Facts as Weapons

For a long time we've emphasized the importance of fact checking. But even facts that 'check out' can be used (incorrectly) as weapons in information wars.

The following article by the Consilience Project, How to Mislead with Facts, describes how "verified facts can be used to support erroneous conclusions."

A quick recap:

1. Taking facts out of context, or failing to report sufficient context.
2. Cherry-picking facts to support a particular point of view (which has other valid sides).
3. Reinterpreting facts to persuade readers that a particular outcome is unquestionable.

When 'conclusions' like these are amplified on social media they really do have an impact, even if they are misinformation based on verified facts. 

The need for information fluency and not taking for granted everything we read is as true today as it was when the Internet first appeared. The article offers guidelines in terms of questions that are good to ask of any information. Here are just a few:

• Has a reliable source been cited to support the facts?
• Have the facts been corroborated by multiple independent sources?
• What is important to know about the contexts in which the facts have been validated?
• How much will the fact hold true beyond the context in which it was validated?
• What additional facts must be considered?
• In what ways can the fact be framed emotionally and taken personally by different types of people?

When facts are used as weapons (e.g., to vilify a political party, a scientific finding, a leadership decision, etc.) the task of not falling prey to misinformation requires more than reading. If recent events have taught us anything, is that information can't be taken at face value without some degree of risk. Unless readers exercise care and learn to evaluate facts on their own, they are increasingly at risk.

 

The Spread of Misinformation

Understanding Misinformation

Events preceding and ensuing from the 2020 election have serious implications for information fluency. Claims of a stolen election before it happened and supported ever since by politicians and pundits have been taken to heart by millions of people. Was the violence that erupted on January 6 during the counting of Electoral College votes justified? Was there enough evidence to justify breaching the capitol? Or was misinformed rhetoric to blame?

What difference could information fluency have made?

Truth or Misinformation?

On December 2, 2020 President Trump addressed the nation in what he said may be his most important speech:

"I am determined to protect our election system, which is now under coordinated assault and siege." [Source]

Citing an election that could not be conducted in a single day, his premise is that opportunities for fraud were multiplied by early voting and tabulating results that continued for days afterwards. States experienced a huge increase in early voting in response to the COVID pandemic. According to the U.S. Elections Project, over 100,000,000 people voted early, more than double the number who voted early in 2016 (47 million). It was a highly unusual year and many Americans responded by deciding to vote early, some to avoid crowds on election day and others to stand in early-voting lines--as more than one person said it, " I couldn't wait to cast my vote."

States enacted changes to their voting procedures to allow people to avoid crowds. Whether this was for health reasons or a systematic attempt for "assault and siege" (or both) is where opinions differ. In his speech, Trump builds his case for something other than public health reasons. He uses the word pandemic four times, each time connecting it to something Democrats are doing:

• "Using the pandemic as a pretext, Democrat politicians and judges drastically changed election procedures just months, and in some cases, weeks before the election on the 3rd of November."
• "They (Democrats) used the pandemic, sometimes referred to as the China virus, where it originated as an excuse to mail out tens of millions of ballots, which ultimately led to a big part of the fraud..."
• "It is important for Americans to understand that these destructive changes to our election laws were not a necessary response to the pandemic."
• "The pandemic simply gave the Democrats an excuse to do what they have been trying to do for many, many years. In fact, the very first bill that house Democrats introduced when Nancy Pelosi became speaker, was it attempt to mandate universal mail-in voting and eliminate measures such as voter ID, which is so necessary."

These four statements are but a small sample of claims made in the 46 minute speech. If events as described can be supported by evidence other than these words, especially if Democrats can be caught red-handed doing these things for these reasons, then there may be truth to them. If not, they are misinformation (fake news) or worse, malinformation known by the author to be a lie.

Unpacking 'Fake News'

Trump popularized the use of 'fake news' by using the term around 2,000 times in the past four years. This umbrella term covers a lot of types of information, including known facts. Trump's use of the term, mainly aimed at news bureaus to discount the things they wrote, clouds the variations that can be found in news labeled as fake. There are intended and unintended mistakes which cover a wide range of intended and unintended lies and what can loosely be classified as dreams. Among this latter group are hopeful statements that can never be proven, generally the stuff of faith. To one person, they are undeniably true; to another they are delusions.

