Tag Archives: myths

An App for Good Being Derailed by An Ugly Rumor

A woman is hidden by the target she is holding up in front of her face.

It’s the latest example of a troubling pattern regarding social media apps, especially one designed to do good: a phone-based app starts to become widely popular, especially with young people, but then becomes beset by rumors – all unfounded – that it’s a front for sex trafficking.

It happened in May 2016 to the social app Down To Lunch, in 2018 to IRL, a social app that helps users plan in-person meetups and, in 2021, to WalkSafe, an app designed to help women gauge the safety of neighborhoods. And now it’s happening to the Gas app, a tool that lets high schoolers send praise to one another.

As this article in the Washington Post points out:

Gas has never been linked to any form of human trafficking, and the app’s very structure makes it impossible, experts say. The app has limited features, doesn’t track users’ locations and can’t be used to message someone. It’s a basic polling platform that allows users to vote anonymously on preset compliments to send to mutual connections.

The false information that the app is somehow tricking children into being trafficked has ricocheted across the internet. Teenagers have posted videos on TikTok and Snapchat saying the app trafficks minors. Parents have warned other parents. On Oct. 31, the Piedmont, Oklahoma, police department issued a statement warning parents about the app and encouraging them to check their kids’ phones and the post received hundreds of shares on Facebook. The police ultimately issued a tepid retraction. The Oktaha Public School system in Oklahoma posted an announcement on its Facebook page on Thursday claiming the Gas app tricks students into giving away their locations. Local media also latched onto the hoax and shared it as the truth.

That a police department, a school district and a TV station shared such an obvious lie is outrageous. I wouldn’t be surprised if some nonprofits have as well.

How sad that this Tech4Good tool, one designed to encourage civility and positivity, is under attack by people spreading lies online.

Related resources:

Myths about sex trafficking abound in the USA.

Examples of Folklore, Rumors (or Rumours), Urban Myths & Organized Misinformation Campaigns Interfering with Development & Aid/Relief Efforts & Elections. (note there are several examples of mobs who have murdered strangers visiting their towns under the mistaken belief that such were there to abduct children for organ harvesting)

You have an obligation to be truthful online.

If you have benefited from this blog, my other blogs, or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help

We’ve all believed misinformation at some point

At some point, you have believed misinformation. You may bristle at the idea that you have ever fallen for a falsehood, but you have. Every person has. When you realize that you’re wrong, you probably just quietly, without any announcement, switched your stance, because it’s unlikely people around you knew that you thought something was true that wasn’t. If you cannot admit this, it’s going to be very hard for you to counter misinformation in, say, public health, because you will set yourself apart and above the majority of people.

I fell for misinformation about vaccines back in 2007, because of CNN broadcaster Larry King. I was living in Germany and I watched copious amounts of CNN International because it was one of only two-English language TV channels I had. One of the programs they showed was Larry King Live. I naively thought that people booked on his program were vetted. I assumed anyone who got on his show to talk about health, the environment, crime, whatever, had been screened, to make sure they really were appropriate to talk about those subjects, and that they had some sort of doctor or scientist they consulted to make sure someone wasn’t saying something dangerous on the show. So when Larry King hosted TV personality Jenny McCarthy and actress Holly Robinson Peete in 2007, talking about how they believed vaccines had caused their children to have autism, I believed what was being said. I didn’t say anything to anyone – at least I hope I didn’t – but the belief was there.

Then I stumbled onto the Bad Astronomy web site, a blog by scientist and skeptic Phil Plait – he probably got a shout out on fark.com and that’s how I started reading him. I started reading back issues of the blog and, low and behold, there was his thorough, merciless debunking of the myth that vaccines cause autism and his specific condemnation of Jenny McCarthy.

I will never forget reading his blog and realizing I had been duped. I literally stared at my computer screen, not moving, for at least a full minute. I was horrified. And then, I was angry.

Larry King had Jenny McCarthy on his show eight times. EIGHT TIMES. How many parents chose not to get their children vaccines because of that? How many children contracted preventable diseases because of that? How many children were permanently disabled or died because of that? It was then I realized what The New York Times later wrote in its obituary for King: “crackpot inventors, conspiracy theorists and spiritual mediums loved his show, which let them reach huge audiences without facing challenging questions.”

I wanted to link to Phil’s specific blogs that made me realize that I had been duped, but the site is pretty much defunct, and searches on the Internet Wayback Machine weren’t helpful. So, here’s a 2008 article he wrote for Discover Magazine that says much of what those blogs said, to my memory.

