Coronavirus Fake News

China Coronavirus

When life gets scary, it's important to think twice about information.


The outbreak of the coronavirus is a good example. As the numbers of people affected and dying grows daily, the amount of misinformation surrounding the outbreak expands globally. Some of the information is considered misleading and unhealthy.

News reports have begun to circulate stories about fake news and the coronavirus. This presents a ripe opportunity to use information fluency to identify fake news claims.

Many people are attracted to a possible solution known as Master Mineral Solution (aka Miracle Mineral Solution or MMS). Here's a sample copied from the testimonial page:

I was teaching a class and all of the sudden, I got a head cold ... This rushed on me like a freight train! I was miserable until evening, then I thought I would take a mega-dose of CDS that I had in the fridge. I just poared some in a glass, added some water to it, and down the hatch! I guess now, it was equal to a 6 drop dose of MMS. Within, say, 2 or 3 minutes, the "cold" left like the wind blowing a raincloud away. Clear as a bell!

Before you go online to place an order--this is also touted as a cure for coronavirus--do some fact checking. 

Try an investigative query like Miracle Mineral Solution coronavirus. Then examine the results:

• Are they positive or negative?
• Who is the publisher?

A summary of the results for the first ten results from this search in Google shows that none of the sources have positive things to say about MMS, using words like "bleach," "QANON," "conspiracy theory," "dangerous," "toxic," "acute liver failure," "vomiting" and more. The sources include rollingstone.com, thedailybeast.com, salon.com, vice.com, businessinsider.com, nypost.com, nymag.com, armstrongmywire.com and inews.co.uk.  These aren't necessarily considered authorities on health issues. But the preponderance of negativity regarding MMS raises a red flag.

Now, if we had confirmation of such claims from a recognized authority, that might convince us not to try MMS. So another query is tried, taking one of the keywords commonly found in the first results: medical authority coronavirus bleach.

The first result includes this information in the snippet (abstract): "But medical authorities, including the US Food and Drugs Administration, have ..."  This invites further reading. Browsing the article, clicking links on the FDA-related information, leads to this page on the fda site: 

FDA warns consumers about the dangerous and potentially life threatening side effects of Miracle Mineral Solution

Here is another Red Flag. If you have students, see what other medical authorities they can find.

US students fall short in 'fake news' digital literacy tasks

Finnish sources recently shared the results of a study at an international school in which students "significantly outperformed U.S. students on tasks which measure digital literacy in social media and online news." source

The study suggests the differences are due to the way the Finnish curricula facilitates students' critical thinking skills, compared to the US.  In the Finnish International Baccalaureate school, critical thinking skills are taught explicitly in dedicated courses as well as the more traditional core subjects. In the US, critical thinking instruction occurs implicitly into subject coursework. For example, a course called Theory of Knowledge is aimed at developing critical thinking skills. Other courses extend this development in subject matter areas.

One takeaway from this study is the benefits to students who receive explicit instruction in critical thinking throughout the curriculum. Stanford University researchers, upon whose work this research is based, has labeled US students' abilities to discern fake news 'dismaying' and 'bleak.' 

Programs for facilitating critical thinking, when it comes to fake news, are available on sites such as Information Fluency. What is needed is the will of educational leaders to dedicate space in curriculum and instruction to their application.

Here are just a few of the resources that are available around which to design a course or embed in traditional subject matter:

15 Challenges (includes 8 Challenges on Investigative Searching/Thinking)
WSI (Website Investigator)
Author Tutorial (Investigative Searching/Thinking)
Publisher Tutorial
Bias Tutorial
Freshness Tutorial

The results of the study may be found in the April 2019 Journal of Research in International Education.

Locating Disinformation

Fragment of the cover of Disinformation,
a book by Ion Mihai Pacepa, ex-deputy 
chief of communist Romania’s foreign 
intelligence, and law professor 
Ronald J. Rychlak

Just finished reading a module produced for UNESCO to combat disinformation: Combatting disinformation and misinformationthrough Media and Information Literacy (MIL) by Magda Abu-Fadil.

It's a lesson that may be used by instructors over two 90 minute periods, divided this way: 1) theoretical (tools for detection) and 2) practical (fraudulent stories in the news and analysis).

The module doesn't state where to look for fraudulent news, just to use some examples from local news sources.

This raises the question, how does one find disinformation? It could take time to track down false news stories for the purposing of teaching.  Of course, not every story used for analysis doesn't need to be false; some should be legitimate (some absolutely need to be false).