• Intentional mistakes: The author knowingly lies. Mistakes of this type are not always bad, for example, sarcasm and satire--saying the opposite of something that is true for a humorous effect. But intentional lies can also be used to deceive, to gain the author an advantage or disadvantage the listener. Marketing is full of intentional lies, or at least partial truths: "Drink this supplement. It will add years to your life." Malinformation is also found here: information meant for harm to the one who consumes it.
• Unintended mistakes: The author or recipient is unaware of an inaccurate statement. Accidents and typos fit into this category. So do inaccurate assumptions that have not been vetted. So does passing along misinformation (thought to be accurate) which is a common occurence of this mistake on social media. Mistakes are amplifed the more they are repeated, but they are still mistakes.
• Dreams: The author or recipient exercises faith in things unseen. These are harder to pin down as there is no tangible proof they exist or not. Again, there's an immense spectrum here, from statements of faith found in the world's great religions and philosophies to bizarre suspicions and irrational fancies. Conspiracy theories belong here, being based on trust in things unseen or facts misunderstood. A person of faith should take exception at placing both religion and conspiracy theories in the same boat. There are fundamental differences between the two. At the heart of time-tested religions is love; fear lurks behind conspiracy theories.

Fact Checking 'Stop the Steal'

What is the appropriate label for information related to 'Stop the Steal'? Is it an intentional lie? Is it an unintentional mistake? Is it an unprovable conspiracy theory? It depends on who promotes the idea and why. Critical thinking comes into play in making such distinctions. In the context of Information Fluency, this takes the form of Investigative Searching.

Indispensable to the investigator's toolkit is fact checking. Investigative searching is within everyone's reach, but few do it. The consequences of not doing it now include charges of sedition for those who attacked the capitol based on information they consumed.

To demonstrate fact checking, take the substance of the last statement quoted in the speech above.

when Nancy Pelosi became speaker, Democrats attempted to mandate universal mail-in voting and eliminate measures such as voter ID

It is well-known that Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House. This could be fact checked, but it is a universally accepted fact. The title on her office door at the Capitol says "Speaker of the House." That is what others call her, including Republicans and Democrats. This is one of the things in the statement about which everyone agrees. It's a fact.

The rest of the statement invites study. Did Democrats attempt to mandate universal mail-in voting when Pelosi became speaker (or at any point)? This should be easy enough to check, since official statements are part of the public record.

Query: Pelosi universal mail-in voting

Here are the results with comments added:

• NANCY PELOSI'S NOVEMBER POWER PLAY "As I described here last week, Democrats are pressing to enact changes in Washington that would force states into adopting universal mail-in systems and banning photo ID requirements." This statement matches what Trump said on Dec. 2 with the exception that Pelosi's move is said to have occurred at least 76 days prior to the Nov 3 election. It must be mentioned that Rep. Hice is a Republican serving Georgia's 10th district. This claim includes new information: banning photo IDs.
• SIGNIFICANT EVENTS IN THE 2020 ELECTION CYCLE "Ranking Member Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) sent a letter to Chairperson Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Subcommittee on Elections Chair Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) requesting that they review House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's recent election legislation, specifically the nationalization of vote-by-mail, included in her two recent coronavirus relief packages." This site expresses the views of the House Republicans and appears to match what Trump said on Dec. 2. New keywords that may be useful include: nationalization and vote-by-mail.
• PELOSI SAYS MAIL-IN-VOTING IS ESSENTIAL FOR AMERICANS' HEALTH "House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday that mail-in voting in the upcoming election will be an essential option for Americans‘ safety and well-being, despite President Donald Trump’s claims that mail-in voting will lead to fraud and delays. (dated Aug. 2, 2020)" Politico claims to provide non-partisan coverage of political news. If so, this provides non-partisan of Pelosi's support of mail-in voting, though her stated argument is based on health concerns and not winning the election due to fraud.
• SAYS "PELOSI BLACKMAILS CONGRESS! SHE DEMANDS MAIL-IN VOTING OR NO 2ND STIMULUS FOR YOU AND YOUR FAMILY.” "False. Pelosi does not have the power to “demand” mail-in voting for November; that is being decided by each state governor." Politifact is operated by the Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism school and research organization partially funded by the Open Society Foundations (associated with George Soros). Because of this, right-leaning critics may see Politifact as left-leaning.

These four sources all associate Pelosi with an interest in mail-in voting, but they disagree about what she intended. The two Republican views echo the President in his belief that universal mail-in voting would benefit Democrats (presumably due to fraud). The non-partisan source supports her interest in promoting mail-in voting. The more left-leaning site says she has no power to make this happen since states decide how to conduct voting. Note that the investigation takes into account potential bias as information is collected.

According to public record, Nancy Pelosi has been Speaker of the House since Jan. 3, 2019 (she was also Speaker from 2007 to 2011). Was the first bill introduced when she was Speaker in 2019 about universal mail-in voting? So far, none of the results to the first query address this.

Query: house bill 2019 mail-in voting

The top result is this from Congress.gov: Sponsor: Sen. Wyden, Ron [D-OR] (Introduced 01/03/2019). Vote by Mail Act of 2019. This proposed bill (S.26) requires states to allow voting in federal elections to be by mail without additional conditions or requirements, except a deadline for returning the ballot. States must mail ballots to individuals registered to vote in a federal election not later than two weeks before the election. The U.S. Postal Service must carry ballots mailed by a state expeditiously and free of postage. This bill authorizes automatic voter registration of individuals through state motor vehicle authorities.

