- My internet newsfeed is mostly crap.
I try to be smart, right?
And discern what I'm reading online and make sure
that it's lining up with truth, but for the most part,
it seems like everyone has an agenda or everything's biased.
So how do you figure out what's real?
A technique that I used to use was I would read something
on one side of the aisle and then I'd go read something
on the other side of the aisle and then I would assume
that the truth is in the middle.
Truth is truth.
It doesn't have to be on that spectrum,
it's its own separate thing.
Recently I've been tricked a couple of times.
I've seen a story and I've read about it
and was like, ooh, that's pretty interesting.
And the more I dig, the more I see this narrative happening
and then suddenly a couple of days later, it comes out
that what I was reading wasn't true,
even though a lot of people thought it was.
If I can be fooled by a story like that from a couple
of different sources, how much is getting through my filter?
What's even scarier is I share things online.
So how much of the stuff that I share is not true?
Like, am I part of the problem?
'Cause I wanna be a good guy, I wanna be,
like, part of the solutions.
So here's how it works in engineering.
If there's a process that's failing, you find
the root cause of that failure and you try to fix it.
In this case, my failure is the ability
to discern fact from fiction online.
There's a well respected nonprofit school for journalism,
it's called the Poynter Institute.
And they are the experts for good journalism.
Poynter has created this program called MediaWise,
and it's supported by Google to help people learn
how to see what's true and what's not true online.
I've partnered with MediaWise to make this video
to figure out how I can help myself and other people
learn how to separate fact from fiction online.
As part of this partnership I traveled to Austin, Texas
to talk about misinformation online at South by Southwest.
I want to introduce you to Katy Byron,
who runs the MediaWise project.
This is Katy.
We're buddies. (Katy laughs)
And she's been a journalist for 15 years.
The goal here is to get people more intelligent
about how they use the internet, right?
- Yes.
- Katy is smart, she really knows her stuff.
And she told me there's three easy steps
to figuring out if something is true online.
To see this is in action I pulled up a tweet
I knew Katy would personally like.
She's a third generation journalist, so I tried to pull
at her heartstrings and show her a tweet
that made journalists look really good.
Let's see what she does to engage
to figure out if this is true or not.
I saw this tweet.
And it makes me feel things, right?
- Makes me feel things true.
I love journalism. (laughs)
- It's talking about these dudes, that, like,
basically helped expose the lies.
And, you know, they're watching--
- Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
- Are they famous journalists?
- Yes, very.
- Okay, I don't know a whole lot about it.
- All the President's Men, the movie, the old movie?
It's about them.
And this is actually a scene from that time.
- I wanna retweet that, right?
Should I retweet it?
- It's very retweetable. (laughs)
- Should I retweet it?
- I mean, I think, number one I would
look at who is Don Wislow?
- Step one, you can see that she tries to figure out
who is behind the information.
- I hope he's not somebody really important that I should
know who he is. (Destin laughs)
Don Winslow, number one, who is behind the information?
We need to figure that out.
- [Destin] He's an author.
- New York Times number one
international bestselling author of The Cartel.
He's not necessarily an expert on the topic of journalism.
That to me is not enough for the retweet.
So next step, after I looked that up--
- So you would not retweet it at this point?
- No, no. (laughs)
- So now what I do I do?
- There's no link to any additional information,
and that to me is always a red flag, always.
So find more information about what they're saying.
- Number two, what's the evidence?
This is the most important step for Katy.
And one thing I found was interesting is she didn't stop
at just, is the story true, she went further.
She wanted to see if the photo was real.
To do this, she used a really clever technique,
it's just a Google reverse imagine search.
- Use a reverse Google image search and write click
and search Google for image, it's as simple as that.
This is one of my favorite tools.
- [Destin] Oh, wow, okay.
- [Katy] So first search results--
- [Destin] Reddit, Twitter, Blogspot, Tumblr.
- [Katy] Scoopnest, I don't know what that is.
- So I'm simply looking for things
that I recognize as reputable--
- And I spend all my days lateral reading,
and I don't know any of these.
