Fact or Fiction: Can We Identify Truth on the Internet?
By: Max Hollett
Tags: Misinformation, Internet, Social Media, Fake News, Filter Bubble

Fact or Fiction: Can We Identify Truth on the Internet?

Photo by visuals on Unsplash

On a platform as large as the internet, it is a given that not everything you read or watch will be true. However, during the current COVID-19 pandemic, it seems even harder to know what information you can trust. Despite the best efforts of tech companies like Google and Facebook, a worrying amount of false information about the coronavirus has been disseminated on the internet.

Given the circumstances, now is as good a time as ever to examine some of the big questions surrounding this topic. How does misinformation spread so quickly and freely on the internet? And why do we seem to be so susceptible to it? Finally, what can we do to protect ourselves from it? Let’s take a look.

The term “fake news” became more popularized around the 2016 U.S. election by people such as Donald Trump. But what exactly is “fake news”? As it turns out, the term “fake news” is not usually used in accordance with its actual definition. People usually use the term to describe false information presented as the truth. Sometimes people just use it to denounce truth they may not agree with or just do not trust. Fake news is technically defined as the presentation of false information as a fact, paired with the intention behind that untrue information. This intention could be something like damaging a reputation or making money.

Since there are so many terms which are used surrounding false information, I feel it is my responsibility to give readers a few more brief definitions. Two important words to understand are misinformation and disinformation. These two terms sound very similar and are often used interchangeably. The nuance between misinformation and disinformation, not unlike fake news, has to do with intent. Misinformation is false information being spread regardless of its intent to misinform. Disinformation is false information specifically meant to mislead.

Information in either of these categories can be false in a number of ways. A piece of fabricated content would be completely false, while misleading or manipulated content would be a distortion or manipulation of the truth. A common example of misleading content is clickbait, which may sensationalize events or exclude context. Given these definitions and for the sake of consistency, I will mostly refer broadly to either false information or misinformation as I continue. It is important however, to set some ground rules about the misuse and overuse of some of these terms.

What Do We See Online?

You may tell yourself that you would never fall for false information on the internet. I certainly have felt this way in the past. It’s easy to think this way when you see stories of all the outlandish conspiracy theories and obviously misleading headlines on the internet. “How could anyone believe that stuff?” Right? The truth is that we are far more susceptible to misinformation than we suspect. You probably don’t think all that hard about what shows up when you log into your social media, or even Google account. However, what you see is not neutral.

If you and your best friend were to both Google the same thing, you would get entirely different results. This is because social media companies use algorithms, a complex set of processes and rules used by computers, to tailor your flow of content specifically to you by considering how likely you are to be interested and interact with the content. However, calling these algorithms complex would be an understatement. Some of the algorithms used within social media adapt over time, and even their creators no longer completely understand how they work.

Author and activist Eli Pariser calls the effect of this a “Filter Bubble.” Pariser published his book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You in 2011 which thrust the term “Filter Bubble” into the spotlight. His ideas have since drawn the attention of Tim Berners-Lee: the inventor of the World Wide Web, and Bill Gates: the co-founder of Microsoft.

Eli Pariser’s Ted Talk on the Filter Bubble

In his Ted Talk on the subject, Pariser identifies the “Filter Bubble” as “your own personal unique universe of information that you live in online.” Social media companies claim that this is good for us. It offers all the most relevant information for us personally rather than make us sift through everything that we may not find interesting. This doesn’t sound that bad does it? Well, it definitely makes social media more entertaining in the moment, but it can have dire consequences.

The algorithms used are extraordinarily sophisticated in deciding what we want to see. But they aren’t really doing it for us. They are doing it for their real client, the advertisers. By giving us exactly what we want on our social media feed, they make us more likely to spend more and more time browsing. By recording all our interests and viewing patterns, they make it easier for advertisers to directly deliver the most pertinent advertisements. Essentially, they are selling our time. What truly makes this dangerous is that we don’t have the choice, the algorithm does. We don’t choose what gets in to our “Filter Bubble,” and we don’t choose what gets locked outside.

What Makes Us So Susceptible?

Now that we have set the stage about what we see on social media, a big question still stands. Why are we so susceptible to false information? One of the concepts which makes us more susceptible is confirmation bias. We are uniquely susceptible to this concept while living in a filter bubble. Confirmation bias is when we look for or interpret new information to support our preexisting beliefs and theories. As you may have already connected, you don’t even have to look for the information which supports your beliefs. The algorithms deliver the information directly to you. This often means that we don’t even know when we are being fed exactly what we want.

