How good are you at knowing what’s true?

Is it possible to win the war on misinformation? 

 

Edgar Allan Poe may have coined the solution back in 1845 (he was 36 at the time, just four years before his untimely death) when he wrote, “Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.” 

 

Today, we hear, and see, too much. And the tools, as you know, are ever more potent. Witness last month’s official launch of Sora, Open AI’s text-to-video service that can create fake videos of up to 20 seconds from a simple prompt. 

 

How do we manage the onslaught? 

 

My earnest hope is that, ultimately, we’ll create powerful AI fact-checkers to combat what other AI sources can produce. But we’re not there yet. And while educators — who now teach students about news literacy — and fact-checking organizations do their part (see sidebar), it seems that, for now, it’s still up to us. 

 

Three Questions

The commonplace recommendations — which seem, at times, a touch underwhelming — encourage us to pose three questions. Here are Bob Britten’s three, shared in a piece for theconversation.com: “What’s the source? What’s the evidence? Do you want to believe it?”

 

I find the third question intriguing, as it introduces emotion. “Reflect on how the information makes you feel,” suggests Yonty Friesem, co-founder of the Illinois Media Literacy Coalition. “If you are so activated and so outraged that you need to share it, most likely there is some kind of a technique and manipulation there that aims to activate that response. It doesn’t mean that it’s untrue. But it means that something in the message made you react so emotionally that maybe there is a trick manipulation, and it serves somebody to have you react that way.”

 

The Stanford History Education Group aligns on source and evidence, then asks: “What are other sources saying?” 

 

And mediasmarts.ca challenges us to verify our source: “Do they really exist? Are they who they say they are? Are they trustworthy?” 

 

Scholastic.com cites one study that found “59 percent of social media links aren’t clicked on and read before they’re shared.” The authors suggest the obvious: “Don’t just believe a headline. Take time to evaluate the post.”

 

The Oxymoronic Dilemma 

In December 2023, nature.com published a lengthy analysis on misinformation and revealed a disturbing, yet noteworthy, reality. The authors explain: “Although conventional wisdom suggests that searching online when evaluating misinformation would reduce belief in it, there is little empirical evidence to evaluate this claim.” 

 

The researchers conducted five experiments and found “consistent evidence that online search to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing them.”

 

What Then Are We to Do? 

Perhaps, simply follow our instincts, our intuition, and our common sense. After all, it’s exhausting to question everything! 

 

Guidelines to consider: 

 

● From scholar Edward Baig: “Don’t equate likes with truth.”

 

● From tech writer Martin Libicki: “Readers should aim to be skeptical, but not cynical.” 

 

● From mediasmarts.ca: “Critical thinking isn’t about doubting everything, it’s about learning how to find out what is true.”