Hi I’m John Green, welcome to Crash Course Navigating Digital Information.
So, today, we are going to learn one of the most important skills of 21st century life,
and I don’t say that lightly.
So, you know my name and that this is an episode of Crash Course.
But there’s a lot that doesn’t tell you.
It doesn’t tell you, for instance, that Crash Course is a product of Complexly, a
company owned by my brother and me and funded partly by support from patreon, partly by
advertisements, and partly by grants from organizations.
It also doesn’t tell you who works on the show--a large team of producers, editors,
writers, illustrators, and more.
You’re looking at some of them now.
[camera pans to crew behind the camera] And as I mentioned in the previous videos,
the folks at MediaWise also helped us make this video.
MediaWise was created with support from Google, and it’s a collaboration between the Poynter
Institute, a non-profit journalism school, and the Stanford History Education Group,
a university-based research group.
All of this is helpful to know when navigating digital information, because understanding
where information came from helps us to understand if it’s reliable.
How do you even find a source in a world where no one has to cite sources, and what citations
exist are perpetually disappearing?
Well, to quote my friends Rhett and Link, Let’s talk about that.[1]
INTRO So, information doesn’t just appear, even
if it’s automated or driven by an algorithm.
A twitter bot, for instance, is not a person--but they were created by people, as are the algorithms
that declare what topics are trending in online discourse.
So all information is produced by someone, but it’s also produced for a purpose.
Like, newspapers are created by journalists and editors to inform the public about things
editors think they should know.
But of course, they also have to sell subscriptions and advertisements to support themselves.
Advertisements are created by companies to convince customers to buy or use their products.
Movies and books are created to entertain, or to stir up important cultural conversations,
or both.
The lines between these motives, of course, are not always clear.
Advertisements often feel informative, and sometimes seek to be informative-- like those
medicine ads that list 143 side effects in 10 seconds, because they are required to do
so by law.
And while journalism should seek to inform, journalists are humans, and they make choices
both about what to cover and how to cover it, choices we may not agree with.
Movies and books may exist to entertain and enlighten, but they can also exist to sell
things--it is no coincidence, for instance, that everyone in The Fault in Our Stars movie
uses Apple products.
So the first question we ask is who made this and why?
And we mustn’t oversimplify the answers.
Like, I wrote The Fault in Our Stars because I was inspired by my friend Esther, and also
because I wanted to explore whether a short life can be a full life, and also because
I thought people would read it--and pay for it.
The book was also a product of my editor and Penguin Random House, my publisher.
They also thought people would read and buy it.
None of those motivations negates any of the others.
But of course, understanding who is actually behind a project can be difficult, especially
online.
I mean, “catfishing” is now a verb because it’s so easy to pretend to be what you’re
not.
The “Stop City-Funded Internet” campaign is a good example of what I mean.
So, in early 2018, the city of West Plains, Missouri was working on a taxpayer-funded
municipal internet service project.
If successful, it would provide residents with cheaper high-speed internet.
And while the city was working on this plan, a website for the “Stop City-Funded Internet”
campaign popped up.[2] It claimed to be a grassroots community of local fiscal conservatives
against the plan.
The campaign site looked pretty sleek and professionally-designed.
It had a clear, stated mission and high-quality photography.
Oh, and also, a list of all the ways municipal internet service projects have failed.
And just by looking at the website, you wouldn’t have been able to tell who was really behind
that campaign, because it didn’t name names or list its leadership.
But in the end, someone did discover the brains behind the operation.
It was…of course...
Fidelity Communications, a local commercial internet provider that didn’t want to lose
customers.
And the only reason they came clean[3] was because a Missouri man noticed the file name
of the site’s logo had “Fidelity” in it.[4]
But most of the time, we don’t need to search source code to know more about who’s sharing
the information we’re consuming.
We just need to read differently.
So, we tend to read web sites like we read books or articles: we start at the top of
the page, look at the title, and scroll down from there.