Consider this scenario. You click on a Facebook post about an instance of voter fraud in the 2020 election out of curiosity. “This is crazy! There is no way this is real right?” you think while reading the comments. The algorithm takes note. You hop back on Facebook later and notice another post about voter fraud. Once again, you click and start reading. Again, the algorithm records your activity. The trend continues and you start seeing videos about voter fraud every time you log on to Facebook. Like I mentioned earlier, you may think that you wouldn’t fall for misinformation, but really imagine yourself in this situation. Once you start seeing a consistent flow of information about something like widespread voter fraud, it seems to become more and more valid. Rather than seeing an even spread of evidence for and against voter fraud, you only see evidence confirming your growing suspicions. The voter fraud example is topical, but only one example of the confirmation bias machine created by social media. Situations like this happen to all kinds of people across all kinds of viewpoints.

Another way we are susceptible to false information is that it often appeals to our emotions. More specifically, misinformation tends to exploit negative feelings such as superiority, anger, and fear. An example of this was present after the Las Vegas shooting in 2017. Of course, people were angry and devastated by a such a seemingly senseless act of violence. Unfortunately, this emotion was channeled into the implicit anti-Muslim racism present in post 9/11 America. Numerous claims arose on social media stating that the gunman was Muslim or that he had converted to Islam. These claims ended up being entirely false, but still spread rapidly after the tragedy. I am sure that like me, most of you are not surprised by this.

A group of three researchers at MIT conducted a study analyzing the statistics regarding the spread of false information. The team consisted of Soroush Vosoughi, a postdoctoral researcher, Sinan Aral, a Professor of Management, and Deb Roy, an associate professor of media arts and sciences. Vosoughi explains in an interview that what got him interested in this research was the Twitter aftermath of another tragedy, The Boston Marathon Bombings in 2013. He discusses how due to a news vacuum, he and his friends were getting their news from the only source they could find it, Twitter. He says that after the dust settled, he realized “a lot of what I was reading during that week was actually rumors.” The results of their study were shocking. They discovered that fake news stories were about 70 percent more likely to be retweeted by Twitter uses than a real news story was. They also found that false news spread around six times as fast.

Sinan Aral Discussing the Findings of the Study He Co-authored

The researchers at MIT hypothesize that people’s attraction to novel information is a factor which could explain their findings. They admit that they can’t prove this based on their research alone, but their claim actually does have a potential scientific backing. A relevant article can be found on the website ScienceDaily, which features breaking discoveries in the realms of science, technology, health, and the environment. The study provided by the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) seems to support the “novelty hypothesis” made by the scholars at MIT. The article highlights that “Brain scientists led by Sebastian Haesler (NERF, empowered by IMEC, KU Leuven and VIB) have identified a causal mechanism of how novel stimuli promote learning. Novelty directly activates the dopamine system, which is responsible for associative learning.”

Based on the study’s findings, a novel stimulus such as the action of reading a tweet containing new and seemingly important information could activate a dopamine response, leading to greater interaction with the information. A possible result would be the viewer feeling a responsibility to inform others about what they learned. I can personally relate to this. There have been times when I have felt compelled to tell my friends about something new that I had recently learned. This makes me question if I had confirmed that what I was sharing was true, or if it was just by impulse. Was I just excited to share something I thought was new and significant? After an event such as the Boston Marathon bombings, people may have felt they were being helpful by sharing posts about alleged identities of the perpetrators.

Unfortunately, good intentions in these scenarios do not always lead to positive results, especially when you don’t know whether the information you share is true or not. This leads into another notable factor influencing the spread of false information. This factor has to do with the fact that gathering the truth is an awful lot harder than just retweeting a post containing rumors and speculation. This can be seen in the social media aftermath of both the Las Vegas shooting and the Boston Marathon bombings. In fact, as mentioned earlier by Soroush Vosoughi, what led him to getting so much of his information off Twitter after the bombings was the fact that there wasn’t any concrete news being reported. It makes sense that people would be frantically searching for information after a tragedy such as the ones mentioned above, but most of the time, the information they want is not known by anyone yet. This leaves an information void which turns into a breeding ground for false information, whether it’s just rumors and speculation or genuine manufactured fake news and disinformation.

Where Do We Go from Here?

I hope that one thing has become evident through examining how misinformation spreads and after exploring our susceptibility. Falling for fake news and the many other types of misinformation does not make you dumb. The combination of being trapped in a filter bubble, having your emotions exploited, and possessing the human desire for novelty can be a treacherous combination for anybody when it comes to social media and the internet in general.