I share this story of being duped when I do trainings for international visitors through the State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program through World Oregon. And there is always a look of shock and incredulity. One person asked, “Aren’t you embarrassed to share this story?” Yes, I’m ashamed that I fell for something any sensible person now knows is nonsense. But it’s important to acknowledge that being duped can happen to anyone.

Knowing when you have been duped, and acknowledging it, even just to yourself, will help you better address misinformation in your own communications efforts – professional or otherwise.

Also see:

If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help

Updated: How Misinformation Can Derail Aid & Relief Efforts

There are lots of obstacles that can stand in the way of human, community and institutional development, aid and relief efforts, or government health initiatives, or even elections. But there is one obstacle that, until recently, rarely got discussed: widespread misunderstanding and myth-spreading.

Folklore, rumors (or rumours) and urban myths / urban legends, as well as organized misinformation campaigns and “fake news”, often interfere with relief and development activities, and government initiatives, including public health initiatives — even bringing such to a grinding halt. They also create ongoing misunderstandings among communities and cultures, prevent people from seeking help, encourage people to engage in unhealthy and even dangerous practices, cultivate mistrust of people and institutions, have even lead to mobs of people attacking someone or others for no reason other than something they heard from a friend of a friend of a friend, motivated legislators to introduce laws to address something that doesn’t exist, and influenced elections. And with the advent of social media like Twitter and Facebook, as well as just text messaging among cell phones, spreading misinformation is easier than ever.

Since 2004, I have been gathering and sharing both examples of this phenomenon, and compiling recommendations on preventing folklore, rumors and urban myths from interfering with development and aid/relief efforts and government initiatives. I do this research and entirely on my own, as a volunteer, with no funding from anyone. I update the information as my free time allows – and time has allowed such.

Once upon a time, I had wanted it to be the topic of my Master’s Degree thesis, but back in 2004, I couldn’t get an agency to go on record to tell their story. The few representatives of organizations that I talked to didn’t want to give any attention to the misinformation campaigns that were targeting them. With the advent of social media and the proliferation of misinformation, government agencies and nonprofits are scrambling to address rumors before they get out of hand – and before people are killed as a result. For instance, in 2017, in India, in the southern state of Telangana, videos were circulated among villagers that had been staged or edited in a particular way and claimed to show children being abducted by a criminal gang were circulated in more than 400 villages in the southern Indian state of Telangana via WhatsApp and an Indian messaging service called ShareChat. These videos claimed that the children were being abducted in order to harvest their organs. The claims in these videos were completely false. But because so many people believed what they saw in these videos, people stopped going out of night, several completely innocent people were attacked by mobs who accused them of being organ thieves, and at least 25 people were murdered – lynched – falsely accused of being a part of the gang. Here’s more about the consequences of such misinformation campaigns and how the situation in India was addressed.

Also see:

Scammers target those that care about soldiers, world affairs

Aid workers need to help local staff avoid scams 

You have an obligation to be truthful online

My voluntourism-related & ethics-related blogs (and how I define scam)

How to change minds

I’m a part of the March for Science Facebook group, for people that were in the Marches for Science all across the USA on April 2017 or that supported such. A lot of the talk on the group has been about science education and public relations. There are individuals and communities all over the USA – and the world – fighting against science-based decision making in public policies and science education in schools, and many on the group feel this is because of poor wording and poor outreach by scientists and those that support science regarding public relations. In my ongoing quest to be a better communicator, I’ve watched these discussions closely.

Recently, someone posted the following regarding how we communicate about science. I think it’s a great testimony regarding what works, and what doesn’t, regarding swaying public opinion, changing people’s minds and fighting misinformation. I’m sharing it here, with her permission, but without her name to protect her identity:

I’m not a scientist. I’m not afraid of science but I also don’t have a strong grasp of most science related jargon. I joined this group along with a few other science groups/pages as I heard more and more of anti-science rhetoric from our govt. Allthough I don’t understand a lot of scientific things that doesn’t mean I don’t realize the importance of science for our society and for our future.

I have learned SO MUCH from reading posts and comments. The reason I have learned so much? The reason I am no longer “afraid” of GMO’s? The reason I have changed my mind on other popular misconceptions? Because my fear was never the science. My fear was that I didn’t know what information to trust. Money talks. It’s hard to figure out who is paying. Do I trust a science study that was paid for by a big corporation? Do I trust a study that’s published but not peer reviewed? WHO do you trust?

The common thread I’ve found as I read posts and comments in order to learn more is how stupid I am. How dumb was I to not trust GMO’s. People’s comments were blatantly MEAN. And sure, I was completely uneducated about GMO’s. I read the wrong information. I trusted the wrong sources. But again, without hours of research to find out funding sources, etc HOW do I know what to trust?