- [Destin] So all this is looking--
- These are all not reputable names or well known sources,
so that is a red flag in itself.
- [Destin] What if I went this, what if I went up here
to tools and I searched, like, let's say, like, last year.
I should get an old source now,
so maybe I can find the first person.
- [Katy] Washington Post, what is this?
So that's a good sign, NPR.
- [Destin] Washington Post.
- So this is a panel, but not showing the photo, right?
So that's--
- [Woman] His resignation felt like to you?
Elizabeth?
- This is the night he announced he was going to resign.
- [Woman] The night he announced he was resigning.
- He was gonna resign, and it was
the next day that was truly bizarre.
- I think most people probably aren't gonna sit through
a five minute video to find out, right?
So I think I'd go back to the search results.
And see what else we got. - Okay.
But that was an original source, those were the guys.
- Yes, but we're talking, we're trying to verify
the veracity of the photo, right?
- [Destin] Got it, because somebody
could have photoshopped in--
- Nixon's image.
- You think differently than me.
(Katy laughs)
I've been, like, yeah, they were there, retweet.
But you're trying to make sure that the image is real.
You have a higher level of fidelity that's required--
- And skepticism, you know.
- Skepticism.
- I think that, because the internet is full
of a lot of garbage. (laughs)
- Number three, what do other sources say?
Katy told me a really interesting technique
called lateral reading.
- Basically that means instead of reading vertically
and just looking at your newsfeed--
- Yeah, 'cause I'm just scrolling on my phone, yeah.
- And you stop at a tweet or you stop at a Instagram meme
or whatever, instead of reading vertically and just
trying to figure out is this legitimate or not,
just by looking at that, you need to open up tabs
on your browser and literally read laterally.
- Sometimes when you get to the end of this
three step process you're pretty sure that the thing is real
and you wanna tweet it because it makes you feel things
and you want other people to feel things,
but at that point, if you don't know 100%,
this is the moment that you have to decide if you're
gonna be part of the problem of misinformation online
or if you're gonna be part of the solution.
You have to do something that she calls click restraint.
Okay, well, I can't find the actual image.
Okay, so, to me that's just generally a red flag,
and it's not something to be discouraged by,
it's also telling you something.
It's telling you that you can't find this image
anywhere else, so it could be doctored, number one.
Number two, I'm not gonna feed that out, I'm not gonna
retweet that, I'm not gonna share that on my social media.
- But those are your homies.
They're like, talking about how journalism--
- I know, it's really tempting, this is like
chocolate for a journalist, that tweet, you know?
(laughter)
But I'm going to exert my click restraint
and I am not going to reshare that.
- Really?
So now that we're armed with these techniques:
who's behind the information?
What does the evidence say?
And what do other sources say?
Katy wanted me to take a shot at it.
She found something online that was
a little bit controversial, it's the kind of thing
that gets people stirred up online.
And she wanted me to take a crack at figuring out
if it was true or not.
Right, you're gonna send it to me?
- I sent it to you.
- [Destin] How do I fact check that?
- [Katy] Memes are kinda tricky, because you need to do
a screenshot that takes away the text.
Google Image Search, drag and drop.
- [Destin] Arctic sea ice minimum, is that it?
- [Katy] You could try that, that's NASA,
so that's always a good sign.
Okay, so this is the image, right?
- [Destin] There it is.
- [Katy] Bingo.
The dates are wrong, so this,
which is really important to the story.
- Look at that, they blotted out the date
to put whatever date they wanted on there.
Punks.
It's called just facts page too.
(Katy laughs)
Like, ultimately, the person that made that post
was trying to say, like, hey, global warming is real
and if you don't believe it you suck.
But ultimately they undermined what they were trying to do
because they showed false data and then somebody
on the other side that's a climate change denier
or whatever terminology you wanna use to get excited about,
that person can say, see, you doctored the photos.
So it muddies the waters, and it makes truth
this difficult thing to find, and so ultimately
even if you're trying to put an exclamation point
beside the thing that you believe,
you can undercut your very cause.