By browsing related bills, one discovers the Vote by Mail Act of 2019 was introduced the same day in the House (H.R. 92 and H.R. 138). Over the course of the year other proposed bills to make voting easier starting in 2022 (mail-in, vote only from home, etc.) were also introduced. None of these bills has yet been passed; all were referred to committees. So while Democrats did introduce bills to make voting in federal elections by mail equitable across the country (since some states allow this while 28 others do not), they have not yet been successful in making it a law.

Nonetheless, Trump's statement is accurate regarding bills for universal mail-in voting being introduced the first day Nancy Pelosi resumed her role as Speaker of the House. Public records support the claim that Democrats sought to nationalize vote by mail. But they never became law.

To verify Trump's claim that Democrats also sought to eliminate voter ID requires reading the text of the bill. Here is the relevant section from H.R.

"If an individual in a State is eligible to cast a vote in an election for Federal office, the State may not impose any additional conditions or requirements on the eligibility of the individual to cast the vote in such election by mail, except to the extent that the State imposes a deadline for requesting the ballot and related voting materials from the appropriate State or local election official and for returning the ballot to the appropriate State or local election official."

The phrase to pay attention to is "eligible to cast a vote." Nothing is said specifically about checking voter ID. It certainly may not by concluded that the bill intends to abolish ID verification, otherwise it would have to say it. As it stands, states do require verification of voter ID, known as "safeguards."

This from FactCheck.org: "There are ‘safeguards’: Trump wrongly claimed there were “no safeguards” used by states to check the identity of voters."

Assessing Trump's claim

This article has examined only one claim pulled from a 46 minute speech. Other fact checking services such as FactCheck.org have written about the speech more comprehensively. What this investigation has found is that Trump made a statement containing both accurate and inaccurate information. The accurate part can be described as who, what and when and is easily verified. The 'why' is left as an unverified assumption. The ommision qualifies as misinformation, but what kind?

Unable to 'read' Trump's mind, it is impossible to say whether he intended to include inaccurate information in his statement and why. But it is there. Unless he admits to a deliberate lie, or not knowing all the facts, or professes a desire to prevent people from voting (voter suppression), the best we can say is he promoted a dream. There is no evidence to back it up. But because there is evidence to prove it didn't happen, it is a lie whether he meant it that way or not.

Questions to ponder

The reader is left with a few questions for self-examination:

• Do you believe everything you read or hear?
• How do you know when you are not being told the truth?
• Do you take time to fact check information or read analyses published by non-partisan fact checkers?
• Do you pass along information that has not been fact checked?

 

 

 

For more on Fact Checking: Information Fluency

Twitter fooled by Fake Candidate

A few election cycles ago, there was the story of Susie Flynn running for President. It was a hoax published by a media company to attract attention. It made for a pretty good fact checking evaluation challenge. Here's an archived reminder of the story.

In today's news is a story about a 17-year old who fabricated a Senate candidate named Andrew Walz and managed to get Twitter to verify the fake as legitimate.  Here's some of the story from CNN:

"Earlier this month, Walz's account received a coveted blue check mark from Twitter as part of the company's broader push to verify the authenticity of many Senate, House and gubernatorial candidates currently running for office. Twitter has framed this effort as key to helping Americans find reliable information about politicians in the lead up to the 2020 election."

Not until the 17-year old's parents came forward with the story did anyone notice the problem.

One takeaway is that if a bored teen can exploit Twitter's election integrity efforts, what else is that publisher missing?

We are foolish if we allow others to think for us, assuring us what to believe, what to trust. There is really no substitute for honing our skills and taking time to do our own vetting.

The story of Andrew Walz is another wake up call to practice fact checking.  What details in Andrew Walz's campaign can't be verified? Post your answers below.

More on fact checking here.

What can't Google do for you?

We already know Google is wildly popular, the go-to search engine for most students and a disruptive innovator in search technology.

But it can't do everything.

There are many times a non-trivial question arises and Google is not the right tool. It's fine for most easy searches, but when the information needed is more complex or you can't think of the right keywords to use, Google hits a wall.

At times like these, having information fluency skills is essential. Searching may require a different, specialized search engine. Knowing how to learn to use an unfamiliar search engine is highly important. So are investigative skills to check out questionable news. Google is not your one stop shop for all that.

Finding specialized research articles is one example. The first of the three free Internet Search Challenges is one of those.

If you have your own example of a time when Google was not the answer, feel free to share it here.

Fact Checking Refresher

When and where did this occur?

Fact checking is in the news a lot these days because of fake news. Concurrent with the US midterm elections this fall, fake news is anticipated to increase, attempting to confuse voters about facts.