This question was amazing. I always want to learn more. I want to understand about so many things – to give my kids the best future possible. The best food to eat. The best meds for my asthmatic child. The best environment for them to grow up in, etc. But here’s the thing. If I wasn’t determined to do the best for my kids . . . by the 100th ridiculing comment on a post I found interesting I would have stopped following and learning. Heck by the 20th I would have written off these sciences pages.

Even in this thread there are those using terms like “stupid,” “brainwashing,” etc. Very derogatory terms and grouping all people who don’t have a knack for science into one realm. I have a great head for business, finances and can analyze the heck out of any non-technical literature. I don’t make fun or ridicule those people who don’t have have that ability. It accomplishes nothing.

So thank you to those of you who answered this post thoughtfully. I’m certain there are many of you who diligently try over and over again to get your point across. Don’t give up. Changing peoples’ minds is never easy but in this case it’s worth the fight.

—end quoted text—

Also see:

5 ideas erróneas que personas tienen sobre lo que implica hacer un voluntariado internacional

5 ideas erróneas que muchas personas tienen sobre lo que implica hacer un voluntariado internacional

A lo mejor la imagen de voluntarios internacional jugando fútbol con niños en África, construyendo una escuela, cocinando con las mujeres de una aldea o dando clases a una comunidad. Pareciera que la participación de una voluntarios en un proyecto en que se lleva a cabo en países en vías de desarrollo, lograra grandes y duraderas transformaciones, pero no es así. Este artículo presenta 5 ideas erróneas que muchas personas tienen sobre lo que implica hacer un voluntariado internacional. Esta información es de Hacesfalta. No hay un mejor lugar para encontrar información sobre todo tipos de voluntariado que Hacesfalta. Si usted está interesado en voluntariado internacional o micro voluntariado, este es el sitio para usted.

(Perhaps you picture the image of international volunteers playing soccer with children in Africa, building a school, cooking with the women of a village or teaching a community. It may seem that this kind of participation of volunteers in a project in developing countries will achieve great and lasting transformations, but it is not so. This article presents five misconceptions that many people have about what it means to volunteer internationally. This information is from Hacesfalta. There is no better place to find information in Spanish on all types of volunteering than Hacesfalta. If you are interested in international volunteering or micro volunteering, and you are a Spanish speaker, this is the place for you.)

And for my resources on this subject, in English:

  • Volunteering Abroad / Internationally: a Reality Check
    A review of the four different types of volunteering abroad programs, and how to improve your profile to be chosen by highly-competitive programs, such as the PeaceCorps.
  • transire benefaciendo: “to travel along while doing good.”
    Advice for those wanting to make their travel more than sight-seeing and shopping. This may be a better, cheaper option for you if you want to have an international experience and make a difference in some way.
  • Volunteering Abroad / Internationally: a Reality Check
    A review of the four different types of volunteering abroad programs, and how to improve your profile to be chosen by highly-competitive programs, such as the PeaceCorps.
  • Ideas for Funding Your Volunteering Abroad Trip
    If you need to raise money to pay for a short-term volunteering gig abroad, here are realistic ways to do so. Also has advice on how to choose a credible program.
  • Vetting Organizations in Other Countries
    A resource that can help you evaluate volunteer-placement organizations that charge you for your placement as a volunteer, as well as for people interested in partnering or supporting an organization abroad but wanting to know it’s a credible organization, that it’s not some sort of scam, or an ‘organization’ of just one person.
  • The realities of voluntourism: use with caution
    Voluntourism is really awful and really good. I’m totally against it and I support it. Confused yet? This opinion piece is my attempt to explain why voluntourism sometimes works and why, very often, it’s dreadful.
  • Volunteering To Help After Major Disasters
    Whenever a disaster strikes, hundreds — even thousands — of citizens in the USA start contacting various organizations in an effort to try to volunteer onsite at the disaster site. But what many of these people don’t realize is that spontaneous volunteers with no training and no affiliation can actually cause more problems than they alleviate in a disaster situation, particularly regarding disaster locations far from their home. If you want to be a part of the mobilization for a future disaster, here are tips to help you get into “the system,” get training, and be in a position to make a real difference.
  • Tax credits for volunteering (for residents of the USA) – includes information on tax deductions for volunteering abroad

Folklore, Rumors & Misinformation Campaigns Interfering with Humanitarian Efforts & Government Initiatives

gossipUPDATED:

Preventing Folklore, Rumors, Urban Myths & Organized Misinformation Campaigns From Interfering with Development & Aid/Relief Efforts & Government Initiatives

Folklore, rumors and contemporary myths / legends often interfere with development aid activities and government initiatives, including public health programs – even bringing such to a grinding halt. They create ongoing misunderstandings and mistrust, prevent people from seeking help, encourage people to engage in unhealthy and even dangerous practices, and have even lead to mobs of people attacking someone or others because of something they heard from a friend of a friend of a friend. With social media like Twitter and Facebook, as well as simple text messaging among cell phones, spreading misinformation is easier than ever.