We read vertically.
And many websites look really legitimate when you’re reading vertically, because you’re
only seeing what their creators want you to see.
And creators know what we think make websites look authoritative -- a well-designed logo,
references and citations, professional photography, no grammatical errors or typos.
And so when you read vertically, it is often impossible to distinguish reliable information
from unreliable.
But introducing other strategies into your reading -- like looking elsewhere for additional
information -- can help you find out a lot more.
When you’re on a new website, instead of staying put and taking their word for it,
you should just... leave.
Open a new tab and start looking for more information.
That’s called lateral reading.
It’s lateral because, instead of moving up and down, you’re moving from tab to tab.
Basically, what I’m saying is that when your browser looks like this, it can actually
be good news.
Like, here’s a website from the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC.
This page from 2018[5] is about a back-and-forth in the federal government over regulating
internet service providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T.
Regulating those providers could include setting the prices and rates for their services or
whether they’re allowed to collect tolls from websites or content creators, among other
things.
Apparently, ALEC is against government regulation of internet service providers.
So we want to know who ALEC is.
We can tell a few things by looking at their website.
Namely that this site is apparently /not/ run by Hailey Baldwin’s famous uncle.
Also the site does have a dot-org web address, which is often used by nonprofits.
The logo looks serious and kind of fancy.
The website is easy to use.
ALEC’s about page says it’s “America’s largest nonpartisan, voluntary membership
organization of state legislators dedicated to the principles of limited government, free
markets, and federalism.”
Its board of directors page lists many U.S. representatives and senators.
And if we stay on this page, it all seems... you know, kind of boring and standard.
But if you open a new tab and search ALEC -- ok, yeah, the first results are Alec Baldwin.
Hailey’s uncle.
But below that, and below ALEC’s website, lies their Wikipedia page and a website called
ALEC exposed dot org.
Towards the bottom of the first page of search results, there are news articles by websites
like The Atlantic and The Guardian.
These say that corporations and nonprofits are also members of ALEC.
We learn that one of ALEC’s stated goals is to bring corporate leaders and legislators
together so they can craft laws.
A search for “ALEC members” shows that AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon have all been members.[6]
Which means the original article about internet regulation has some, you know, big conflicts
of interest.
Internet service providers obviously have a huge financial incentive to fight regulation.
But that article doesn’t disclose that.
So in this case, lateral reading helped us find out who’s really behind information:
a huge group of lawmakers working with big corporations towards their common interests.
All right, so now that you understand the idea of lateral reading, you may be wondering
where you should go when you open that next tab.
There are plenty of online sources you can use to look into different organizations and
authors.
They may not be perfect, but they’re a good starting point if you’re just trying to
learn a little bit about a source of information.
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
Newspapers can be a good place to start.
Some of them have been around for decades or even centuries.
They have tons of information.
Traditionally, newspapers provided written information about current events printed daily
or weekly.
Today, many newspapers have turned into digital media companies that publish news online daily
in a variety of formats.
Some focus on international or national news and others focus on local news.
Magazines and digital news sites are useful for lateral reading, too.
However it’s important to note that many online news organizations have their own points
of view.
Sometimes these are explicit liberal or conservative political leanings.
But sometimes they’re much harder to pinpoint, like a mashup of their contributors’ own
interests and perspectives.
Like, a website written specifically about comics for and by women might cover the new
Captain Marvel trailer differently than a site with all male writers would, for
instance.
We’ll talk more about authorial perspective in our next episode.
Fact-checking websites can also be an excellent resource.
Sites like Snopes.com and Politifact.com are well-respected fact-checking sites created
by researchers and journalists
with the goal of fact-checking: articles,
public statements, and even social media posts.
Of course that doesn’t mean they’re never wrong,
because they’re also created by humans, but they do strive to be right.
But like every resource, fact checking websites are just one tool in the tool box.
There is no magic arbiter of truth.