Warnings abound, for instance this article from Axios: Fake News 2.0: The propaganda war gets sophisticated.

Here are a few points from the article:

"Bad actors are looking to mimic more normal communications, instead of spewing bright commentary that could get them flagged for spreading hate or violence."

"Language and behaviors are becoming a lot more sophisticated and human-like to avoid detection."

"The new trend is bad actors taking advantage of existing polarization to manipulate groups of real people, as opposed to creating or pretending to be groups of people."

If deliberate deception is ever-evolving to be less obvious, fake news (not just what Trump calls fake news) will be all the harder to detect.

Fact checking is really the only remedy unless 1) your mind is already made up (you are polarized) and 2) you stay off the Web.

Let's assume there are still consumers of information whose minds aren't locked down and who venture online to be informed. How do they avoid consuming fake news?

Fact Check This

"FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead of Apparent Murder-Suicide." This was a headline and story picked up by Facebook during the 2016 Presidential Campaign. (Pew Researchers recently reported that 62 percent of American adults get their news from social media, in particular, Facebook: close to two-thirds of Facebook users get news from the platform. So this story wasn't trivial.)

Fact checking involves looking for proper nouns, claims, images, dates and numbers that may easily be investigated.

One could start with the the source: The Denver Guardian. It sounds real but the Denver Guardian does not exist except in fiction. The Website was launched in July of 2016 and most of it was unfinished at the time the article appeared. Immediately the story loses credibility.

From the content of the story, other facts are waiting to be checked. For example, a reference that credits TV news station WHAG-TV with coverage of the story. Examination of that station's site reveals no coverage, another red flag. 

The image of a burning house in the Denver Guardian first appeared on Flickr in 2010. Drag the image above into Google Image Search and look for matches (excuse the pun). What do you find?

Fake news is not limited to a few inaccuracies: they abound.

Next time you read something with potential consequences, take a moment to fact check it out.

Finding and Fact-checking Information

Here is the third and final free preview in this series of WSI (Website Investigator) tutorials. The Fact Checking tutorial is a useful how-to for finding embedded info to evaluate.

Much has been said about information in a post-truth age. To some extent, truth is what you want to believe. However, there may be solid reasons to back up that belief, or none at all. When the information has value to pass along, it's a good idea to make sure the facts about it are consistent. Otherwise you risk looking like a fool, which unfortunately still has a tendency to mar one's reputation.

Consider an annual subscription to the entire Information Fluency site. All your students can access the WSI cases plus many more helpful resources for one calendar year. More info.

Personal Filters

On the 21st Century Information Fluency page last month, I posted this question:

What do you do to determine if news is fake? Share a tip.

The responses were all sound:

• (be wary of a site that) Doesn't provide reliable sources for the information or credentials of the author; if its intent is to elicit strong emotion.
• Consider/evaluate source and compare.
• Find multiple sources and compare.
• Use common sense and previous knowledge and experience. If it seems very strange check, double check snd triple check before accepting!
• Consult fact checking sites like Snopes or Fact-check.org
• Check to see who owns the site.

The tips fall into two types: evaluation methods and monitoring one's reaction to the news. Because it's internalized, the personal sniff test is the fast alternative and may suffer from subjectivity.

One of the problems in getting people of any age to fact check and source check is that it is time consuming. It requires secondary or investigative searching to research other sources of information in order to establish consistency and trust. Unless the stakes are high (risk is involved), I tend not to do it.

That leaves personal filters, which may seem pretty reliable depending on one's experience. Of course the younger you are, the less personal knowledge you have to rely on. Trusting what others say starts early, unless you were raised by wolves or the fear of them.

So let's say we assemble five individuals at random and expose them to some information. Are their reactions, informed by their personal filters, all going to be the same?  You can imagine the possibilities: one sees a conspiracy theory, one can take it or leave it, another becomes agitated, another is mollified and the last person has no memory of what they just read. Who's right? Everyone is, in their own eyes.

Personal filters can go dangerously awry, which is why it could be in the best interest of all to have a conversation or at least listen in to such conversations. One-sided truth seems to be a thing nowadays. 

Faked news is someone's one-sided truth. We might all benefit by sharing and listening before putting too much faith in our personal filters. When that's not possible, there is always fact and source checking.

Spring 18 Full Circle Kit now available

The newest edition of the 21st Century Information Fluency Full Circle Kit focuses on Fact Checking.

This is part three of three in a series on Investigative Searching. Access to the Kit requires an annual membership.

All Kits

Spring '18 Contents

Feature Article: Fake News, Part Three

Researchers at MIT recently published their findings about the spread of false news on Twitter. There is still no substitute for investigative searching. 

Action Zone: Fact Checking Challenge

This Level 3 challenge may be used with the Assessment guide to check students' understanding of fact checking.

