How to avoid spreading misinformation on social media
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(Source: Ashutosh Sonwani from Pexels)
“Bullshit is a consequential aspect of the human condition. Indeed, with the rise of communication technology, people are likely encountering more bullshit in their everyday lives than ever before.”
Misinformation isn’t new; it has simply become more widespread and sophisticated.
In years past, a conspiracy video like Plandemic would have been almost impossible for someone to make without a film crew, a studio, and access to high-end recording equipment. Now, almost anyone can make such a video if they have a little bit of money, some software, and a few willing participants.
We’re all susceptible to misinformation, no matter how intelligent we think we are. In one PBS survey of Americans, 59% of respondents said it was difficult to identify false information on social media. Only 37% said it was easy to identify it.
Based on research by MIT cognitive scientist David Rand (no relation), people are inclined to believe false news at least 20% of the time. Rand also found that our susceptibility to misinformation is driven mostly by “lazy thinking” rather than other factors.
Misinformation and Social Media
Social media has provided us with incredible new ways to connect and organize, but it has also played an outsized role in the spread of misinformation. Unfortunately, the efforts of social media companies to eliminate misinformation from their platforms won’t be enough to slow the tide.
Some giants, like Facebook, are even taking a decidedly hands-off approach by refusing to fact check, often under fear of being accused of censoring or violating the spirit of free speech. There is also an ongoing debate over whether social media platforms should counter misinformation on their platforms. Some would even argue that it is illegal — or at least undemocratic — for the platforms to do so.
As such, we each have a personal obligation to stop the flow of misinformation. According to the Brookings Institution, “To counter misinformation online, we can and should demand that newsfeed algorithms not amplify our worst instincts. But we can’t expect them to save us from ourselves.”
The best way to combat misinformation is for us to educate ourselves so we can recognize it and stop the spread. Here are a few things you can do to identify misinformation before you share it on social media.
Recognize Your Confirmation Bias
Confirmation bias refers to our tendency to search for information that confirms what we already believe.
It plays a role in both the creation of misinformation as well as its spread. Conspiracy theorists may search for “clues” that confirm what they believe, then create content piecing those “clues” together, i.e. “connecting the dots.” Other times, misinformation is published with the knowledge that it is false, but with the assumption that those who read it will spread it because of their own confirmation bias.
Simply knowing confirmation bias exists won’t protect you from it because it happens subconsciously. Everyone has their biases, and an article, video, meme, or image that appears to support something you believe is all too tempting to share immediately. To prevent confirmation bias, you must recognize it in yourself — as it’s happening.
Confirmation Bias and Search Engines
Search engines have also made confirmation bias pervasive. If you search for the right terms, you can find a page on the web that will confirm almost anything you want to believe.
For example, if you’re arguing with a random person on social media and they won’t seem to listen to your reasoning as to why the Earth is flat, all you need to do to confirm your belief is search for the term, “evidence that the earth is flat” on Google. You’ll have to scroll through and ignore all the first-page sources discrediting your argument, but you’ll eventually find something that confirms it.
(I did this search, and on page two of my search results I found a link to the so-called “Flat Earth Society,” which had all the ammunition you’d need to argue for a flat Earth on Facebook ad infinitum.)
That said, just because you find something that confirms your beliefs doesn’t mean its false. You just need to confirm its false before you share it.
Combating Confirmation Bias
Let’s say you see an article that confirms something you want to be true. To combat confirmation bias, try the following:
Don’t jump to conclusions.
Take time to read and consider the veracity of the information.
Check for language that suggests opinion or speculation.
Seek conflicting information from other sources.
Discuss the information with someone else.
If you see something online or in the news and it gets your blood pumping, it’s time to take a step back. Go through the steps above and you’ll have a better idea of whether what you’re seeing is true or if you’re just seeing what you want to see.
Even if a piece of content doesn’t tell you exactly what you want to hear, there’s always the chance that you’ll subconsciously “cherry-pick” what you want to be true from its contents.
Using Fact-Checking Sites
If something sounds too good (or bad) to be true, you can also check fact-checking sites like the following to make sure it’s not a hoax:
If you don’t have time to do a deep analysis of the information you’re looking at, at least do a quick Google search to see if there are conflicting sources of information (see the “Check Other Sources” section). You can even send the content to a friend and ask for their opinion.
The most important thing to recognize is that confirmation bias occurs subconsciously while we’re making decisions.
To combat it, you need to disrupt your decision-making so you can get a clearer understanding of the information in front of you. You also need to be open and willing to accept when mounting evidence shows that your information is incorrect.
Don’t Just Read the Headline
“You didn’t read the article, did you?”
