Welcome to I Am Your Target Demographic. Today we're doing something different.
This is a very diverse channel, we cover religion, literature, travel, comic books,
movies, all sorts of things. But today I wanted to talk about misinformation,
so we're going to do a tour through how we ended up where we are now, where truth is subjective
and it's hard to tell what's true and what's not. It's hard to tell what is misinformation, what is
real information. So we're going to do a little journey through time and see what led us here.
The earliest form of misinformation is still
rampant today because it's so simple and yet so effective. It all began with a lie.
Someone discovered that I could say something that isn't true.
People can lie straight to your face
but then they can also lie about other people and that's where we start to get rumors.
And when people hear these rumors, they hear it, they hear it again,
they hear it from someone else, and they start to wonder if it's true.
Now rumors and lies... they're verbal. They're things that people are saying to each other,
there's really no evidence. So eventually this evolved into starting to put those
rumors and those lies onto paper, into things like a poster that might go up,
a pamphlet you might give out... and this is where it evolved into what we call propaganda.
The very quiet rumors that insinuated that someone was a horrible person
became a large flyer saying that they were a horrible person in big bold letters.
Propaganda also veered this lying and rumors away from being solely about an individual.
Propaganda began to lie to people about the state of their country or their town.
You can trust it because you've read it enough times that it must be true.
They tell you that if you believe these things, you are a patriot. You are proud
of your country. You should listen to us, you should believe these things.
And when you hear this lie, you hear this rumor over and over,
you start to see it again and again, written down in pamphlets and books... it starts to feel real.
With the rise in books and the ability to publish things like magazines,
misinformation took a detour into the realm of entertainment. It was fun for some people
to share lies and exaggerations but it's even more fun when you can put their face or edit two
people's pictures together and now put it in the supermarket. Princess Diana, she's really a spy.
Brad and Jen broke up because he's likely a lizard person?
The headlines were wild for magazines like the National Enquirer and Weekly World News. Now some
of this focused on real people and stories that could maybe be true, while others veered into the
wild and extreme. A bat boy could be living in that small town I guess, not impossible.
While these magazines ran rampant for decades, you still see them in
the grocery stores. Did the Kardashians really replace Chloe with a robot? Could that be real?
Quite possibly... I've seen it a few times, it could be true.
Now along with the rise of magazines started to come off-brand journalists,
people that were against the status quo, so we're going to start our own
blog, radio show, whatever medium they can use, we're going to share the truth. And you started
to see more and more of these kind of conspiracy theories gaining traction. With the internet,
it was easier than ever to find these communities and find those theories and
people that maybe believe the same wild things that you did.
Now in order for these journalists (and I say that lightly) to gain traction
they had to oppose the large mainstream media. Right? Because how would people believe me
if ABC News and CNN were telling people the opposite. So now you've started to
see a clash and where people started to deconstruct the mainstream media.
If I know the truth and ABC News is telling me the opposite,
then they must be wrong and if it's malicious, they must be lying. What
happens when an ABC News broadcast tells us that our issue, our concern, is nothing, it's wrong.
So the fight against mainstream media... there's a lot of reasons why people would. Because all
this lying, rumors, propaganda, people do it for a reason. It could be fame, it could be money, could
be power, it could be their own personal gain, whatever it is, they want that to be the truth.
We got 'em, they lied about this thing. They were wrong about this, they misreported on this... So
every error becomes now you can't trust any of them. So this is how the war on mainstream media
began, was picking apart, they've been wrong before you can't trust them. You can trust us.
And the people telling you misinformation, telling you lies, rumors, propaganda,
they want you to believe that. Don't believe them, believe us.
And the common people start to hear this over and over. I can't trust them.
Can I trust them? They start to hear it, they start to believe it,
it starts to become real. So this is why it's more and more important that journalists
get things right, because every flub, every error now is expanded to... you
are representing all of mainstream media. And so it is vitally important to not get things wrong.
So why do people believe the lies and rumors? At a certain point,
once you've maybe fallen into some of these ideas, it becomes your view of the world
and people are obviously much more comfortable with opinions that line up with their view of the
world. And so they hear that and it comforts them. Sometimes it's called an echo chamber,
where you are hearing things that align with your values, you are just being reinforced in what you
believe, and so when something else comes into your echo chamber, it can feel disruptive, it can
feel negative, it can feel jarring, and so people often gladly kind of reinforce misinformation.