Curriculum: Mini Lessons

Using two Websites about fake news to create mini lessons on fake news and fact checking.

Assessment: Fact Checking and Secondary Searching

Five items to measure how well students know when to Fact Checking and how.

Reacting to Fake News

Fake news may have started as a joke, but it quietly became a trusted news contender in 2016.

Saturday Night Live, the Onion and even Snopes have produced fake news for some time. In the context of SNL and the Onion, it's rather easy to detect the fake. When it comes to Snopes, it's harder because they are all about checking facts to debunk fake stories. Yet they've created their own fakes from time to time to keep readers from becoming overly reliant on what the publishers of Snopes say is true.

Here's one example:

The Mississippi state legislature removed fractions and decimal points from the mathematics curriculum of public secondary schools.

It's not true. But if Snopes says it's true, it must be factual, right? Wrong. Snopes maintains a section of its site for "The Repository of Lost Legends" (TRoLL for short). See http://www.snopes.com/lost/lost.asp. One way to tell it's a fake is to check out a link at the bottom of the article: More information about this page. It's very subtle.

If this story appeared on Facebook, how many readers would take it for a fact? There would not likely be anything labeling it as fake news. 

Fact checking is the only personal solution to avoid being fooled or the victim of a scam.

In the Snopes article, these are just a sample of facts to investigate. 

1. 13 August 1999.  First of all, this is an old date, so it doesn't seem relevant any longer. If a person investigated 13 August 1999 and other major keywords from the story, Mississippi fractions, these results would appear:
• The original Snopes article
• A reprint of the Snopes article claiming the story to be true because it was in Snopes; look at the comments: people are skeptical but not misbelieving.  (more than one reprint that offers the story as true)
• An article that claims Snopes is lying 
• Nothing from Mississippi government
2. There are also many Proper nouns in the fake article that are worth checking out. Here are two:
• senator Cassius de Spain
• Judith Sutpen, chairperson of the Mississippi Senate Education committee

There is no record of Judith Sutpen as a chairperson of the Mississippi Senate Education committee. The closest coincidence is that she is a character in "Absalom Absalom!" by William Faulkner.  Cassius de Spain is also a character in the same book. A method for coming up with names is starting to emerge--I'd bet Cora Tull and John Sartoris may also be Faulker characters. Suddenly, the story seems manufactured.

Of course, one could also check Mississippi laws.

But it's way easier to react to news like this than to fact check it:

• "It is true and sad, http://www.snopes.com/lost/fraction.htm "
• "The scariest thing about this post is that I still haven't decided if it's satire or not. "
• "wow people are idiots."
• "You know, I could see changing the age at which fractions are taught if it was discovered that a thirteen-year-old understood them more easily than a ten-year-old (or for that matter, a six-year-old faster than a ten-year-old), but I thought the emphasis was supposed to be on more education, not less?"

 And so on.
    

Satanize Me?

A report of a secret McDonald's menu is going around the Internet. I learned of it today thanks to this DIGG post:

McDonald's Has A Secret Menu And Other Facts link

Digg's source is Lucky Peach, where Lucas Peterson gives the details, along with photos, of secret menu items:

• Sausage Egg Big MacMuffin
• Mash Brown
• Blankets in a Blankets
• The McLuminati
• “Derrida-Style”
• General Ro’s Chicken
• Mommie Dearest
• The Burmese Python
• The Captain Nemo
• “Diorama-Style”
• Satanize Me!         

Short of walking in to your local McDonald's and asking for one of these menu variations (under your breath), how could you really know for sure if a secret menu does or does not exist? Maybe you don't mind if the counter person gives you a blank stare. Or laughs--I'm sure someone has already tried this.

After all, other fast food places have secret menus, why not McDonalds? 

One place to start is with the author. Lucas Peterson (If you want to make sure you get the right Lucas Peterson, include "Lucky Peach" in the query.) Top results are his Twitter page: https://twitter.com/lucaspeterson, another piece he wrote in Lucky Peace entitled, An Official Complaint Against Oriental Ramen, his LinkedIn page, where he lists his occupation as eater, Lucky Peach, LA Weekly, Serious Eats, Flaunt Magazine, Film/TV.  So we gather he is a public figure with an interest in food topics that can sometimes be humorous.

Another place to go is Lucky Peach. What kind of publication is this? From skimming results, it's a
"cult indie magazine founded by chef David Chang and writer Peter Meehan" [link] about all things food. It is a "quarterly journal of food and writing. each issue focuses on a single theme, and explores that theme through essays, art, photography, and recipes." [link]. The style of the magazine is ad-driven with loud cartoons and other attention-grabbing stuff. So an article about a secret menu fits in, although no claims are made whether it's true or not.

So, a writer that can be serious (at least at times) and a magazine that can be serious (at times) have paired up and released this story. Is this one of their not-serious moments?