If you’ve ever seen this before, you’re not alone. A study of people’s interactions with their Facebook News Feed indicated that people who only skim headlines and article previews are overconfident about how much they know. One study from Columbia University revealed that 60% of the URLs shared on social media weren’t even clicked before they were shared (although some of this percentage could be attributable to bots).
In one accidental experiment, a writer created a news headline, but no story was attached to it. Over 2,000 people commented on the “article” and thousands shared it.
To combat the spread of misinformation, you must determine if what you’re reading, hearing, and seeing is truthful and accurate. That means going beyond the headline.
The Inverted Pyramid
Of course, most people don’t have time to read a long article. To understand the gist of an article on a time crunch, try reading strategically.
Most news stories will lead with the most important information: Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?
It’s not the best tool for telling a compelling story, but journalists sometimes rely on what’s known as the “inverted pyramid” to structure their news articles:
(Source: The Ohio State University Pressbooks)
As you can see, the article will delve into more crucial information in the next part of the story, known as “the body.”
This is usually where you’ll find the real substance of the story. It’s also where you’ll encounter evidence, background information, quotes from authoritative sources, and the human connection — what makes the story significant to the people involved and why it is important to society in some greater context.
The end of the article, “the tail,” might contain extra information that’s relevant to the story or that provides more context. Generally, you should try to at least get through the body of a story before you can say you understand what it said. This way, you’ll be exposed to the evidence and, more importantly, to what makes the story significant.
Misinformation tends to have high levels of speculation and opinion, but not much evidence. False stories that do have evidence may only draw it from biased or erroneous sources.
Check the Source
If you’re reading a piece of information that’s been shared by someone on social media, check the original story before sharing it yourself. This usually requires you to click on the link and get redirected to the article or web page.
In most cases, this will lead you to the original piece of content, which should have quotes and evidence from legitimate sources. If it brings you to a personal blog, another social media network, or anything else that isn’t an actual news site, you may need to keep digging to find the true source of information.
If you can’t keep digging, that “news” might just be a rumor, someone’s opinion, or misinformation.
Credible Sources
A credible source is usually an individual who has first-hand knowledge of events or an expert who understands the complexities of a topic and can speak on it form an authoritative standpoint. Some source material will be embedded with a link in the body of the article that directs you to the source in question.
If an event like an accident or attack occurs, it’s better to hear about it from multiple sources who were present rather than a pundit who can only speculate about what happened. Professional journalists will interview multiple people at the scene to get an accurate account of events.
Check Other Sources
If you see information online that feels off base, phony, or too good to be true, check other sources before sharing it. Try official sources like academic or government websites first. Then, you can move on to major news sites.
Don’t assume someone’s personal statement on social media is accurate unless that person also posts evidence from reliable sources to back up their claims.
It’s easy to manufacture fake content and put in online. It’s much harder to prevent the damage caused by that content once it’s been spread across social media.
Example: The Antifa Scare
On Sunday, May 31st in Klamath Falls, Oregon, about 200 people showed up downtown to protest the killing of George Floyd. Across the street, hundreds of other people also arrived, some of them armed with firearms.
According to NBC News, “They said they came with shotguns, rifles, and pistols to protect their downtown businesses from outsiders. They had heard that Antifa, paid by billionaire philanthropist George Soros, were being bused in from neighboring cities, hellbent on razing their idyllic town.”
Antifa never showed up.
If you aren’t familiar with Antifa, it stands for “anti-fascist.” It refers to a loose ideology that has its roots in World War II Europe and centers around combating fascism “by any means necessary,” which sometimes means violence.
As it stands today, Antifa is not an organization and has no leadership structure. It consists of small, autonomous groups of individuals who share a similar ideology, and who sometimes coordinate to protest or “protect” protestors. There’s little reason to believe Antifa is in any way associated with Hungarian-American billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros.
It’s difficult to pin down where the rumor associated with this particular incident began, but it may have originated with this tweet:
(Source: Lipstick Alley)
This tweet might appear legitimate, but it wasn’t created by an Antifa group. It was created by a white supremacist group known as “Identity Evropa” (which has since rebranded itself as “The American Identity Movement”). In other words, it was a deliberate deception to put groups similar to their own on edge.
After the protest at Klamath Falls, the rumor of an Antifa uprising grew. It prompted armed militias to mobilize to “defend” other towns from the perceived threat, which inevitably led to confrontations between the armed groups and protesters.
There is little evidence that Antifa was even present.
Although most of the confrontations between militias and protesters weren’t violent, some of them resulted in brawls. One confrontation in Albuquerque ended in a shooting.
It would have been relatively easy to check the accuracy of these rumors. A simple call to the local police to verify the possibility of a “threat” from Antifa would have sufficed.
