How to spot misinformation

0:00- Sorry, my hair is a little bit... I tried to wet it down, but, anyway. So, let's talk a little bit about the information that you might have access to. So, we live, in some ways, in a wonderful time. We have access to more information than any human beings ever had at any point in history.

0:20Now, that comes with a lot of benefits. There's great resources, you can go to places like Khan Academy and learn things for free. You can look up things, you can watch videos from almost anywhere in the world, but, coming with that does come with some problems.

0:35Not all of the information that you have access to is of equal value. So, there's words that you might have heard, like misinformation and disinformation, and those are kind of the worst things out there. Disinformation is when someone intentionally is trying to fool you, and disinformation has gotten super powerful lately.

0:59With things like artificial intelligence and deep fakes, people can literally create a video of something that never happened, and it can look very, very credible. And oftentimes, it'll be just believable enough that someone will say, "Oh my God, I can't believe that happened," especially if it already validates a point of view that they already have, they'll post it on social media, share it with their friends, and, I forgot the exact saying, but they say, you know, something like, "A lie can spread around the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on," and that can happen, and that has happened, and you don't want to be part of that, because that's not good for how we make decisions as a whole.

1:38Even if it validates an opinion that you have, I hope that you aren't someone that says, "I want to validate my opinions, even if a lie is validating." You say, "No, this is my current opinion based on the facts as I understand it, based on as solid data as I can get."

1:54And actually, if there's information, if there's facts that you can authenticate that go against your opinion, then you say, "Wait, maybe I have to rethink it," or, "Maybe I have to modify my opinion some way," as opposed to saying, "Let me go look for disinformation to share with my friends so that more people believe what I believe."

2:13Now, close to disinformation, and this is probably more common, is misinformation. Misinformation is when you, say, share something that you think is true, but it's not. So, for example, say I'm a bad actor, and I actually say, "Hey, I'm going to create a lie in order to make people afraid, or in order for people to have this opinion or that opinion, I will be engaging in disinformation."

2:35And then I share it on social media, and let's say you see that, and you're like, "Oh my God, I can't believe that happened." So, you believe it, but then you share it with all of your friends and family, well, now you are spreading misinformation. And I'll put another category, and I actually think this is where social media has maybe harmed us a little bit, is, or a lot of bit, is there's sometimes truthful information, but if you're only getting truthful information that validates one side or one point of view, you're not getting the big picture.

3:05And also, sometimes there's truthful information, but it's packaged in a way that it skews your point of view. So, we want information that is truthful, that can show both sides or multiple sides. Sometimes there's more than two sides to an issue, and is conveyed in a way that doesn't immediately force some type of opinion.

3:27What do I mean, "Conveyed in a way?" Well, it, you know, some of these political ads, you can see they put it in black and white, and they make the opponent look evil, or you'll see a lot of graphs where they'll say, "Oh, the stock market collapsed today," and they'll show, and it looked like it went from, you know, something to zero, but if you look at what the marker is, that's not zero there, it's some, still some high number, so they just zoomed in on the part that collapsed.

3:50So, if you just look at it, you're like, "Oh my God, the world is ending," but, maybe it's not, maybe it's not. So, the question you should ask is, you know, most of us don't have the power to change all of these actors in the world, but what could we do ourselves in order to protect ourselves and our communities, and frankly, our democracy?

4:06Because if we have the right, if we, the people, are going to be making decisions, we have to be optimally informed here. And so, the number one thing you should do is try to figure out whether what you're looking at is real, and there's multiple ways of doing that.

4:23You can look for other evidence, whether that's through a web search, through, now you can talk to AIs, maybe even talk to some people. There are a few things that I though were real, there was this video of a kangaroo trying to board a flight, which I kind of wanted to believe.

4:38And I actually did share it with some friends, and then they were the ones to point out, "Sal, I can't believe you fell for this. That is a deep fake AI," and I was disappointed, because I'd like to believe we live in a world where kangaroos try to board flights.

4:53But, my friends helped me not spread misinformation. I would argue that was fairly harmless, but, still, I do not want to be the one spreading that type of misinformation. So, when I see something, I try to do multiple news sources. I try to look at news sources, that even if many people believe might have a certain bias, pro, against something, that at least I believe that they're doing, they're validating their work.

5:21So, it could be a lot of the mainstream newspapers, et cetera, et cetera, magazines, other major international groups, they oftentimes will publish data that you can go and validate. And, once again, you know, a lot of these newspapers have their own biases, but the more credible ones will at least try to validate the information.

5:40But, even there, try to get multiple points of view. I actually try to look at newspapers that come at issues from different points of view. I actually try to get news sources from multiple countries. Sometimes it's just, we emphasize, so there's things happening all over the planet that we might not be hearing about here in the United States, and it's interesting.

5:57And it even makes you think about, well, why aren't we hearing it? Is it just we're not interested in it? Maybe someone doesn't want to know, want us to know about it. And so, that's the beauty, we now do have access to all of these things. So, generally speaking, when you look at information or news, pause, see the source, think hard about whether you are getting one side of the story, even if you can validate it.

6:17And social media, as I said, it kind of just tries to reinforce your own point of view, it just tries to keep you clicking. It's trying to manipulate your brain, and so, fight that and say, "You know what? Social media, I'm not just going to be fed the stuff that I like to, that likes," you know, that it's not even stuff you like, sometimes it's stuff that makes you angry, or stuff that makes you, like, really stressed, that's the stuff that keeps you doom scrolling, but say, "No, I'm not gonna fall into that.

6:39Let me look at other sources. Let me see if there's another side to this. Let me see if there's context that I'm missing before I climb the ladder of inference, before I get angry." And this is, one, I think, going to make you a better decision maker, but in aggregate, it's going to make all of us better decision makers, which is crucial in a democracy.