trafficking issue, mixing facts with its own fictions to suit its narrative.
Conspiracy theories have fueled some QAnon believers to be arrested in cases of serious crimes, including a murder in New York and a conspiracy to kidnap a child.
"QAnon has gone from misinformation online to being out on the street corner," he said. "That's why I think it's dangerous."
Written by: Brian X. Chen
Photographs by: Glenn Harvey
© 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES
OPINION: After nearly a decade in US politics, Trump remains as popular as ever.