Fighting Disinformation Can Feel Like a Lost Cause. It Isn't.

[Nevilledog]

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Ross Garber
@rossgarber
“it seems far more prudent to focus most of our efforts on building an educated and resilient public that can spot and then ignore disinformation campaigns.”
This, plus build trustworthy news orgs. (Have reliable sources for realinfo)

nytimes.com
Opinion | Fighting Disinformation Can Feel Like a Lost Cause. It Isn’t.
The right lessons can teach us all how to spot it.
8:12 AM · Mar 8, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/07/opinion/fighting-disinformation-education.html


No paywall
https://archive.ph/DcJik

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about disinformation and how it has been used as a cudgel to dismiss and silence opinions that some people might not like. This doesn’t mean that disinformation isn’t a problem — the speed with which unverified, mislabeled or outright false news came out of Ukraine was a grim reminder of this — but it’s become increasingly difficult to tell the difference between what’s a purposeful attempt to mislead the public and what’s being called disinformation because of a genuine difference of opinion.

Plus, we really can’t trust that technology can solve the trouble it creates. After the 2016 election, the tech giants attempted to fix the disinformation problem by placing labels on potentially harmful posts. This, in theory, isn’t a bad idea if one can somehow corral and then sort every bit of online information. A 2020 study found that the filters for this sort of project could not possibly catch all of the disinformation, which presented a problem: If you can identify only, say, 20 percent of the bad information and label it as such, what happens to the 80 percent? The researchers found that readers would be more likely to assume that the unlabeled disinformation was trustworthy.

Given the difficulty of regulating every online post, especially in a country that protects most forms of speech, it seems far more prudent to focus most of our efforts on building an educated and resilient public that can spot and then ignore disinformation campaigns.

An educational alternative

Over the past five years, Finland has become one of the world’s leaders in disinformation education. High school students there are given a series of political topics and asked to compile lists of stories and commentary from across the internet. They’re then tasked with investigating the veracity of claims. In some schools, even elementary school students are given a “tool kit” that provides them with ways to spot dubious information online.

*snip*

[Biophilic]

1. Back in the late 50s and 60s I was taught to look at the source.

Make sure it's a reliable one and if not, try to figure out or learn as much as possible about both the reliable source as well as one that wasn't apparently reliable. They both tell a story and can be useful for learning the truth, as much as possible.

[Irish_Dem]

2. Given the First Amendment, teaching the public to spot misinformation is the way to go.