Added to the mix: fake news sites set up specifically to mislead people, as well as crowdsourced efforts by professional online provocateurs and automated troll bots pumping out thousands of comments, countering misinformation efforts has to be a priority for aid and development organizations, as well as government agencies.

Since 2004, I have been gathering and sharing both examples of this phenomena, and recommendations on preventing folklore, rumors and urban myths from interfering with development and aid/relief efforts and government initiatives. I’ve recently updated this information with new information regarding countering organized misinformation campaigns.

Anyone working in development or relief efforts, or working in government organizations, needs to be aware of the power of rumor and myth-sharing, and be prepared to prevent and to counter such. This page is an effort to help those workers:

  • cultivate trust in the community through communications, thereby creating an environment less susceptible to rumor-baiting
  • quickly identify rumors and misinformation campaigns that have the potential to derail humanitarian aid and development efforts
  • quickly respond to rumors and misinformation campaigns that could derail or are interfering with humanitarian aid and development efforts

And, FYI: I do this entirely on my own, as a volunteer, with no funding from anyone. I update the information as my free time allows.

Also see:

fake news, folklore & friendships

gossipIt wasn’t getting a journalism degree, or being a journalist, that made me a skeptic when it comes to sensational stories. It was a folklore class. Urban Folklore 371, to be exact. It was a very popular class at Western Kentucky University back in the late 1980s, both for people getting a degree in folklore studies and for people needing humanities courses for whatever their degree program was, like me. Class studies focused on contemporary, largely non-religious-based legends, customs and beliefs in the USA. One class might focus on watching a film about the games kids play on a playground and how those games explore the things they fear – marriage, childbirth, stranger danger, being ostracized by their peers, etc. Another class might review the difference versions of the “vanishing hitchhiker” story and why such stories are so popular in so many different cultures, and how the story changes over time.

I heard at least one student say, “That’s not a true story?! I always thought it was!” at least once in every class. Because of that class, I realized there were legends being told as truth all around me, by friends, by family, even by newspapers. “I heard it from my cousin” or “My friend saw it in a newspaper” or “My Mom saw it on Oprah” was usually the preface to some outlandish story told as fact. But the class taught me that, in fact, no woman was ever killed by spiders nesting in her elaborate hairdo, that there has never been a killer with a hook for a hand that attacked a couple in a parked car in a nearby town, that there is no actor who has never had a gerbil removed from his anus, and on and on and on.

I became the “um – that’s not true” girl at various places where I worked. And then via email. And I still am, now on social media. And what I have learned from being little Ms. Debunker is that people REALLY do NOT like these stories debunked. In fact, pointing out the facts that prove these stories aren’t true, no matter how gently I try to do it, often makes people very angry.

Back in the 1990s, a friend sent me yet another forwarded email. This time, the text said the email was from Microsoft Founder Bill Gates, that he’d written a program that would trace everyone to whom the email message was sent, and that he was beta testing the program. The email encouraged people to forward the message and said that if it reaches 1,000 people, everyone on the list would receive $1,000. Of course, it wasn’t true – I knew it as soon as I saw it. She’d sent me several of these type of emails – one that said people that forwarded the message would get a free trip to Disney World, another said we’d all get free computers, and on and on. I had been deleting them, but I was tired of it. So I looked online, found a site that debunked the myth, and sent her the link. I didn’t make any judgement statements; I just said, “This is a myth. Here’s more info. You might want to let everyone know you sent to, as well as the person you got it from,” or something similar.

She was not happy with me. In fact, it almost ended our friendship. She told me that the Internet was “a place for having fun” and “you can’t win if you don’t play” and what did she have to lose by forwarding the message even if it sounded fishy?

And that kind of reaction kept happening. Three new friends I made back in 2010, after I’d moved back to the USA, all unfriended me on Facebook the same day, outraged that I pointed out several things they were posting as their status updates – about how Facebook was going to start charging users, about how putting up a disclaimer on your Facebook page would stop the company from being able to sell your information, and on and on – were all urban legends, all untrue. Their reaction was almost verbatim of what that friend via email had said: Facebook is “a place for having fun” and “it’s better to be safe and share it” and what did they have to lose by sharing the message even if it sounded fishy? Also, they said they did not have time to “check every single thing online.”

