How To Tell If It's True?
There was a time when gossiping was entertaining, and twisting reality a little was fun. Many publishing empires were built around these two, and the public consumed them as they were - inconsequential entertainment.
Nowadays, given the power and speed of social media to spread information, false news have become a threat. In fact, in 2016 the Oxford dictionaries announced 'post-truth' as the word of the year.
Since then, the spectre of fake news has only increased its scope, becoming more and more common. False news are no longer 'fun' or innocuous, but deal with serious issues, causing dangerous confusion, uncertainty, and misinformation among the population.
If you are like most people and you're connected to your smartphone most of the day, you probably find yourself constantly assaulted by all kinds of media battling to get your attention: newsfeeds, videos, ads, news, photos, animations, articles, and more.
Publicists, marketers and reporters know that the best way to capture the public’s attention, and become viral, is by creating a sensation, shocking. Therefore, they create and post images, videos and headlines that are sensationalist, always aiming for shock value.
Why? Because we are wired to react impulsively when we feel scared or threatened.
Located in the limbic system, deep inside our brains, the amygdala controls the automatic responses that allow us to react instantly to dangers, often before we are aware of them.
This evolutionary reflex is excellent to keep us safe, but it also has its downsides.
When alarm sparks in our brains, it triggers a rapid and involuntary response. Before you can stop to think whether that headline, video, or picture is real or not, you've already clicked on it, making it more prone to believe it, share it, and spread its content.
What's worse is that if this response is continuous, it reaches a saturation point in our brains, requiring higher and higher doses -bigger and bigger shocks- to generate the same response. Thus, sustained shock both desensitizes the viewer and causes addiction.
Fake news these days are hard to spot because they're designed to mimic actual sources of information. Therefore, simply seeing the logo of a reputed news source next to the headline doesn't automatically guarantee that the news isn't fake.
However, many of us often browse news carelessly and in a hurry, which makes us easy targets for fake news.
Worse still: the attention wars in the media is so fierce that even reliable sources of information are increasingly 'selling' their news with sensationalist headlines in the hopes to catch more viewers, thinning the line between fake and real news.
Many false news are produced by groups or organizations as propaganda, aiming directly to the hopes of a target group in the population, who are so eager to believe it that they don't stop to verify if they are real or not.
This manipulation is extremely dangerous as it carries social and personal consequences that are hard to predict or control.
To make things worse, in 2015 a group of visual analysts at Cornell University found evidence that our skills to differentiate altered from non-altered images is rather poor, identifying the modified images only 46.5% of the time.
Since then, the ability to manipulate digital images has only increased, and nowadays it’s nearly impossible to recognize the false from the real.
So, how do you spot fake news?
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions published an easy to follow 6 step guide to detect fake news, published on its website in more than 20 languages.
Other tips are:
*Think before you click - Train yourself to pause before you click on or share news. Ponder: what is the intention of that headline? To inform or simply to attract gullible readers? Is it from an objective source, or is it biased?
Although many reliable sources verify their content, the point of view of journalists may not be entirely objective, imprinting their own prejudices and biases on the news or article, thus attempting to impose their own opinion on the readers.
Sometimes it's hard to think amid so much digital noise, but if you develop critical thinking, you will eventually do it automatically.
How do you develop critical thinking? Simply by questioning - Is it 100% real? If not, what part of it is real and what part is fake? Is it satire?
Developing this alertness takes time, but with practice - and we get plenty of it daily! - it will become second nature and you'll develop acute sensibility to spot the fake from the true.
*Develop your culture - People with well-developed culture are less prone to believe fake news, simply because they have a solid background of true facts, they are sceptical, and they are used to dig deeper for more information.
Fake news are often thin and shallow, providing scant, often contradictory details, and usually omit their sources or are vague about them, all of which reveal them as false.
Also, people who read a lot tend to take time to read carefully and analyze what they're reading, two excellent exercises to avoid fake news.
*Check, check, check - Before you share a piece of information, check with authorities on the subject, and reliable sources, such as librarians, professors, mentors, etc.
If you want to go a step further, you can try online fact-checking sites like Snopes to verify if the news is true. For pictures, you can try Google Reverse Image Search to check where the image originated and whether it was altered or not.
As a rule of thumb, if a news is only reported by one source and without much detail, it's likely to be false. The more reliable sources that report the same news, the better chances it has to be real.
*Don't bite the bait - if the headline is outrageous, shocking, hilarious, and/or unbelievable (and it's not coming from a humorous site) it's very likely to be false.
Use your common sense. When in doubt, use the old adage: if it's too good - or incredible, or shocking, or awful - to be true, it's probably false.
Finally, don't rely on social media or word of mouth for information - Social media is the preferred turf of fake news, and word of mouth often deforms even the truest information.
Chose to be informed through reputed sources, and select the news you share carefully, since they represent you. If you share fake news, your own image will suffer.
These simple actions will help you detect falseness in the media, and keep you safe from dangerous misinformation.
To Learn More
-To read and download the paper on the 2015 Cornell University research "Humans Are Easily Fooled by Digital Images":
https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05301
-To download the guidelines published by the IFLA as a PDF in your language:
https://www.ifla.org/publications/node/11174
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Sources: IFLA.org, Mindtools.com, UsaToday, BBC.
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