Thanks, Thought Bubble!
So, to reiterate, no newspaper or news site is infallible.
All of this is created by humans, and humans make mistakes constantly.
All of us.
Our modern media landscape is very difficult to navigate and that has sowed distrust between
the public and the quote unquote mainstream media.
But I think there are two important things to remember here.
First, “the media” does not exist.
It’s not a monolith.
There are no secret meetings between every reporter and editor and photographer in the
world about what to report.
It is a very large and diverse industry made up of individuals with vastly different viewpoints.
But, secondly, it is possible to take those different viewpoints into account when reading
laterally and checking information for yourself.
Now, having waded into controversial waters, I’m about to dive into them.
There’s another resource you can use while reading laterally.
One you’ve been told not to use by teachers and parents and other adults.
But I’m not like them, I’m young, and...what’s that Stan?
Oh.
Apparently I am like them.
Nonetheless, I am here to tell you that you SHOULD USE WIKIPEDIA.
Wikipedia can be a very good place to start your research.
You’ve definitely been told at some point that it’s an unreliable source or that anyone
can just edit at a whim.
Wikipedia can be wrong.
It often is.
Many articles CAN be edited by anyone, but Wikipedia is also the largest general reference
work on the web, and its articles /are/ subject to editing standards.
Some of them are quite rigorous, in fact.
So it can be a great place to find a general overview of a topic.
Now, not every article meets Wikipedia’s editorial standards--as many articles say
/above/ the article--but the ones that do are well-sourced and carefully written, and
if you scroll down to the bottom of any wikipedia page, you should find citations that work.
We’re gonna talk about Wikipedia in a future episode, but for now I just wanna say this:
There is no, like, single source on the Internet, or off the Internet for that matter
There’s no secret way to understand the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth.
I think we sometimes forget this, so I want to state it clearly: Information is made by
people--flawed, biased, imperfect people.
But sometimes we conclude that because no source is inherently objective, all information
must be equally unreliable, and that is dead wrong.
No matter what you’re thinking about or trying to learn about, understanding who is
sharing the information, and why, can help you to evaluate what you’re reading and
place it in its proper context.
And lateral reading can really help with that.
I know it feels like extra work--the entering of search terms, looking through sources,
and so on--but I’ve been trying this for the last several weeks, and it has genuinely
worked for me.
Instead of asking why read laterally, I think we should consider what we lose when we don’t
read laterally, when we passively scroll through information feeds and accept what seems true
and dismiss what seems wrong.
Reading that way gives misinformation and disinformation more power.
It allows people to hijack your consciousness, and it also makes you part of the problem.
The world wide web demands we utilize a new kind of reading to evaluate information, one
that is very different from how we read books or newspapers.
There’s no beginning and no end to the web.
Vertical reading doesn’t work because it’s not vertical.
It’s a web.
So, we often need to leave individual websites to understand that website...by using other
websites.
It will get simpler over time and with practice.
Once, you didn’t know how to read vertically.
So, we’re going to keep practicing.
I’ll see you next time.
For this series, Crash Course has teamed up with MediaWise, a project out of the Poynter
Institute that was created with support from Google.
The Poynter Institute is a non-profit journalism school.
The goal of MediaWise is to teach students how to assess the accuracy of information
they encounter online.
The MediaWise curriculum was developed by the Stanford History Education Group based
on civic online reasoning research that they began in 2015.
If you’re interested in learning more about MediaWise and fact-checking, you can visit
@mediawisetips on Instagram.
________________ [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4PooiX37Pld1T8J5SYT-SQ
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20180129214112/https://stopcityfundedinternet.com/ [3]https://www.westplainsdailyquill.net/features/business/article_589ec380-18a4-11e8-b515-43970aabc869.html
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcDPOvFdUcE [5]https://www.alec.org/article/democrats-hope-to-restore-heavy-handed-internet-regulations-through-senate-vote/
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_American_Legislative_Exchange_Council