Now, in 2016, I have friends that are furious with me for posting science-based web sites that debunk their posts from quack sites like the “Food Babe” claiming that GMOs cause cancer or that vaccines cause autism (to be clear, these are MYTHS). Two journalists – JOURNALISTS – were mad at me when I pointed out that a status update one had shared – it urged users to use the Facebook check-in function to say they were at Standing Rock in North Dakota, that this would somehow prevent the Morton County Sheriff’s Department there from geotargeting DAPL protesters – was promoting false information. I wasn’t just annoyed by the message – I found it imprudent, and yet another example of slackervism or slacktivism: people truly wishing to assist the protesters were checking in on Facebook rather than doing something that would REALLY make a difference, like sending funds to support the protest efforts or writing their Congressional representatives in support of the protesters. It also misdirects people from the nefarious ways law enforcement really does surveil people on social media. I would have thought journalists would know better than engage in such behavior.

Contemporary legends online cause harm, and it’s bothered me long before the Standing Rock/Facebook book check-in myth. Since 2004, I have been gathering and sharing examples of how rumors and urban / contemporary myths often interfere with relief and development activities, and government initiatives, including public health initiatives — even bringing such to a grinding halt. These myths create ongoing misunderstandings among communities and cultures, prevent people from seeking help, encourage people to engage in unhealthy and even dangerous practices, cultivate mistrust of people and institutions, and have even lead to mobs of people attacking someone or others for no reason other than something they heard from a friend of a friend of a friend. With the advent of social media like Twitter and Facebook, as well as just text messaging among cell phones, spreading misinformation is easier than ever.

Based on my experience as a researcher and a communications practitioner, and everything I’ve read – and I read a LOT on this subject – rumors that interfere with development and aid/relief efforts and government health initiatives come from:

  • misinterpretations of what a person or community is seeing, hearing or experiencing,
  • from previous community experiences or their cultural beliefs,
  • willful misrepresentation by people who, for whatever reason, want to derail a development or relief activity,
  • unintentional but inappropriate or hard-to-understand words or actions by a communicator, or
  • the desire of an individual or community to believe an alternative narrative, a desire that is stronger than the facts

That list of bullet points was central to the long list I made of recommendations on preventing folklore, rumors and urban myths from interfering with such initiatives. I made that list to help aid workers, particularly people leading public health initiatives. For years, I’ve updated that list and felt really good about it being comprehensive and realistic, and I’ve employed some of the methods myself in my work.

But are these recommendations enough anymore? I’m not sure. Because BuzzFeed reported that fake news stories about the USA Presidential election this year generated more engagement on Facebook than the top election stories from 19 major news outlets COMBINED – that included major news outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and NBC News, and on and on. And a new study from Stanford researchers evaluated students’ ability to assess information sources, and described the results as “dismaying,” “bleak” and a “threat to democracy,” as reported by NPR News. Researchers said students displayed a “stunning and dismaying consistency” in their responses, getting duped again and again. The researchers weren’t looking for high-level analysis of data but just a “reasonable bar” of, for instance, telling fake accounts from real ones, activist groups from neutral sources and ads from articles. And the students failed. Miserably. And then there’s my own experience seeing the reaction a lot of people have to references to sites like snopes.com or truthorfiction.com or hoax-slayer.com or the Pulitzer Prize-winning site Politico that debunk myths; those people claim that “These sites aren’t true. They’re biased.” And that’s that – just a simple dismissal, so they can continue to cling to falsehoods.

National Public Radio did a story a few days ago about a man in Los Angeles who decided to build fake news sites that publish outrageous, blatantly false stories that promote stories that extreme far-right groups in the USA (also known as “alt-right”) would love to believe; he thought that when these stories were picked up by white supremacist web sites and promoted as true, he and others, particularly major media outlets, would be able to point out that the stories were entirely fiction, created only as bait, and that the white supremacists were promoting such as fact. But instead, thousands of people with no formal association with white supremacists groups shared these stories as fact – reaching millions more people. He wrote one fake story for one of his fake sites on how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot. Again, this story is NOT TRUE. But it led to a state representative in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana; a state legislator was creating legislation and outrage based on something that had never happened.

BTW, to see these fake news sites for yourself, just go to Google and search for snopes is biased, and you will get a long list of links to fake news sites, most right-wing, all fighting against debunking fact-based sites like Snopes. I refuse to name those fake news sites because I don’t want them to get any more traffic than they already do.