The investigation returns to those customers who have tried this. They should be able to verify whether any of the creations bulleted above actually exist (I personally believe any McDonalds can deliver on Mash Brown). Where can you find these people, these witnesses?

Try Twitter.

A search for #secretmenu (guessing that's been used) turns up hits for secret menus submitted by members. Down the list is an entry by Lucky Peach with a picture of Sausage Egg Big MacMuffin, captioned: "We like to have a little fun sometimes, too!" Not quite definitive, but a sign the article is more fun than serious.

What other evidence can you find--without actually going in and muttering, "Satanize me?" (Note: I suggest not actually trying this. Keep in mind: McDonalds crew members read the Internet--they might actually comply-- in which case it doesn't have to be an official secret menu, but an underground one.)

Lies Around the World

It's always good to have lies online labeled. But most aren't.

Here's a website that showcases a number of Internet lies from what could normally be considered reputable sources. The content just doesn't stand up to fact checking. Looking at an author's reputation is not sufficient to determine credibility in these cases.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/opinion/sunday/the-lies-heard-round-the-world.html

If you are looking for some good examples to use with students on how to fact check, pick a couple from the list.

Information Fluency Doesn't Stop With Retrieval

Looking for a hallmark case of consuming unreliable information?

The company that NYC hired to clean up the ebola-infected apartment of a Dr. there turned out to be a scam. Here's a sample article from the Daily News: http://www.dailynews724.com/politics/how-new-york-city-hired-a-con-artist-to-clean-up-ebola-h309372.html

Once information is obtained, by retrieval, observation, word of mouth, etc., it's very tempting to treat it as reliable. In this case, the company's Chief Safety Officer surrounded himself with media to make it appear he was trustworthy.

It always pays to fact check.

How about googling the Chief Safety Officer's name and the name of the company?  Had someone queried

sal pane biorecovery

before the problems finally became public there wouldn't be a long history of the company. Yet Mr. Pane made the following claim: "For the past 27 years the company’s been around..."

The red flag that prompted suspicion came when officials identified Mr. Pane as a convicted felon. Another red flag: The company appears to have been in existence for 16 years.

Can you find more?

Fake Tweet Result of Phishing

As follow-up to the story yesterday about @AP's fake tweet, it has been reported that the hacked message came about an hour after company employees received an expertly-crafted, spear-phishing email.

Spear-phishing is getting harder to detect as successful practices inform future "phishes." What doesn't work is abandoned, reworked and the culprit becomes increasingly less suspicious.

It may come as a surprise or not, but 19% of spear-phishing attempts are successful. Someone in an organization takes the personalized bait and hands out secure information.

The effects of spear-phishing can be avoided by fact checking. I haven't seen a copy of the message received by AP employees yesterday. It would be interesting to see it and fact check it.

Can anyone find it?

Fact Checking Spam

Mayotte Islands

Well, spam is good for at least one thing.  Fact checking practice.

Most spam is easily spotted. There are a few types of letters that seem to get replicated. Two of the more popular are: you've been selected to receive some money, or I need some money...  Usually I delete them without much thought, except to wonder why my spam filter lets them through.

In the the "you've been selected" category, I got this today:

From: Mr. Ban Ki-moon

Subject: ONLINE NOTICE!!!!

United Nations has deposited the sum of $10,500,000.00 USD to western union, which is to be shared among you and other 7 Email users.You are entitled to $1,500,000.00 USD in the on-going united nations poverty alleviation program. Please send your Name,Address & Phone Number, email ID:

to union payment center via email (unionpayment768@sify.com) to apply for your payment.Or call Mr. David Young @ +60166561422 for more inquiries on the above message.

Regards,

Mr. Ban Ki-moon

Secretary-General (UNITED NATIONS) ©.http://www.un.org/sg/biography.shtml

Cool. I could use 1.5 M. This email screams "hit delete." Yet it's a real goldmine for fact checking and believability:

• Ban Ki-moon - yes, he is Secretary-General of the United Nations (but why is he writing to me?)
• info@diaockhanglinh.com.vn - (a Vietnamese real estate website?);
• ONLINE NOTICE!!!! (not the message you'd expect if you actually won the money);
• $10,500,000 USD - too much to be believable?
• "you and other 7" - Mr. Ban Ki-moon needs some help with English (or maybe he types as well as Illinois' former governor);
• $1,500,000 - a nice sum and it is one-seventh of 10.5 M, but remember, there are supposedly 8 winners (seven others plus me) so this doesn't add up;
• Please send your Name, Address & Phone Number, email ID - (stranger danger!)
• union payment768@sify.com - check it out: sify.com has no believable connection to a payment (payout) center;
• +60166561422 - what are the chances this is a real phone number? International code 6-Argentina? 60-Germany? 601-Mayotte Isl? (off the east coast of Africa); for no particular reason, I vote for Mayotte;
• ©.http://www.un.org/sg/biography.shtml - not sure about the copyright symbol, but this is Ban Ki-moon's biographical page. Nice try.

