Hello and welcome to Crash Course: Navigating Digital Information.
My name is John Green, and you may know me from my various channels on YouTube, all caps
tweets about Liverpool Football Club, Q&As about books on my website, or elsewhere on
the internet.
I spend a /lot/ of time online.
In fact, in some ways, I live here.
The average American spends 24 hours per week online, but one in four U.S. adults say that
they are online almost constantly.
And I am among them.
I love the Internet--it contains so much helpful information; it connects us to each other;
it allows more people to have a voice in public conversations.
But of course, the Internet is also littered with misleading, sensationalized, and downright
false information.
So, OK.
I only know two jokes.
I’ll tell the other one at the end of the series, but here’s the first one, which
was made famous by the American writer David Foster Wallace:
Two young fish are swimming along one day when an older fish swims past and says, “‘Morning,
kids.
How’s the water?’
The young fish just look at each other for a second and then swim on for a while, and
then one says to the other, ‘What the heck is water?’”
Now I am not the wise old fish of this enterprise.
I am as susceptible to misleading information as anyone.
I tend to focus on information that reinforces my pre-existing worldview, and to passively
ingest all kinds of media while scrolling and swiping endlessly through my feeds.
But I also think we ought to be suspicious of anyone who claims to be the wise old fish
with some special understanding of what we’re swimming in.
Believing that you’re immune to the seductions of false and misleading information is, if
anything, a symptom of being influenced by false and misleading information.
I tell this joke for two reasons: First, because I need you to call me out if I start acting
like the wise old fish, and second, to point out that much of what we’re swimming in
is new and strange--and we’re still figuring it out together.
So, 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.
Other MediaWise project partners include the Local Media Association and the National Association
for Media Literacy Education.
I’m saying all that, and I’ll say it again, because I think it’s important to understand
where this information about information came from.
Over the next ten episodes, we’re going to dive deeply into the feed and share some
tools that are proven to work when it comes to evaluating the quality and accuracy of
information.
We may not figure out exactly what water is, but we’re going to try to learn to improve
our swimming.
Stan, have we rolled the intro yet?
We’re MULTIPLE minutes into the video.
Roll the intro!
INTRO When you want to see what your friends are
up to, you might head to Snapchat, WhatsApp, Instagram or maybe /Fin/stagram.
I don’t get that joke but young people in the office said that it is funny.
And then when you want the news, you may wait to be startled by a push alert from a news
app, or you might go to twitter, or snapchat, or reddit.
And when you need to settle a feud over how to pronounce g-i-f, or possibly gee-i-f, you
just use a search engine.
These habits all feel quite natural to me, but in fact they are part of a huge shift
in how humans find, and produce, and share information.
Just a short time ago, the production of information was controlled by a much smaller group of
people.
Instead of Googling movie times, you had to buy a newspaper or call the movie theater
and risk talking to an actual human being.
To write a research paper, you had to hunker down in the library, not for the outlets and
the free Wifi but for the access to Encyclopedias and books.
Now I should note that there’s a lot of information that’s not available online,
and that is available at your library.
Libraries continue to be incredibly valuable resources.
But these days, anyone can hop online and produce information via their personal website,
social media, or YouTube channel.
Well, actually, no.
Access to digital devices and high-speed Internet is still a real barrier to entry for many
people, which means unequal access to information.
It also means that while it can feel like everyone is participating in facebook or instagram,
in fact billions of people are not part of those conversations.
Still, the barrier for creating and retrieving information is much lower than it was a generation
ago.
Like, when I was a kid, if you wanted to share an opinion with the public, you wrote a letter
to the newspaper and hoped they would publish it.
There was no other way for a stranger to hear your story or your perspective.
Furthermore, as you already know from the three DMs you’ve answered since you started
this video, the internet changed how we communicate.
We can talk across time and space.
We can connect across geographical and political boundaries, we can create organizations and
communities, find people with similar interests, or we can lift people up when they feel alone.
But, when information flows this freely, dangers are inevitable.
Misinformation -- unintentionally incorrect information -- and disinformation -- information
that’s wrong on purpose -- spread quickly online.
As do hate speech and propaganda.
Plus, we can easily create online worlds where we only see information we already agree with,
or that lines up with our point of view.
For instance, if I only followed people on Twitter who were Team Blake, I would have
been pretty blindsided when Garrett won The Bachelorette.
The same could be said for, say, actual elections.
And because we use information for all kinds of decisions, misinformation and disinformation
are powerful.
This is true for small everyday decisions--restaurant reviews affect where we eat--and for much
larger issues, like choosing a college to attend or a place to work..
The quality of our information directly shapes the quality of our decisions.
And the quality of our decisions, of course, shapes the quality of our shared experience
as humans So, when we talk about [air quotes] “bad”
or questionable information, that includes fake news.
The kind of news reporting that is /totally/ false.
Which is a huge problem, especially on social media and during breaking news events.