Competent decision-making depends on people – the decision-makers – having reliable, accurate facts put in a meaningful and appropriate context. Reason – the power of the mind to think, understand and form judgments by a process of logic – relies on being able to evaluate information regarding credibility and truth. But fact-based decision-making, the idea of being logical and using reason and intellect, have become things to eschew. The Modis Operandi for many is go with your gut, not with the facts. Go not for truth, but truthiness.

I always thought that last bullet in my list of why people believe myths, “the desire of an individual or community to believe an alternative narrative, a desire that is stronger than the facts,” was easy to address. Now, given all the aforementioned, I’m not at all sure.

I’m going to keep calling out myths whenever I see them, and if it costs me Facebook friends, so be it. I prefer the truth, even when the truth hurts, even when the truth causes me to have to reconsider an opinion. There is a growing lack of media literacy and science literacy in the USA – and, indeed, the world. And the consequences of this could be catastrophic – if they haven’t been already. People need to be able to not just access information, but also to analyze it and evaluate the source. That’s just not happening. And I’ve no idea how to change things.

Also see:

8:10 am Nov. 28, 2016 Update: Filippo Menczer, Professor of Computer Science and Informatics and Director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana University, Bloomington, authored the article Why Fake News Is So Incredibly Effective, published in Time and The Conversation. Excerpts: “Our lab got a personal lesson in this when our own research project became the subject of a vicious misinformation campaign in the run-up to the 2014 U.S. midterm elections. When we investigated what was happening, we found fake news stories about our research being predominantly shared by Twitter users within one partisan echo chamber, a large and homogeneous community of politically active users. These people were quick to retweet and impervious to debunking information.” Also of note: “We developed the BotOrNot tool to detect social bots. It’s not perfect, but accurate enough to uncover persuasion campaigns in the Brexit and antivax movements… our lab is building a platform called Hoaxy to track and visualize the spread of unverified claims and corresponding fact-checking on social media. That will give us real-world data, with which we can inform our simulated social networks. Then we can test possible approaches to fighting fake news.”

1:05 pm Nov. 29, 2016 Updates:

Donald Trump and the Rise of Alt-Reality Media: You think the truth took a hit last year? It’s about to get worse. A lot worse. from Politico.

For Some, Scientists Aren’t The Authority On Science from NPR

Dec. 3, 2016 Updates:

Spread of Fake News Provokes Anxiety in Italy from The New York Times

Dec. 6, 2016 Updates:

A North Carolina man read online that a pizza restaurant in northwest Washington, DC, was harboring young children as sex slaves as part of a child-abuse ring, so he drove six hours from his home to the restaurant, and not long after arriving, he fired from an assault-like AR-15 rifle. No one was injured, and he’s been arrested, but, as The New York Times notes,  “the shooting underscores the stubborn lasting power of fake news and how hard it is to stamp out. Debunking false news articles can sometimes stoke the outrage of the believers, leading fake news purveyors to feed that appetite with more misinformation. Efforts by social media companies to control the spread of these stories are limited, and shutting one online discussion thread down simply pushes the fake news creators to move to another space online. The articles were exposed as false by publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post and the fact-checking website Snopes. But the debunking did not squash the conspiracy theories about the pizzeria — instead, it led to the opposite. ‘The reason why it’s so hard to stop fake news is that the facts don’t change people’s minds,’ said Leslie Harris, a former president of the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonprofit that promotes free speech and open internet policies.”

Dec. 9, 2016 update

“Fakes, News and the Election: A New Taxonomy for the Study of Misleading Information within the Hybrid Media System”

Giglietto, Fabio and Iannelli, Laura and Rossi, Luca and Valeriani, Augusto

November 30, 2016. Convegno AssoComPol 2016 (Urbino, 15-17 Dicembre 2016), Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2878774

Abstract:
The widely unexpected outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election prompted a broad debate on the role played by “fake-news” circulating on social media during political campaigns. Despite a relatively vast amount of existing literature on the topic, a general lack of conceptual coherence and a rapidly changing news eco-system hinder the development of effective strategies to tackle the issue. Leveraging on four strands of research in the existing scholarship, the paper introduces a radically new model aimed at describing the process through which misleading information spreads within the hybrid media system in the post-truth era. The application of the model results in four different typologies of propagations. These typologies are used to describe real cases of misleading information from the 2016 US Presidential election. The paper discusses the contribution and implication of the model in tackling the issue of misleading information on a theoretical, empirical, and practical level.

