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The TL:DR for those who just feel they don't have time to read this entire post is simple Think before you post.
Step 1: STOP RELYING ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER AS SOURCES
Facebook and Twitter are wonderful ways to keep up to date on activities and events in your social circle, but when it comes to being a source of News the “What’s Trending” section is not without it’s issues.
Both Facebook and Twitter’s Trending topics are simply a ranking of data tracked in the stream. It’s an indication of what the masses are discussing. There in lies the problem, with the speed that a Fake News story or hoax can be introduced into the stream and shared through invoking an emotional reaction, a story can become the most talked about topic on the globe and never actually happened.
Step 2: REALIZE THAT THE BEST LIES ARE BASED IN TRUTH
One of the key elements to a good lie is that, in most cases, it has to be believed to be effective. In many a situation, this means that there needs to be elements of truth involved.
Lacking a believable basis means a story falls apart, and the more players involved in the story the larger the chance is that details wont always add up. In the caee of Fake News and Hoaxes, checking for this starts right at the headline of the piece by asking yourself the simple question of
“Is this something that could believably happen? Remember you can’t even spell Believe without the word lie, see it’s right there in the middle beLIEve
Step 3: USE THE 5W’s BEFORE SHARING
We should all remember these from our school current event studies, the 5 W’s known as Who,What,When,Where and Why, which were used to help us employ critical thought.
In fact, let us use an example to try to break down how the 5W’s can be used. The other day, I got this message via Facebook from a family member
Hi I'm mark The Director of facebook
Hello everyone, it seems that all the warnings were real, facebook use will cost money
If you send this string to 18 different from your list, your icon will be blue and it will be free for you.
If you do not believe me tomorrow at 6 pm that facebook will be closed and to open it you will have to pay, this is all by law.
This message is to inform all our users, that our servers have recently been very congested, so we are asking for your help to solve this problem. We require that our active users forward this message to each of the people in your contact list in order to confirm our active facebook users if you do not send this message to all your facebook contacts then your account will remain inactive with the consequence of Lose all your cont the transmission of this message. Your SmartPhone will be updated within the next 24 hours, will have a new design and a new color for the chat. Dear Facebook users, we are going to do an update for facebook from 23:00 p.m. until 05:00 a.m. on this day. If you do not send this to all your contacts the update will be canceled and you will not have the possibility to chat with your facebook messages
Will go to pay rate unless you are a frequent user. If you have at least 10 contacts
Send this sms and the logo will turn red to indicate that you are a user
Confirmed ... We finish it for free Tomorrow they start to collect the messages for facebook at 0.37 cents Forward this message to more than 9 people of your contacts and it will be free of life for you to watch and it will turn green the ball of above do it and you will see
This looks pretty scary at first even though on close inspection it looks like two different messages have been mashed together (notice half way along where after it mentioned the change in color for your chat windows it goes into "Dear Facebook Users..." as it has people wondering if they could end up paying for Facebook unless they do a specific action, but lets apply the 5W’s to this
Who? This message appears to be from mark The Director of facebook. Ok, We’re supposed to assume that is meaning Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg right? so that brings us to
What? Forward this message (how, via Facebook Messenger or SMS?, both are instructed) to 18 people. and we are all supposed to do this,
When? By 6pm on an unspecified date, and We are supposed to do this
Where? On our Smart phones
Why? Because if We Don’t Facebook’s iconic blue icon will turn red and We get charged for using Facebook, If We don’t We’ll be locked out of Facebook.
Now, lets apply some critical thought to this, Firstly Mark is too busy overseeing a company with almost half the world as users, plus the fact is He has been off touring the United States with his family when not in the office. Secondly, this can be debunked with asking yourself one question. Do you really think a Multibillion Dollar company would try a ploy of “free for you if you spam your friends, pay if you don’t”?
Step 4: FIND YOUR TRUSTED SOURCES AND DEBUNKING SITES
Trying to work one’s way through Fake News is always going to be a challenge, The 5W’s listed in Step 3 can help, but so can finding credible, unbiased news sources. Which sources are, of course, going to be affected by one’s own personal beliefs and viewpoint, so I won’t make suggestions on which ones you should pick specifically, but using the sources that the News Stations use, like Reuters or the Associated Press are good areas to start.
When it comes to making choices on specific sources, check the ownership, an example of this would be the Washington Post. Owned by Jeff Bezos, Founder and owner of Amazon, an article on the success of an Amazon event could very well have the potential to have a spin on it due to the common factor of the company’s owners. (Disclaimer: I am not saying this is the case, simply using this as an example for educational purposes)
It’s also very handy to keep a collection of debunking sites around to check stories against, but make sure your selected sites are not simply quoting other debunking sites and they do their own investigating. After all, site like Snopes saying something is debunked is not the same as if Hoax-Slayer said it was debunked just because Snopes said it was. (once again, example used for education purposes only here)
Step 5: THE ABOUT SECTION IS YOUR FRIEND
Pretty much any Website in this modern times has an about section that tells you a bit about those behind the Website. This is important as there are Websites that do News Satire, stories which are clearly written to entertain rather than inform.
A good Satire site will make this clearly known. Some will place a pop up on the site, a banner or other means of letting the user know. With a little detective work on your part this information is usually pretty easy to locate.
Step 6: BE AWARE OF CLONED SITES BY KNOWING YOUR TRUSTED SOURCES
Web Design template setups, like Wordpress, have made the job of cloning a reliable source’s Website easier than ever, all any party has to do is copy a few images, locate the theme and launch a domain and they can have an exact clone of CNN’s look (or to be fair any other Site) right down to a address that looks right.
This can make knowing the source is a reliable one fairly hard to do, unless one is ready to again do some detective work. The World Wide Web is an extensive catalog of data, and as such is held in a library of indexed links known as Domain Name Servers, or DNS. What this means is that, as an end user, We have tools to check on a Website. Through a simple google search phrase, WHOIS, coupled with the address of a Website, users can locate where the servers for the site are located, how long the site has been online and, unless a site owner has paid to keep it hidden, who owns the Domain address.
So, since we used CNN before, lets keep with that example. If you ended up on what appeared to be a CNN Website, but the address didn’t seem right and the story didn’t pass the 5W’s, what should you do? That is easy. Take the address up to the inclusion of a Website extension (typically a dot com) and run it through a Whois search. You never know when you will find that the article is actually on a bogus site owned by Boris in Moscow.
This has been, by far, one of the longer blog posts I have written for the Inertial Zen Designs Blog, but I hope it can help you come up with some of your own techniques and ways to help curb hoaxes and Fake News. Thank you for reading.
Dave, inertialzendesigns.com