So many inaccuracies; so many things don't add up. It makes for good fact checking practice.

I've left two juicy fact checking "facts" untouched. Can you find them?

Investigate before you pass it along

Thanks to my beautiful spouse, here's an excellent example of the benefits of a little fact-checking.

Unfortunately, the person who "passed along" the email encouraging my wife to consider the views of Harvard Historian David Kaiser didn't fact check it first.

The tag line reads: "By passing this along, perhaps it will help to begin the awakening of Americans to where we are headed." Perhaps you also received this from a friend or relative.

The preface to the article (which can be described as anti-Obama) includes a lot of objective facts:

David Kaiser is a respected historian whose published works have covered a broad range of topics, from European Warfare to American League Baseball. Born in 1947, the son of a diplomat, Kaiser spent his childhood in three capital cities: Washington D.C., Albany, New York , and Dakar , Senegal ... He attended Harvard University, graduating there in 1969 with a B.A. in history. He then spent several years more at Harvard, gaining a PhD in history, which he obtained in 1976.. He served in the Army Reserve from 1970 to 1976.

He is a professor in the Strategy and Policy Department of the United States Naval War College . He has previously taught at Carnegie Mellon, Williams College and Harvard University. Kaiser's latest book, The Road to Dallas, about the Kennedy assassination, was just published by HarvardUniversityPress.

The article is a poster child for bias and doesn't seem to be written by a person with such impeccable credentials. That red flag prompted my wife to do some fact checking. She found the claims about David Kaiser listed above to be accurate. She also found his blog at http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/.

Scanning the prose in the blog didn't seem to match the type of content in the email. But it was the ABOUT ME section that is most revealing:

The email circulating widely attributed to me comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler is a forgery: see snopes.com/politics/soapbox/proportions.asp. 

While the email attempted to provide indisputable authorship information, it was a forgery. Two minutes worth of investigation is all the effort it took. The big step was the motivation to fact check rather than just read, believe and forward it to someone else.

Passing along that email didn't quite have the desired result.

News without all the Facts

Today my daily Google Alert on Medical Breakthroughs brought this article to my attention:

Medical Breakthrough Bringing New Hope To MS Patients

Drug Showing Promising Results

I'm interested in this topic since a friend's daughter suffers from MS. But the article is light on facts. In particular, what may be the most important fact is missing. What is the name of the drug?

This article surely is a retelling of the original release about the drug, so hopefully a quick fact-check query will turn up the missing facts. This turns out to be the case.

Fact-checking, about which I've blogged numerous times, starts by taking a fact or two from a derivative article and follows it to its source.

My query was: Gabriel Pardo OMRF drug. Two of these are the preferred type of fact-checking keywords: proper nouns; both were taken from the koco.com article cited above. In case there were a lot of articles about Pardo and OMRF I added the less powerful term 'drug' since that's the word I'm hoping to replace with another proper noun.

This is a good search to demonstrate how ideal queries proceed from less to more specific.

Let's hope the new drug continues to show promising results.

Do you believe everything you read?

Here's a good opportunity to put the Baloney Detection Kit (and fact checking) to work:

According to Denver's ABC news affiliate,

"This year, one in six men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer but 207,000 women will hear, 'You have breast cancer.' Furthermore, 63 percent of women will find out they have ovarian cancer after it has spread."

Before accepting these numbers as credible, it would be a good idea to check the facts. This is something most students don't do. Let's see how it would play out if they cited the article without trying to verify the facts.

Let's start with "one in six men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer." That should be easy to check. Query: prostate cancer rate

First hit: American Cancer Society: "About 1 man in 6 will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during his lifetime."

Second hit: National Cancer Institute: "Based on rates from 2006-2008, 16.48% of men born today will be diagnosed with cancer of the prostate at some time during their lifetime." That's about 1 in 6.

It appears Channel 7 got one fact right (1 in 6) and one fact wrong ('this year,' as opposed to a 'lifetime').  If you skim the comments at the bottom of Channel 7's article, one reader states exactly the same thing.

So, while the source seems credible (ABC News affiliate), other sources do not verify the first set of numbers. The student who cites this has inaccurate facts.

What about the other numbers?  What do your students find?

US Airlines

Here's a scam that has been around a while that shows the value of fact checking. It could be a good lesson to use with middle school learners or older.

The scam starts when a letter arrives at your house. I would provide a copy for the students. Here's a link with a scanned copy of the letter I received, with some personal information blocked out. If you duplicate the letter, you may want to take out my information altogether and replace it with something more personal for the students.

There are three parts to the mailer: the cover of the envelope, the award notification instructions and a check issued for $1,400.