And it’s a problem across all political ideologies and perspectives.
But we’re not just talking about fake news.
We’re also talking about information that isn’t credible because the author of that
content isn’t an authority on the topic.
Take a blog of serious-sounding fitness tips from someone who loves gym selfies but isn’t
qualified to give professional health advice.
We’re also talking about information that comes from writers or organizations that have
something to lose from the whole truth.
Like a company that sells toasters creating BestToasters.com to publish lists of the “best”
toasters, with their brand at the top of every list.
Or friends who conveniently find videos that supposedly [air quotes] “prove” gif is
pronounced gif when you know that gif is pronounced gif.
But the thing is, quality of information lies on a spectrum.
It’s not a duality, good information and bad information.
It is our job to evaluate the information that we receive, find out where it falls on
that spectrum, and decide how to use it going forward.
But as a species, we are not particularly good at judging the quality of information
on the internet.
In fact, we’ve always been bad at it.
In 2002, a study with over 2,000 participants[1] reported that a website’s /design/ was the
most frequently mentioned factor in judging a website’s credibility.
When asked to choose which of two sites was more credible, 46% of participants used the
look of the website in their evaluations.
Adults and young people alike still typically evaluate information based on factors unrelated
to its content: how it looks, whether they’ve used it before or who referred them to it.
In 2016, our friends at the Stanford History Education Group released a study of over 7,000
middle school, high school, and college students.
When asked to evaluate online information, they based their evaluations on a site’s
look and feel.
They focused on things that a website creator could easily change, like the URL or the About
page.
Spoiler alert: that technique doesn’t work well.
One of the things that participants had to do was judge minimumwage.com, a site about
-- you guessed it -- the minimum wage.
It claimed to bust myths behind the minimum wage, listing ways that raising it would hurt
the economy.
Many students never discovered that that site was by a public relations firm working for
a group that wants to keep minimum wages low.
The firm represents industries that stand to benefit from paying employees less.
In other words, the creator of this website has something to lose by telling both sides
of the minimum wage debate.
So we can’t fully trust them to do so.
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.
During the study, some students also felt the presence of certain types of content on
a website meant that it was more reliable.
Like, when students found something they thought was evidence on a page --
a statistic or an anecdote, perhaps -- they assumed that meant the entire page was
more reliable.
And they often didn’t check the sources, because, you know, it’s the Internet.
People never check sources.
For example, participants also looked at an article that was actually an advertisement
for Shell Oil[2].
70% of high school students rated it as more reliable than a traditional news story.
Why?
Because of this pie chart at the top.
Statistics and infographics are often easy and effective ways to communicate facts and
evidence.
But that doesn’t mean all charts are trustworthy.
Like, here’s another chart.
It says that, 96% of the time, the sky is green.
The /existence/ of this chart is no more proof of its validity than, say, a spooky noise
is proof that your house is haunted.
But back to the Stanford History Education Group study.
Over 80% of middle school students didn’t correctly identify that this was an ad, either,
even though it was labeled “Sponsored Content.”
Sponsored content means a company paid the publication for a space on its site, hoping
to advertise with a post that /looks/ like a news article.
And as you may know, sponsored content shapes a lot of discourse on YouTube.
And it’s effective advertising, because many of us can’t help but believe that what
looks like a news article must in fact be one.
Thanks, Thought Bubble.
You might argue that the students in that study are still learning.
They’ll probably be better at it when they get older.
Well, the Stanford History Education Group also tested historians with PhDs, first year
college students from a pretty fancy university, and professional fact checkers from major
news organizations.
Fact checkers are the people who go through each bit of copy in a news story to make sure
that all the facts are accurate.
There are far too few of them in this world.
But anyway, how effectively would you guess these three groups evaluated information quality?
Although both the professors and the students have achieved academic success and are smart,
thoughtful people, they also didn’t do well with the experiment.
When evaluating online sources, they also focused on superficial things like the sites’
layout, how much content the site had, and whether it linked to other sites.
They focused largely on appearance and the /presence/ of things like evidence and links,
not their content or their value.
And those strategies might have worked in the early days of the internet, but things
are much more complicated, and there are many misleading or false stories cite sources that
either don’t say what they’re purported to say, or are themselves also false.
It’s misinformation all the way down.
So, who /did/ sort out the misinformation from the good info?
The fact-checkers!
I mean, that is literally their jobs, but it’s nice to know they were good at it.
The fact-checkers did well because they employed a variety of carefully honed skills to decipher
fact from fiction.
And we are going to learn those skills together from the fact-checkers in the next episode.
Also the one after that, and the one after that and the one after that.
We’re going to fact checker school!
In the meantime, if you’re interested in learning more about MediaWise and fact-checking,
you can visit @mediawisetips on Instagram.
Thanks for swimming with me.
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://dejanseo.com.au/media/pdf/credibility-online.pdf
[2] https://sheg.stanford.edu/civic-online-reasoning/comparing-articles