Barring that, a Google search would have revealed at least some information countering the rumor. After May 31st, several media outlets released stories about why the supposed threat of Antifa is both overblown and inaccurate.
Look for the Red Flags of Fake Content
Scammers often go to great lengths to make their content appear legitimate, but there are a few things you can look for to ensure you’re looking at a real news source.
Newly built websites, websites with poor grammar, and websites that only have a handful of posts are likely to be fake news websites. Most fake news websites present highly partisan or inflammatory stories and appear amateurish.
The Anatomy of a Fake News Website
Some fake news websites attempt to mimic real news sites to trick people into believing their stories. Others are “satirical,” but the satire is so veiled that it is difficult for most people to recognize it.
In this classic example from 2016, “ABC News” appears to report that President Obama has signed an executive order banning the pledge of allegiance in schools:
Source (Times of San Diego)
The first red flag is obvious. It’s the logo, which has a different font than it should.
The real ABC News logo looks like this:
Private companies are extremely protective of their intellectual property, and they understand the importance of maintaining their branding materials across platforms. They’d never substitute a different font unless it was part of an effort to rebrand the entire company.
If your web browser indicates that the website is “not secure,” that means it isn’t protected by an encryption and you have no privacy while viewing it. Any information you submit to the website is not protected. Every legitimate news site should be “secure” on your web browser and contain “https://” at the beginning of the web address.
Other obvious signs of a fake news site are advertisements for strange of overtly sexual products, low-quality images or stock photography masking as real news footage, poor writing, and a lack of sub-pages. Most news sites contain archives, as well as separate sub-pages for opinion columns and other types of content.
If you still aren’t sure if a news site is legitimate, check the site’s “About Us” page or their disclaimer. Every news site lists this information, so if it’s unclear or missing, you probably aren’t looking at a legitimate website (the fake website above gave the address of the Westboro Baptist Church as its physical business address).
You can also check other content on the site to see if the site’s reporting is consistent.
It may be difficult to see in the example above, but the right sidebar contains two news stories with the same headline: “The Amish in America Commit Their Vote to Donald Trump.” This would be a profoundly serious publishing mistake for a major news network.
Furthermore, the fact that the headline needs to specify that the Amish are “in America” is telling. There are very few Amish people in other countries, and they wouldn’t be able to vote in a United States presidential election unless they were already American citizens.
Examine the URL
Finally, if you could see the URL for the website above, you’d see that the domain is “ABCNews.com.co.” If you know anything about URLs (uniform resource locators, or web addresses), the “.com.co” suffix should be a dead giveaway: This is a deliberate attempt to mislead visitors, who might perceive this as an extension of the legitimate “ABCNews.com” website.
Most legitimate news sites will have a “.com” domain. A “.co” website could still be a legitimate site, but it’s much cheaper to purchase a “.co” domain than a “.com” domain. It’s safe to assume ABC News would spring from a “.com” website.
Furthermore, almost anyone can spin up a “.co” website on a platform like WordPress or Squarespace with a few dollars and a little bit of know-how.
As a note, keep an eye out for websites that claim to be American news outlets but are located outside of America. Many websites hosted outside of the U.S. have country codes in their URLs like “.ru” (Russia), “.si” (Slovenia), “.bd” (Bangladesh), and so on.
Free websites may still have the name of the website platform within them. If you see a news site that has “.wordpress.com” or “.squarespace.com” in its URL, you’re looking at a free website that almost anyone could create over a weekend.
Think Before You Share
This brings us to one of the most important things you can do to combat misinformation, which is thinking objectively about content before you share it. This isn’t easy to do.
When we have successful social interactions, such as when we identify with what someone else is saying, our brains get a shot of dopamine. From an evolutionary standpoint, our brains likely produce this chemical to motivate certain types of behavior that help with survival and reproduction. That’s why you get a dopamine reward when you eat, socialize, or have sex.
Unfortunately, digital media has a way of manipulating our brains to trigger dopamine. When we see content that we connect with on our phones and laptops, our instinct is to share that connection with others. Misinformation takes advantage of this instinct by manipulating our emotions.
According to Chamath Palihapitiya, former Vice President of User Growth at Facebook, these “short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.”
A good way to combat misinformation is to recognize when a piece of content is triggering an emotional reaction. If what you’re reading or viewing has you feeling incensed or zealous, don’t immediately share it. Think about it for a while. Check other sources or talk to people you trust about the subject.
Once you’ve calmed down and determined the information to be legitimate, then you can share and comment.
This is a segment from a larger body of work entitled “Knowing What’s True in the Age of Misinformation: A Practical Guide to Finding Truth in Modern Public Discourse and Media.”
You can read the full guide here.