Also see: Feuds in the nonprofit/NGO/charity world

Ukrainian journalism student project: Stopfake.org

For more than a decade, I’ve been informally studying how folklore, rumors & urban myths interfere with development/aid/relief efforts, and government initiatives, & how these are overcome. I’m so fascinated with the subject that it was almost my Master’s degree these once-upon-a-time – but I couldn’t find enough people to go on-the-record in interviews.

I have longed for myth-busting sites like snopes.com or Straight Dope column by Cecil Adams in the USA to be created for developing and transitional countries (as well as home-grown versions of the show “MythBusters“), in local languages. I dream of winning the lottery just so I can fund such initiatives in various countries.

Imagine my thrill to discover this week that there IS such a thing in Ukraine! Fact-checking website Stopfake.org was launched on March 2, 2014 by alumni and students of Mohyla School of Journalism and of the Digital Future of Journalism professional program. “The main purpose of this community is to check facts, verify information, and refute distorted information and propaganda about events in Ukraine covered in the media,” according to the web site. The site is in both English and Russian.

It’s an all-volunteer site (and that includes ONLINE volunteers / virtual volunteering), verifying information, finding and translating and researching stories, etc. Though the site is meant to fact-check anti-Ukrainian bias in media, there are some articles that debunk pro-Ukrainian stories as well. What I particularly love is the article How to Identify a Fake.

I hope that, once the conflict between Ukraine and Russia has become non-violent and not quite so threatening and vitriolic, the focus of the Stopfake.org site can move to more every-day myths that float around Ukraine – about HIV/AIDS, or about Islamic or Jewish religions/culture, for instance. Such myths can have serious, even deadly, consequences.

I also hope the site will start being updated again in English soon – as of the time of this blog’s writing, it hasn’t been updated in English since the end of August. I wonder if this program would qualify to use the UN’s Online Volunteering service to find online volunteers to translate articles from Russian to English… I certainly consider debunking rumors as an essential part of development and aid work

If you know of a similar myth-debunking site in countries other than the USA, please note such in the comments section on my blog.

And for a good source of information about the conflict in Ukraine, from a variety of sources (news, NGOs, UN agencies, etc.), my go-to site is ReliefWeb’s Ukraine site.

You have an obligation to be truthful online

Because of the Internet and text messaging, it has never been easier to share information – or misinformation.

Also because of the Internet and text messaging, we’ve all become mass communicators. This isn’t the same as passing around a Christmas letter to the family, sending cards to friends or showing a video of the company picnic at a gathering of co-workers. Posting a blog is publishing. Posting a Facebook status update is publishing. Posting a video on YouTube is broadcasting. Yes, it is. You may have set your privacy settings so that only your friends can see what you have published or broadcast, but they have the ability to cut and paste your ideas into their own publications or broadcasts.

And because of all of the aforementioned, you have an obligation in all of your publishing and broadcasting to be truthful – that includes what you forward. I’m not talking about jokes or satire. I’m talking about “Here’s an article from The New York Times” you are sharing because you saw it on someone else’s page – did you make sure it really is from The New York Times? Did you take 15 seconds or less to cut one sentence from the article and paste it into Google or Bing and to see what comes up – a NYT link or a Snopes article debunking the story? (I timed it – it really does take just 15 seconds or less).

You don’t have to be a journalist to have ethics. And you still get to post all sorts of opinions and thoughts and dreams and hopes and fears and jokes and pretty pictures wherever you like, however you like, to whomever you like. But take just 15 seconds or less before you post that amazing story about a boy with cancer or a heroic dog or some outrageous action or comment by someone you don’t like, to make sure it’s true.

What are the consequences of NOT being a responsible citizen of cyberspace? These:

  • You cast doubt on everything you say, once people start to figure out they can’t trust something you post online.
  • You can be seen as careless, once people start to realize you didn’t verify an article before you posted it, an article they initially believed.
  • It’s disrespectful to your network – shouldn’t friends, family and colleagues expect you to respect them enough to verify the information you share with them?
  • You cast doubt on news that IS true. What if there really is a kid with cancer who needs donations, but people don’t believe it because they know that a story you posted about a kid with cancer wasn’t true?

Do you really want the to be associated with untrustworthiness and carelessness? Don’t your friends and family deserve more?

What to do when you find out something you posted is not true? Take it down and replace it with correct information, along with an apology.

I’ve posted information a few times that I thought was true and that turned out not to be. As a trained journalist, I was mortified by my carelessness. I try to use each of those experiences to be a more responsible publisher and broadcaster. Because that’s what my friends, family and colleagues deserve from me.

Related subjects:

Folklore / text messaging interfering with development, aid/relief & public health initiatives

Rampant misinformation online re: Mumbai (from the archives)

Myths aren’t just annoying – they promote hatred

Citizen journalism/crowd-sourcing gone wrong?