Based on this, I think it is important that we approach this topic carefully with friends, family, and even strangers. By realizing that false information can trick almost anyone, we can develop empathy for those who may have been deceived. It is still important to help these people find the truth, but we must be careful in how we approach this. Imagine for a moment someone telling you that a fact you posted on social media was fabricated and proceeding to ask you how you possibly fell for something so obviously fake. To you, this fact may have seemed or even still does seem entirely real. You would likely get defensive the moment you felt that your intellect was being insulted. We need to avoid the stigma around falling prey to false information and not just tell people they are wrong, but rather use empathy and explain the situation to them.

There is something else I want to make clear. Just because it’s easy to believe false information within our current social media climate, doesn’t mean there aren’t actions we can take to protect ourselves from it. By no means am I saying we should take it lying down. So, what can we do?

One of the most effective methods of evaluating the information you are viewing is reading laterally rather than vertically. Vertical reading consists of reading an article from the top of the page to the bottom and from start to finish. Vertical reading lends itself to spending more time analyzing how polished a website feels or how professionally an article reads. For example, a lateral reader may focus heavily on whether a website has a professional name or logo, whether a website has .org URL, or whether it seems to contain scholarly references. Vertical reading can be used while reading a social media post by noticing whether the post’s author has sophisticated language or links to outside sources. To be clear, none of these aspects are bad things, and do not in and of themselves depict anything negative about a source. However, seemingly effective indicators such as these are not truly reliable in determining the credibility of a source. They can be easily imitated and utilized by highly biased organizations or individuals spreading fake news.

The alternative and far more effective method of judging the reliability of what you are reading is lateral reading. Just as the names suggest, as vertical reading moves up and down, lateral reading moves to the sides. Lateral reading focuses less on the specifics of a certain website, but rather the context of the article or website within a broader scope of information. While reading laterally, you are recommended to open new tabs and start doing your own research.

For example, rather than reading the possibly unreliable “About Us” page on a website, you can search to see what other sources are saying about this website and whether it is regarded as biased, or factual. Lateral readers will also consult with fact checking websites such as the Pulitzer prize winning PolitiFact. Other well regarded fact checking sites include FactCheck.org, OpenSecrets.org, and Snopes. Even if there doesn’t seem to be much information about a source or article, you can employ lateral reading by following references to their original source, or trying to research the owner or publisher of a source in order to identify bias or conflict of interest.

As it turns out, vertical reading is probably the primary way you have been taught to read. A study from the Stanford History Education Group out of Stanford University found that undergraduate students and history professors with PhDs alike struggled with determining the credibility of sources after being given up to five minutes to examine them. At the same time, fact checkers ended up being 100 percent effective in determining the more reliable of two sources by utilizing lateral reading. The study had the fact checkers, undergraduate students, and professors all attempt to compare the reliability of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Pediatrics. The former is the largest professional organization of pediatricians in the world with 64,000 members, while the latter is comprised of a group of 200–500 members who broke apart from the American Academy of Pediatrics due to their issues regarding adoption by same-sex couples.

As reported in the study, one of the fact checkers “spent a mere eight seconds on the College’s landing page before going elsewhere,” and stated “The first thing I would do is see if I can find anything on the organization.” As you would expect, he quickly learned the prior information about the American College of Pediatrics and after a couple more minutes of research, labeled the American Academy of Pediatrics the more reliable. When the professors examined the two sites, half of them decided that the American College was more reliable or at least that both sites were equally reliable based on including what seemed like reputable references at the bottom of the page. One professor stated, “These are all references to professional journals so that definitely reinforces my sense that it’s a genuine site and that the information found here can be trusted.” Nobody is going to make the argument that a professor with a PhD isn’t an intelligent individual, but he still missed key aspects of determining an articles credibility. This is just one more example that goes to show that avoiding being fooled by false or biased information is more a product of knowing how to avoid it, not just intelligence.

The bottom line is that fake news, misinformation, and disinformation are not going anywhere soon. Although reading about all the ways that social media and misinformation take advantage of us is surely daunting, the first step is acknowledgement. Once we recognize these problems and how they affect us, we are far more likely to overcome them. We are consistently confronted by our filter bubble and the overflow of possibly false information on social media and the internet, but consciously checking facts, knowing your biases, and trying to view differing opinions and perspectives can go a long way in making you a better netizen.