Translator: Zsófia Herczeg Reviewer: Cihan Ekmekçi
Let's start this in the most exciting fashion - with a disclaimer.
I probably shouldn't give this talk.
I am going to share a lot of fake stories.
And studies have shown the more you share fake stories,
the more people believe those fake stories
even if you are debunking them.
(Sigh)
So just by sharing these fake stories, I might be making you dumber right now.
(Laughter)
You are welcome.
So I have come here to ask you, to beg you
to stop being the internet's bitch.
(Laughter)
Stop believing in things like this:
[At 21 stone and seven feet tall, a bear officiated this couple's wedding]
(Laughter) (Applause)
And this:
[Believe it or not, this is a shark on the freeway in Houston, Texas]
(Laughter)
And this:
[What Ryan Gosling Said About Brigham City, Utah Residents]
(Laughter)
Yeah, I am sorry, Brigham City, Ryan Gosling is not thinking about you.
(Laughter)
As a species, we humans aren't really doing very well
with how quickly information moves online.
We're clearly having problems telling the good stuff from the bad,
and I'm concerned about this
because as a librarian, I deal in information.
Sure, books are my buddies, they're cool,
but librarians deal in information.
So I've always been pretty concerned about misinformation:
information produced to deceive or confuse,
that's often shared online.
It seems like the world is really starting to take notice of this now, too.
You can't go anywhere without hearing about fake news, right?
So the stakes with fake news can be pretty high.
This guy believed in a fake news story so fervently
that he took a gun to a pizzeria
to investigate a child's sex ring tied to the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Now, of course, there was no child sex ring,
and he is in jail,
but I can't stress enough
that taking a gun with you is a pretty bad way to fact-check.
(Laughter)
The dude should have totally checked with a librarian
before he, you know, decided on the gun route.
Perhaps some of you also saw this post
making the rounds in the 2016 election also.
Now, Donald Trump in this quote calls Republican voters dumb,
but the only problem is he never said this.
But to some of us,
especially those of us with left-leaning or anti-Trump biases,
it kind of totally feels like he said it.
Right?
But the thing is you can't feel your way to truth.
In fact, feelings are the enemy when it comes to evaluating information online.
Feelings push you to abandon logic and react emotionally.
And how well does reacting emotionally work for you
in the offline aspects of your life?
I bet your husband loves it.
Mine sure does.
(Laughter)
Visceral emotional reactions work about as well online as they do in real life,
which is to say they're total crap.
Misinfornation pushers can easily manipulate us
through our emotions and through our biases.
They bank on this.
Anger spurs action.
It always has.
If you generate a story online that elicits an emotional response,
you will generate
not only exposure for your website, but also advertising revenue.
So we need to be aware of our emotional responses and biases
when we're evaluating information online.
That's really the only way to do it.
You have to be aware of those things.
But if emotion and bias are the problem, I hear you ask,
maybe Facebook or Google, those soulless automatons, can solve this problem for us.
But algorithms thus far have not been able to solve this very human problem.
And if we leave it up to nameless programmers and big software companies
to decide what is appropriate information,
we're just really handing over control to them
and worse, those who can beat the algorithm.
So another big part of the problem
lies in our desire to see information in black and white terms:
good versus evil, truth versus lies.
It would be so nice to have a bright red line
dividing the bad from the good.
But most of the misinformation we see every day exists in a grey area:
half truths, misinterpreted photos, quotes taken out of context
and all this is seen through layers of bias.
Our bias and the author's bias color what we see and read,
making us more or less likely to feel that something is true.
And the incredibly fast pace of information online
leaves little time for fact-checking.
It only adds to our already disorienting view.
So we give up.
We decide to trust only NPR or only Fox News.
We decide that there's no news organization we can trust,
and so we just keep watching Parks and Rec over and over and over again.
(Laughter)
All right. But maybe that's just me.
(Laughter)
But you can't simply avoid misinformation.
It's just not possible if you are part of this connected modern world.
And the fight for true and credible information
is a fight worth waging.
Fake news isn't harmless.
In many cases misinformation creators are trying to make up your mind for you.
They're trying to influence you
to solidify your support for a certain viewpoint.
That's why it's so scary.
If you give up and you give in,
you are basically handing control over to the loudest voices,
and those voices spread misinformation all the time.
But some of us aren't giving up.
Librarians aren't giving up - my people.
(Laughter)
We're developing workshops and websites to help you steer clear of fake news,
but we're sitting down with people every day
to get to the bottom of viral post and rumors.
But all of us - not just librarians, not just Google, not just Facebook -
all of us need to be responsible for the quality of information we consume.
Fake news isn't just your crazy conspiracy believing Uncle Eddie's problem.
It's our problem.
We all live in this brave new world of lightning-fast information.
We can all easily find, consume and share information.
We need to accept the responsibilities of this new information landscape
and develop coping mechanisms to tackle it.
We can even engage in some light and gun-free fact-checking
every now and then.
You could wow your friends online by being the first to figure out
that this supposed image of an Antifa demonstrator
beating a policeman in Charlottesville
was actually an altered photo of Greek protests taken years earlier.
Well, algorithms alone can't solve this problem.
A well-placed, reversed Google image search can certainly help.
I'd like to close with a librarian's fondest wish
with a little prayer:
May we treat every day like it's April Fools' Day.
(Laughter)
We all know how to be skeptical of information.
We do it every year on April 1st,
and we don't allow fake April Fools' stories
to manipulate our emotions or biases.
We just think more critically about information
and our own susceptibility on that day.
There is a lot of misinformation out there.
We've gotten to the point
where the Internet thinks every day is April Fools'.
We just need to catch up and start acting like it, too.
(Applause)