If they start to hear "okay the mainstream media, I don't know if I trust them"
then it becomes easier and easier to buy into that and they start to believe it
more and more and it becomes kind of second nature for them to believe that
misinformation. If someone has invested a lot of time and energy into these debates,
they dig in to those beliefs, and you likely know people like this, that believe whatever
it is and there is very little that you can do to change their mind, because they've dug in,
they've reinforced their beliefs, and they said no matter what, this is what I believe.
While the internet was a tipping point and it became much easier to find these communities,
social media made this a thousand times worse.
But these videos are being viewed by normal folks,
who've been told time and time again that the mainstream media is wrong.
But these videos are being viewed by a lot of normal people but they've been told over
and over again that mainstream media lies, so maybe this person
is right and that's how these videos get traction.
And to be clear, you don't need to be a huge influencer to do anything like this.
Anyone can start a Twitter profile and go on there and say anything they want, fact or not fact.
Free speech allows them to do that. So that's the tricky part because you don't know if the person
you're talking to is speaking the truth, you don't know if the thread you're reading is accurate.
Now that a large group of people have seen that thread, they've heard that lie,
it goes around and becomes easier to believe that lie, it becomes easier to believe lies like it.
If I now believe that vaccines don't work, when I see a thread that says you should go get a
vaccine... they don't work! It confronts my world view, I don't like it, it's not true. I'm right.
Even the biggest lies that you'll see come from legitimate websites, .coms, you know email
addresses that look legitimate. It's not as easy as spotting who is lying and who is not anymore.
And to be clear misinformation can come from both sides of the political spectrum,
I guess anywhere on the political spectrum, that everyone has an agenda
and so you have to really know who is telling me this and why should I believe them?
If it's a generic Twitter account that says XYZ, what reason do you have to believe them, right,
so be really careful what you believe, especially in politics, you'll see a lot of this when it
comes to who to vote for, what to vote about... so you'll see these extremes and they both cannot be
true but people often don't know how to decipher which one is the truth or are either of them true.
it's getting harder to know which one to believe.
In theory, we're supposed to trust journalists, who have been trained and schooled on how
to find information, verify information, get information from multiple sources, validate it,
make sure that it's true, and then present it in an unbiased way to the world. We're supposed to
be able to do that but it's getting harder when your information is coming from people that are
not trained, people that are not reading, you know the citations and the sources.
I see something that's buck wild on Twitter and so I share, without even opening the
article. I don't know what's in there but I like the headline, that's what I believe.
Part of the problem is when you don't trust trained professionals who know how to find
information but instead you find a 15 year old person on TikTok that says something is not true
and you believe them. What makes them an expert? You need to be careful about who you trust,
because it's very easy for anyone to look into a camera and tell you something that is not true.
So how do you learn the truth? You investigate. You don't just read the headlines, you open up
the articles that people are talking about. Who is their source? Is that person real? Or
is that person qualified? Is this just a blog entry from a basement conspiracy theorist?
Investigate what other people are sharing.
Again regardless where you are on the political spectrum, everyone has a bias, so you have to
find journalists, you have to find websites, news agencies, that are legitimate. They're calling out
misinformation, they're looking for the truth and you can trust that regardless of whatever side,
they're just trying to tell you the truth of what's happening.
Find someone to trust that is trained, they are legitimate, they are able to investigate.
If your world view, the way that you see the world and everyone around you,
is being influenced and shaped by this agency, make sure it's one that you can trust. So be
careful what you read and careful what you believe because it starts as a lie, it grows into rumors,
it grows into propaganda, it starts to look like websites and groups that you can join and you find
community in some of these rumors and lies and beliefs, which suddenly becomes affecting how
the world is being run. That if you're kind of dug into some of these really misinformed
ideas and that's influencing the way that you're voting and the way that you're making decisions,
you want to make sure that that base is, that foundation is, something you can trust.
Hopefully this helped a few of you think about the way that you receive
news and information and questioning if some of those places are legitimate.
Hopefully this reinforced if you already are doing due diligence to find the truth.
Good luck out there in the world and we'll see you next time!