Is it real or is it fake? A roadmap for becoming a wise consumer of news

The video posted by a Facebook friend was alarming. It depicted one of the leading student activists from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School spewing invectives and profanity. The video’s bumps and flashes exposed an obvious attempt at counterfeit. It was so poorly altered, in fact, that I assumed my friend was sharing it as an example of the lengths some would go to defame the MSD students who are rallying for stronger gun control measures.

 I was wrong. The commentary my friend added to his post revealed he had himself been fooled. He was outraged by what he saw and thought the rest of us should be, too.

What he didn’t realize was he was elevating something manufactured to the ranks of “truth” by sharing it with his hundreds of followers. My friend is a respected businessman. His view of the truth can be persuasive, especially among those who know him well enough to be a member of his social media universe.

And so goes the viral, toxic life of fake or “junk” news. Disinformation has become so ubiquitous you would think the degree of alarm would be proportionate to its commonality. Instead, what seems to be proportionate is gullibility.

Research is accelerating to explain why the disease of fake news has become rampant, but the avalanche of new tactics and the evolving responses of citizens make it difficult to stay ahead of this dangerous trend.

Fake news is not just what the Russians feed into our social media network to influence the way we vote, or the wild stories that shadow companies crank out as clickbait. The term can be used as a political bludgeon to discredit critics or to push off unflattering information. “Fake news!” has become a ritualistic mantra.

Mercenary algorithms designed to sell advertising are now used to target you for news feeds that play on your beliefs. Hyper-partisan websites spin stories to appeal to your biases. As recently reported in a series on PBS, one cunning purveyor of fake news produced both truthexaminer.com for extreme liberals and truthmonitor.com for staunch conservatives. The sites were mirror images of each other; the same stories presented with very different sets of “facts” — mostly not factual at all.

Research has shown that because sites like these attract readers already thinking along those lines, the falsehoods have resonance. Not only do you believe them, but you pass them on to Facebook friends and Twitter followers and help them become viral. 

“To be wise about fake news, you have to understand our natural weaknesses,” says Frank Waddell, assistant professor of journalism and fake news researcher at the University of Florida.

“We have a tendency to believe what we are told. This is called truth bias. We also have a tendency to seek out information that supports our prior beliefs. This is called confirmation bias. Finally, we only have so much time and energy to think critically. This makes us rely upon truth bias and confirmation bias the majority of the time.”

Fake news exploits truth bias. We believe what we want to be true, often without making any attempt to confirm that it is true. This is especially tempting when the falsehood is spun from a thread of fact, yet woven into something that grossly misrepresents the reality.

Fake news is as old as the country itself. It has continued unabated throughout the decades, but has become pervasive in the last few years. In the good old days, newspapers and TV stations were the arbiters of truth. These gatekeepers didn’t always get it right, but at least we knew who to blame and where to find them if their information turned out to be wrong.

Today, those who are intentionally and forcefully getting it wrong are hiding in the shadows of cyber world.

And their stories tend to spread faster than “straight” news, according to MIT researcher Soroush Vosoughi, who analyzed 12 years of tweets on Twitter and discovered fake news stories had much greater velocity and breadth than factual stories. That’s true in large part because the fictional ones are often more salacious and compelling.

Facebook, Google and Twitter tell us they are taking steps to slow the spread of this disease, but it will take a band of soldiers of truth at foundations and universities to find meaningful solutions to both the spread of misinformation and the resulting impact on trust in the media and platforms we rely on for news and information.

In October, the University of Florida announced that it would provide $1.25 million to launch the Consortium on Trust in Media and Technology, which will  bring together technologists and social scientists – working in areas such as communications, engineering, anthropology, psychology, information sciences, political science and law – to develop creative solutions to restoring trust and stemming the flow of false and misleading information.

In the meantime, here are some steps you can take to protect yourself from being fooled:

Get to know the source

Take a close look at the address of the sender or the originating website. Do you recognize it as a reliable source? Do a Google search and see what comes up. If it is a site that routinely posts fake news, that is likely to be reported.

Even when the source is not manufacturing outlandish fiction, it might be spinning reality to sell a certain point of view. You are better served by trusted professional news organizations that follow an ethical code, as opposed to providers advancing a particular agenda with no regard for journalistic standards and practices.

Consult with fact-checking sites like Snopes.com, FactCheck.org and Politifact.com. More such services are emerging and offer a good way to double-check something if you sense it might not be true.

Separate news from opinion

Admittedly, the traditional media have done a poor job of making it clear whether an article is news or opinion. Now the missions of information providers are murkier than ever. Professional journalists, who hold themselves accountable to a higher standard of impartiality, are painstaking about sticking with the facts and using quotations marks to indicate when a statement is being made by someone with a point of view. Certain pundits, bloggers and cable TV hosts, on the other hand, are typically out to entertain and agitate. If you have trouble telling the difference, go to americanpressinstitute.org/publications/good-questions/news-opinion-rebecca-iannucci/.

Push for more access

The best way to determine authenticity is to have access to information that enables you to be your own reporter. Frank LoMonte, director of the Brechner Center for Freedom of Information at the University of Florida, puts it well:

“What is the antidote to fake news? The answer is pushing verifiable truthful information out to the public so no one has to take anyone else’s word for anything. It is easy for me to start a rumor that the Legislature is about to put people in internment camps by posting a fake post to Facebook. The antidote is to put all legislative meetings on the web, on camera, so people can say, ‘I watched that meeting with my own two eyes and here’s the link to it, and I can prove to you that it is false.’”

Don’t take someone else’s word for it

Just because someone calls it fake news doesn’t mean it is. In fact, if a politician waves off an unflattering news story as “fake news,” that should sound an alarm in your head.

And just because someone is a good friend doesn’t mean they are infallible and what they are forwarding to you with multiple exclamation points is true. It could be nothing more than what they want to believe.

To thine own self be true

Consider your own predispositions and whether you reinforce them by seeking sources of information that advance your biases. We all have them, but we do too little soul-searching to determine the extent to which we are willing to buy into exaggerations and outright lies that reassure us we’re on the right track when, in fact, we could be blindly going down a dangerous road.

“Awareness of fake news gullibility inoculates consumers to future attempts and builds up fake news sensitivity,” Waddell says.

In the case of my friend who posted the video of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas student, both his reactions and mine were influenced by point of view. I was guilty of hero-worshipping the student, so I would naturally question anything depicting a lack of integrity on his part. My friend, on the other hand, tends to be a Second Amendment purist, so he might be prone to believe the student activities are wrong-headed, and therefore capable of bad behavior. 

For all of us, it is important that we consider our own emotions and take the time to check things out when they seem too good — or too bad — to be true. Our country's future, and perhaps our own sanity, depend on it.

Diane McFarlin is dean of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.