7 types of mis- and disinformation, compare and contrast ideas

by | Apr 11, 2018 | teaching, undergraduates | 0 comments

Stop calling it Fake News, 7 types of mis- and disinformation:

https://hkspolicycast.org/stop-calling-it-fake-news-6c86f9647e63

Information Disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policymaking

 

A typology for fake news:

Edson C. Tandoc Jr., Zheng Wei Lim & Richard Ling (2017): Defining “Fake News”, Digital Journalism, DOI: 10.1080/21670811.2017.1360143

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1360143

Then consider the following. (Thanks Dan Rather!)

1. Understand that trusting a news outlet doesn’t mean they’re perfect — no one’s perfect. It means they tell you when they screw up.

2. Don’t rely on just one news outlet.

3. Don’t rely on just the news to understand an issue. Read books. Find the experts. Find out how the issues are discussed outside of news.*

4. If you find yourself agreeing with everything your news outlet says, you’re doing it wrong. If your news doesn’t challenge you, challenge your news.

5. Find a commentator whose politics differ from yours.… If you can’t find such a person, maybe the media is not the problem.

6. Remember that what the news tells you is far less important than what they decide to talk about in the first place.

Rather added closing words in the video.

“The true test of trustworthy journalism isn’t that they never make mistakes. It’s whether they’re willing to challenge the powers that be on behalf of those without power.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2018/04/04/critics-of-dan-rathers-fake-news-tips-brought-up-his-past-but-the-points-are-pretty-solid/?utm_term=.80344d52acbd

*This echos this fascinating summary of a great experiment. The whole post is awesome, but this is from #2.

“The fact checkers were easily able to  avoid all the traps and narrow down on reliable data, while the historians and undergraduates struggled.
Why? Again I’m not going to summarise the whole paper and I urge you to read the full paper because it goes in fascinating detail on how fact checkers think and search as compared to the other groups but the upshot is the fact checkers were very quick to do cross-checking of information on other sites.
The article calls this “Taking bearings”. While the historians and students spent a lot of time studying the webpages they were presented with,  the fact checkers quickly started searching other websites to learn more about the webpages they were studying.”
 
Which pointed me to this terrific infographic from IFLA:
Finally this:
“We will talk about bias later, but to him** list based methods like CRAAP have too many questions and doesn’t guide the user on what are the most critical questions to ask and the order to ask them in.
He draws an analogy with doctors trying to diagnose patents. Doctors now don’t ask questions in a random order or ask patients to just list all the symptoms. Instead they are trained to use decision trees to ask questions in a specific order to narrow down possibilities.
As such, he gives the following specific targeted advice when checking for fake news.
  • Check for previous work
  • Go upstream to the source
  • Read laterally
  • Circle back
Notice, he doesn’t just give you a bunch of evaluation points, but tells you the order to do them. In particular, he follows the strategy of the fact checkers in the Stanford study and prioritizes cross-checking and validation.”