- Exactly, I mean, it's like feeding the beast.
- Something I've been giving a lot of thought to recently
is that in the developing moments of a new news story,
that is the most likely time that I'm gonna
get misinformation online.
I think it has to do with the speed at which
the news cycle occurs, and to explain this I have a metaphor
for something I learned about fighter jets in the '50s.
There was this colonel in the Air Force named
Colonel John Boyd who developed the decision cycle
called the OODA loop.
He figured out if you can observe, orient, decide, and act
first, you would complete your OODA loop before the enemy
and you would almost always score hits and win.
I asked my buddy Ben to make a simulation
to help me illustrate this point.
Here we have two fighter jets,
they're constantly trying to out maneuver each other.
The only difference in the jets is that the red one
is able to get through its decision cycle first.
The blue one takes his time getting through its OODA loop,
and as a result, it's always too slow and ends up
reaching to information that's already changed.
This means that no matter how many times I restart
the simulation, the red jet is always gonna be
the one that scores the big hits.
Now think of your social media newsfeed
like it's a war zone.
It's not unlike the dogfights seen in aerial combat.
It's a hyper competitive environment where
the stakes are high and reaction time matters.
Instead of observe, orient, decide, act, let's change
the decision cycle to how people make news posts online.
People observe things, they may or may not verify them,
they write a social media post, and then they click publish.
Often times, whoever publishes first gets
the most views, the most followers, which eventually
turns into more advertising dollars.
People are rewarded for posting fast.
The problem today is that your modern newsfeed is driven by
social media, which rewards whoever can post first.
And unlike when traditional,
high quality journalism dominated, on social media,
there are no editors to verify the truth.
In fact, many people intentionally skip this step
so they can can post quicker in order
to be the first one to get the views.
Unfortunately what this means is now
you must verify the truth, because unless it's coming
from a reputable source, it is not going to be fact checked.
So how do we break this cycle of misinformation?
First of all, you need to read the entire article,
not just the title.
If there's nobody willing to put their name
next to the information and there's no sources cited,
that is a crap news source.
They care more about views and clicks than telling you
the truth, you should unsubscribe to that news source
or that social media account, and you should
clean up your news timeline.
Good journalists exist, they do.
You have to find them, you have to follow them,
reward them for their work.
Share their work, tell people, hey, this is
a well sourced article, you should follow this person.
Do some lateral reading.
Use Google to get to the heart of where
that image came from.
And most important of all, think before you click
and share something online.
Do some digging, try to fact check it yourself,
and only then should you share information online.
Do not spread misinformation.
Let's be part of the solution, not part of the problem.
- If you see something on social media that you're not
sure about and you really want some help figuring out
if it's legitimate or not, just share it with a hashtag
or reply with the hashtag is this legit?
And tag @mediawise, and my team and I will
help you figure it out.
- There you go, so, hashtag is this legit?
You know we're just gonna totally flood
your Twitter account, right?
(Katy laughs)
Or your Instagram.
- We're ready.
- You're ready?
Okay, hashtag is this legit?
You should be doing the lateral reading yourself first,
but if you really can't figure it out,
this is the lady to talk to.
- We'll help you figure it out.
Also, follow us on all, across social, @mediawise,
we have some really cool fact checking content that teaches
a lot of the things we've been talking about today.
- Huge thanks to MediaWise for supporting the creation
of this video, and I wanted to let you know
about an upcoming series on Smarter Every Day.
I'm doing a very unique, well researched series,
I guess you would call it, on algorithm manipulation.
I went to YouTube, I went to Twitter, I went to Facebook,
I talked to the people in charge of these things,
the people that develop countermeasures to try to fight
the misinformation that we experience online.
I got to go talk to the people that are in charge
of those things, and it is very fascinating.
That is a, I mean, it's unlike
anything I've ever seen online, so, if you haven't
subscribed to Smarter Every Day, please help me spread
the message on this by subscribing
and sharing those videos when they come out.
I'm Destin, you're getting smarter every day.
Have a good one.