• 3 days ago
Does social media elevate misinformation? How can we tell whether a piece of content is misleading?

7 simple questions on misinformation, answered.
Transcript
00:00spreading blatant disinformation the techniques people use to spread misinformation how incredibly
00:05easy it is to mislead people when you ignore context always check your own facts just because
00:11it's on facebook or youtube does not mean it's true misinformation is false or misleading
00:26information that is harmful i use this harm metric as a way of understanding the difference
00:33between false content like santa claus for instance or false content like the 2020 election
00:40was stolen russia tried that during our last election too but it didn't work well 40 percent
00:47of americans think you lost the election so it kind of did that misinformation that is spread
00:53intentionally we usually refer to as disinformation
01:01many people spread misinformation completely unintentionally they see something they don't
01:06necessarily maybe they don't even know whether it's true or false and they spread it so that
01:11they can ask that question some people spread misinformation because they believe it to be true
01:16and other people spread disinformation intentionally often for their own ends
01:24okay always be suspicious of content that's making a really strong emotional appeal look at
01:31uh who is who is the content is coming from you know who the author is do i know who this source
01:38is is this a news media source that i'm familiar with uh that i think has a reputation for accuracy
01:46and if that's something you're not sure of there are sites like news guard like media bias fact
01:51check where you can go and you can look up a news source and you can find out what their
01:55reputation is other sources like influencers like um random people on the internet that you may not
02:04know those i would have a little more suspicion of if i saw a video if i saw a link on facebook
02:16or youtube i would the first thing i would do is try to understand who created that video
02:25who created that post where does this information come from not only would i encourage people to not
02:31repost or share content that they think is misinformation if they come across it online
02:37don't you know don't comment on it even commenting and saying hey i think this isn't factual
02:45increases the engagement with that content and is basically a signal to the platforms that they
02:51should spread it more um you know similarly any any kind of reaction to it um even like a dislike
02:59or an angry uh is a bad idea if you really want to do something um you can report content other
03:08than that don't touch it something that my research has shown is that misinformation content
03:18from from sources who have a reputation for spreading misinformation um goes viral more
03:24that uh content from misinformation sources gets in in the u.s something like six times
03:32the engagement on average of factual sources and very often the major tech platforms they
03:38have prioritized engagement above all else the primary good they seem to follow is
03:46user attention and the problem is the content that gets the most attention is often not the content
03:52that is uh healthiest or the most factual or the or the safest
04:03fact checks are not always effective for changing beliefs one of the things that i've been thinking
04:08about a lot in the context of what is going on in the russian invasion of ukraine is just how
04:15effective the u.s government's um very early efforts at just getting out to the public
04:23information that they had about realities on the ground in russia and ukraine every indication we
04:28see on the ground right now in terms of the disposition of russian forces is that they are
04:33in fact getting prepared for a major attack on ukraine by getting information out to the public
04:38early they created a situation where it was very difficult for russian misinformation to really
04:43take hold when i compare that to the circumstance in the 2020 election and also the circumstance
04:49around um vaccine misinformation in particular those times in those circumstances were ones of
04:57tremendous uncertainty in the face of that uncertainty there is a real opening for
05:02misinformation that perhaps was easier for spreaders of mis and disinformation to take advantage of
05:08so
05:12what we need to do is better understand why people are in a position that they would believe
05:17such outlandish lies in the first place because i think that's something we don't fully understand
05:24and we're not really going to understand how to counter
05:28uh these false narratives until we understand why people believe them in the first place