Social media: cutting both ways since the 1990s

My voluntourism-related & ethics-related blogs (and how I define scam)

Stop multi-tasking; FOCUS instead!

Back in August 2009, I blogged that Stanford University had published a study that the AP called “surprising”: people who multitask are more easily distracted and less able to ignore irrelevant information than people who do less multitasking. Chronic digital multitaskers were found to be not as good at switching between tasks, compared with people who weren’t chronic multitaskers. In other words, multitaskers cannot concentrate on a single task and do it well; instead, they do a lot of things not very well. They get LESS done than single-taskers.

“The huge finding is, the more media people use the worse they are at using any media. We were totally shocked,” Clifford Nass, a professor at Stanford’s communications department, said in the AP article.

As I said at the time:

Huh? Shocked? Really? Are Stanford researchers THAT out of touch and naive?

I wasn’t AT ALL shocked. It was confirmation of something I’ve known for a long, long time: multi-tasking muddles minds.

In this article in Time from November 2010, Turning Your Phone Off as a Technological Gesture of Affection, the Stanford study is explored further, with this observation:

Multitaskers overestimated their abilities. So, for instance, when your brother insists he’s listening to your story, even as he texts his girlfriend, he really does believe that he’s hearing you. But chances are, he got only every other word.

It’s the same in the workplace: you are not listening to that phone conference while you are checking your email. YA colleague calls on the phone to discuss something or deliver information and he or she knows you are not really listening, as you are trying to IM or fill out a form at the same time – meaning he or she will have to repeat it all later when you realize you don’t know something you should. At a meeting, people ask questions that are fully answered in the two page document they claimed to have scanned on the plane.

At conferences, it’s impossible to strike up conversations with people around you — something essential to make a conference valuable — as they all have their heads buried in their lap tops or PDAs, talking to people elsewhere instead of the people right there next to them, eager to connect.

So why not embrace true digital efficiency and give one slice of attention to each task, even just a few minutes, so that you do all tasks well? It’s amazing how much more work you get done when you single focus! Close your laptop in meetings and workshops. Put the phone or PDA away. Listen, look, make eye contact. Do it just a few times a day, and you will be amazed how much more information you discover and retain, how many MORE connections you make!

I now have a rule during my presentations: if you are going to have your lap top open, you have to be in the back rows; the front and middle rows are reserved for participants; my workshops are interactive, and I’m tired of asking a question to a room full of people or having people break into groups to work on a quesiton and having those at their lap tops look up and say, “Huh? What? Huh?”, or updating their Facebook screens while people behind them watch their screens instead of me. I put a lot of work into my presentations; if you aren’t there to participate, I’d actually rather you not attend at all.

The ability to concentrate on a single task, to get it done properly and completely, or to concentrate on a single content source, reading or listening thoroughly to the information provided, is rapidly becoming a lost skill, and the workplace, public discourse and even every day community life is suffering for it. We’re not becoming more efficient and productive: we’re becoming more distracted, less inclined to complete tasks on time, less likely to do a quality job, and less likely to really, substantially connect with new people. It also affects our quality of life: there are generations who seem to not know how to become engrossed in a movie, how to sit and people-watch, how to just be in the moment, and that means they aren’t really satisfied with anything.

But it’s more than just being ignored while I’m putting my heart and soul into a workshop or watcing co-workers founder in meetings: People are crashing their cars while texting. And even worse: people are making up their minds about world events, government policies, candidates running for office and proposed activities by various organizations based on snippets they’ve glanced at online or on comments heard by a pundit on the radio or TV as they are doing two or three other things at the same time. Debates have become easy for me to win these days because I actually still READ and have more than sound bites to refer to.

My tag line on Yahoo for a few years now has been “Read More Books.” The world would be a better place if more people did, not only because knowledge is a wonderful, empowering, enlightening thing, but also because it would teach people the power of “single-tasking“, or the power of concentration, of focus.

Take just 10 minutes every other hour to read something, in silence, related to your work — memos from colleagues, abstracts from journal articles, an executive summary — without doing anything else. Don’t answer your phone while a colleague is in your office. Turn away from your computer when you are on the phone. Sit and listen intently to a presenter for even just the first 10 minutes, without doing anything else. Introduce yourself to two people sitting near you at a workshop. Never ever write emails while trying to listen to a phone call, a presenter or a colleague. These are little things. And if you do them, you will LOVE the results!

Okay, after that lecture here’s some levity re: Facebook. Enjoy – and don’t do anything else while you watch it, because then you will actually enjoy it!