The real weakness exposed by fake news may be this: critical thinking skills.
Many people are woefully unable to separate fact from fiction, and even young “digital natives” are duped by “sponsored content” and are clueless as to the political bias of social messages, according to a new study from Stanford University.
“It seems clear that we have failed to teach critical thinking, media literacy, and basic research skills to the American public,” said Victoria Bernal, a professor of anthropology at UC Irvine who studies digital media, cyberspace and the public sphere.
“This leaves people very vulnerable to manipulation and scamming. The problem is compounded by American anti-intellectualism that undercuts the value of conclusions drawn on the basis of professional journalism and expert studies.”
Digital media has changed the game by speeding blatantly false information to millions in a matter of seconds, the eagerness of people to embrace “evidence” that supports their opinions, and the “monetization of viewing” that makes fake news lucrative.
Censorship, Bernal said, is not the answer. Education is the best antidote to deception.
Jestin Coler, Huntington Beach resident and purveyor of “faux news” sites, agrees. He has been trying to jump-start the conversation for years, he said. People need to become news-media literate, and responsibility lies with both the consumers of content as well as its producers.
Dan Chmielewski, publisher of TheLiberalOC who also runs a technology PR firm, said it’s up to the reader to question stories that seem to back their preconceived notions and political beliefs.
He tries to be mindful of that, checking stories via established, nonpartisan fact-checking sites like Snopes.com, Politifact.com and Factcheck.org. But he still has fallen prey.
“I shared some fake news on social media simply because I liked the story at hand and wanted it to be true,” Chmielewski said. “But you can’t call every story you disagree with ‘fake news’ because you don’t like it. Trusted media sources and government reports that track data regardless of which party holds the Oval Office can help separate real from fake.
“If a story is aggregated on only partisan websites with no independent media coverage, it’s fake,” he said. “And fake news has consequences, like the child sex ring/pizza shop story that’s so unreal, its hard to see how anyone could have believed it.”
A Pew study released this week found that 64 percent of adults said fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current events, and that nearly a quarter of them had shared fake news online.
There are tools to help:
Facebook has rolled out a new feature allowing users to flag fake stories, and is considering tweaking its algorithms to help spot hem.
Slate has created a new tool to combat the proliferation of bogus stories. The Chrome browser extension can be downloaded for free and is called “This Is Fake.” Once installed, stories that Slate has identified as fake are flagged with a red banner over the preview image, linking directly to an article from a reputable source that debunks the story in question.
Check urls, read the “about us” section, check comments and keep your thinking cap on, experts say. Combating fake news is being framed as a new civic responsibility of us all.
Full disclosure: Our editors were wise enough to discourage us from testing the waters with a fake O.C. news site whose first story would be headlined “Cryogenically frozen heads of Walt Disney and George Lucas to be displayed at Disneyland’s new ‘Star Wars’ attraction.” But we suspect it would have gotten a lot of clicks.