When looking for examples of articles to fact check, I've queried fake news examples. This actually works pretty well, but the examples tend to be older. Finding something fresh and false requires some luck.

Fresh means resorting to news feeds. Here are some examples. Facebook was a source of disinformation in the 2016 election cycle. They are bound to be more diligent in 2018. So where would you look as this campaign heats up?

Where are you likely to find disinformation?  Leave a comment.

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.

Evaluating the Publisher Preview

Here's a free preview of the Evaluate the Publisher tutorial that is part of the WSI (Website Investigator) package.

If you can't determine who the author is, consider the publisher. They own the site and this can tell you something about the contents: whether they are endorsed or not by a reputable publisher.

An annual subscription gives you and your students access to all Information Fluency resources for one calendar year. More info.

https://21cif.com/wsi/training/publisher.html

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.

98% Gullibility?

"Only 2 per cent of children and young people can tell if a news story is real or fake, according to a survey published today."

The survey is from the  All-Party Parliamentary Group on Literacy and the National Literacy Trust.

Read more here: https://www.tes.com/news/pupils-lack-literacy-skills-spot-fake-news 

For resources to help students identify Fake News, visit https://21cif.com/fullcircle/fall2017/index.php (requires an annual membership). Free resources, start here: https://21cif.com/tutorials/micro/index.php

Don't expect help in Infowars

Image Source: Fact Check Central

Yesterday's news about the subway attack in NYC is yet another example that you can't believe everything you read.

Read the article: When News Breaks, Google Still Can't Separate Rumor from Fact

The report, aside from being stockpiled with annoying full-page ads, points out that search algorithms designed to give people answers to their search questions still have a ways to go to filter out inaccuracies:

This trend has resulted in repeated embarrassment for Google, as its apparently authoritative answers have at times affirmed that the Earth is flat, women are evil, and four U.S. presidents had been members of the Ku Klux Klan (none of which are demonstrably true). It also once answered the query “is obama planning a coup” with information from a conspiracy site claiming that Obama was planning to seize power after his term came to an end.

There still is no substitute for personal responsibility as a (re)searcher. Gullibility lives in the fast lane of increasingly speedier computers, servers and results. Having no evaluation strategy is widespread: the democratization of irresponsibility.

There are plenty of ways to fix this. Start by understanding how to fact check.

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.
    

Facts Matter

I recently updated a 21cif MicroModule on Evidence that got me thinking about recent elections in the US. What role did facts actually play?

Election outcomes don't boil down to just a few factors. Not everyone who voted one way or the other did so without weighing pros and cons. In all probability there could have been cases where a vote was cast knowing something about that candidate wasn't 100% satisfactory. For some, evidence to back up claims was critical; for others, not so much.

Throw into this mix Fake News. Titles that appeared include these:

“Twitter, Google and Facebook are burying the FBI criminal investigation of Clinton.”
“Donald Trump Protester Speaks Out: ‘I Was Paid $3,500 To Protest Trump’s Rally.'”
"FBI AGENT SUSPECTED IN HILLARY EMAIL LEAKS FOUND DEAD IN APPARENT MURDER-SUICIDE."
“Remember the voting days: Republicans vote on Tuesday, 11/8 and Democrats vote on Wednesday, 11/9”
“Just out according to @CNN: “Utah officials report voting machine problems across entire country.”

Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/11/did-fake-news-on-facebook-send-trump-to-the-white-house/

Whereas none of the headlines can be supported with evidence, did they reinforce or sway voters? Perhaps.

Without evidence, believing something is true gives all the control to the news source.

"If you don't look for evidence you blindly place all your trust in the alleged accuracy of a source. How do you know they are right?"

(Source: http://21cif.com//tutorials/micro/mm/evidence/index.php)

Here's a helpful open source document on evaluating Fake News sites, thanks to Melissa Zimdars: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10eA5-mCZLSS4MQY5QGb5ewC3VAL6pLkT53V_81ZyitM/preview

She lists 11 tips:

• Three involve checking the URL of the news source. 
• Three are about lack of author or publisher attribution. 
• Two are about checking other, known sources. 
• One is about the effects of biased writing creating an emotional response. 
• One is about formatting (pay attention to ALL CAPS)
• One is about content that encourages bad Internet etiquette.

Can you think of others? These are worth putting into practice unless you don't think facts matter any more.