Social media platforms are not necessarily the best place to find factual news or information.
But the problem is when there's something breaking, if there is some sort of emergency,
if there's some sort of sensational moment that everybody's paying attention to,
social media is where you go.
I'm Renee DiResta and I'm the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory.
And what we do there is we look at how narratives and information spread online.
A lot of times your phone will suddenly seem to be blowing up.
And these alerts are basically headlines of some big breaking thing. On our Twitter feed and
our Facebook feeds that are of course, designed to attract your attention much more so than
deliver a kind of nuanced take on what's actually happening in the world.
My name is David Barstow.
I've been a reporter and a journalist for 33 years.
I now teach investigative reporting at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate
School of Journalism.
So there's a lot of times when you'll see something trending, because it's a breaking
news moment.
If you click into the trend, you're going to find breaking stuff there
that's going to come out faster than it's going to hit a newspaper site
or the nightly news.
And so there's a natural inclination for people to want to go and gravitate there during these
moments to try to figure out what's happening.
Because of the speed of information and the design of the social platforms, everything
looks basically equal.
Then on that small screen, it's very tough to actually distinguish quickly -- what are in
fact, the most important stories of the day?
And that is like a huge challenge that did not exist in the way the media landscape worked
you know, say just 15, 20 years ago.
Misinformation and disinformation are a little bit different.
They are separated by intent.
So misinformation means something that's wrong, but it's very inadvertently wrong.
It might not be true, but the intention is, is good.
The disinformation side of things -- that's where you see people who are deliberately
intending to influence and to mislead someone.
We can find endless examples of crazy stuff that gets packaged in a way and gets pushed
out by -- certainly by social media influencers and others.
If someone is running a disinformation campaign, um, they have a particular agenda. And in the
case of politics sometimes that can be getting a candidate elected or ensuring a
candidate does not get elected,
and what you start to see is the content is intended to distract people -- to create
a whole lot of explanations for a particular event -- too many explanations for a regular
person to feel comfortable thinking that they've figured out the truth.
Usually people will say.
"I don't remember where I read that."
"I think I probably saw that on Facebook," or "I don't know, maybe it was on my Instagram
feed" and no one actually ever really remembers where -- where these things come from.
But somehow there's something memorable about it that sticks in the brain.
And that's, what's dangerous.
What's really at stake right now is whether or not we're going to organize ourselves around
facts, around truth, or are we going to organize ourselves around nonsense, around propaganda.
It's really natural
to want to be the first to know. There's a lot of people on social media,
who just want to gain influence. You know, clout chasers, right?
They're just trying to get more followers or get more likes.
It's not really about the quality of the content.
It's just more about trying to create as much content as we possibly can, in order to generate
as many headlines as we can, in order to generate this many clicks as we can. That ultimately I think is
really toxic in this environment.
Because people are naturally inclined to share,
they'll retweet, they'll re-share, they'll repost, and that will kind of perpetuate the
garbage and actually create a lot of noise and a lot of confusion in those moments.
It's a lot to think about.
Nobody wants to be misled.
I think there's probably four tips
I would say that are key, particularly going into the 2020 election. First up: Be patient,
and don't rush to judgment.
Let stories, settle in you.
Think through, does this really make sense?
Refresh the story a couple hours later, a couple of days later, even to try to make
sure that you have the most complete picture of what happened.
Number two: Be responsible on social media and
think before you share.
When you share content, even if you don't have a ton of followers, you never know how
far the information that you put out is going to make it in the world.
It's worth like just pausing for a beat and wondering, is this real? Third: Be skeptical
of sensationalism.
The people who are running these platforms are trying to grab your attention.
We just read the headline and the headline and the article don't match up.
And so what you've just done at that point is you've shared something that's inaccurate
or misleading. And then last: Consider the source with any information
You're seeing. As a journalist,
it's the thing that I have spent the most amount of time doing, is assessing sources.
Think hard about the source.
Has it earned your trust?