Before you do any searching online, ask the students to evaluate the credibility of the award letter. "Based on what you see here, is there a good enough reason for Carl to call the 800 number?"  A number of potential Red Flags can be spotted, including no return address, the check is made out to US Airlines and there's a deadline to respond.

Using the Baloney Detection Kit (BDK) questions, students could identify questions that would be good to ask in evaluating the truthfulness of the letter's claims.  For example, Number 4 pops out: "is this the way the world works (does the offer sound too good to be true)?" Well, sometimes there are contests with pretty good prizes and I may have entered something unawares, so that question alone isn't quite enough to convince me it's not a bonafide offer.

Number five, on the other hand, is a better question. I must not be the only person to get a letter like this. I wonder if someone has already looked into this. Maybe someone else called the 800 number, has written about it online and will save me the trouble.

This requires fact checking.

Even without looking for other opinions about the letter, there are significant clues to query. This is where students may have problems, since they don't seem to have a good grasp as to what makes a powerful fact checking query. See what keywords they suggest. The best keywords are US Airlines.  You could also select a phrase from the award notification and query that.

There is no company called US Airlines, however there are plenty of results for US airlines (not a proper noun), so students have to read the search results to tell the difference.

As part of the results, there are plenty of US Airlines scam results. Here's where you will find the answer to BDK #5. These are good to skim -- you will find scanned copies of other peoples' letters, along with descriptions of what happened when they called the 800 number. Unlike most of the letters cited, mine was machine addressed--not hand written--the signature on the check is a different name and the 800 number is different. But the form of the letter is 95% the same.

Students need to encounter real examples of incredible information that will eventually reach their front door. Best to be prepared with good questions and the ability to fact check.

In the News: Beatless Heart

News stories make good Search Challenges.

Public awareness and curiosity about stories in the news are good drivers for searching and evaluation. I first heard about the "beatless heart" on public radio and then yesterday a number of high profile news sites carried the story.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/06/15/researchers-create-the-first-pulseless-artificial-heart/
The first "beatless" heart experiments were done on a calf whose heart was removed and replaced with two centrifugal pumps.

Here are a few search challenges that can be spun off of the story.

1. Name the doctors who led this research (easy, except if you require the doctors' initials)

2. Find the name of the calf who received the first beatless heart (easily found in a fact-checking query)

3. How long did the calf live with her new beatless heart? (harder, requires searching the right database and skimming contents)

Of course I had to do some investigation to discover the questions and answers--but that was fun. Usually facts (or missing details) in the articles are good springboards to search questions.

Post your answers in comments.

Earthquake Challenge

The tragedies in Japan triggered by the earthquake last Friday may have been much worse if national preparedness for such events was not a way of life in that country.

Effective building construction and earthquake drills put many people in better circumstances than they would have otherwise experienced. While the death toll continues to rise and our thoughts go out to the people affected, we can also learn from this how better to be prepared ourselves.

Several years ago we created an Earthquake Challenge to test searchers' abilities to select the best keywords for finding this information:

Which toy demonstrates a construction principle that can reduce damage from an earthquake?

It's not a very difficult challenge since all the information needed is in the question

So what happens if you query the question "as is" (not eliminating any words)? The first two returns in Google are from Answer.com. Interestingly, a lot of Internet Search Challenge questions have been posted in Answers.com. Like most of them, the answer to this challenge is incorrect (sorry, Legos is not the name of the toy).
The next result is the original article I wrote introducing the Earthquake Challenge. It also does not contain the solution.

Down the page is a link to a patent page for a device that is "an object protection system." The page references a trampoline toy that is "a prior art." Patents have to disclose artifacts that may be considered similar to new inventions. This is not the answer.

Another result, this one from Blurtit.com quotes the question verbatim and provides another incorrect answer: "Toys can be perfectly used as models that can reduce damage from earthquake." Too general.
Life123.com has the same incorrect answer to the question as Answers.com. Makes you wonder where Life123.com gets their information.

What's going on?

With improvements to search engines I thought it would become easier and easier to locate a correct answer without having to decide which keywords to use. This is not yet the case.

Not until you start to eliminate extraneous keywords will the result start to show up.

If you are looking for an information fluency challenge that ties in with recent news, the earthquake challenge offers both. You can make the following points:

• it is possible, using the right construction principles, to prevent damage from earthquakes;
• just because you can find an answer to the question online doesn't mean the answer is correct (it takes fact-checking);
• choosing a limited number of keywords rather than querying a whole question is a more powerful way to search;
• if you use this challenge in a science class, you could explore why the principles seen modeled in the toy are effective in reducing damage caused by earthquake forces.

While I'm not the one responsible for the wrong answers that are posted online, I ask that you don't fix these. It makes a much better lesson with inaccurate information floating in the stream.

P.S. I changed the wording of the question today, so the challenge you see online differs from the question shown above.