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Combatting Information Overload, Algorithmic Bias, Misinformation, and Disinformation
Combatting Information Overload, Algorithmic Bias, Misinformation, and Disinformation
Many of us are already incorporating readings and discussions on these subjects. One good starting point is “Information Overload Helps Fake News Spread, and Social Media Knows It” by Menczer and Hills from Scientific American.
The Media Manipulation Casebook
The Media Manipulation Casebook
The Media Manipulation Casebook is a very useful digital research platform linking together theory, methods, and practice for mapping media manipulation and disinformation campaigns. This should be a first stop for those wanting to learn about detecting, documenting, describing, and debunking misinformation, disinformation, and media manipulation.
Once Students Understand the Problem, We Need to Teach Fact-Checking Strategies!
Once Students Understand the Problem, We Need to Teach Fact-Checking Strategies!
We highly recommend Mike Caulfield's Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers. You can directly use the online lessons, or you can read his free book online or download it.
Caulfield steers us away from simplistic checklists about "good and bad" kinds of sites (eg thinking it's enough to check for spelling probs, design, .org etc). Instead he recommends the notion of SIFT:
SIFT!
SIFT!
Here's a snippet from his introduction:
This is an unabashedly practical guide for the student fact-checker. It supplements generic information literacy with the specific web-based techniques that can get you closer to the truth on the web more quickly.
This guide will show you how to use date filters to find the source of viral content, how to assess the reputation of a scientific journal in less than five seconds, and how to see if a tweet is really from the famous person you think it is or from an impostor. It’ll show you how to find pages that have been deleted, figure out who paid for the website you’re looking at, and whether the weather portrayed in that viral video actual matches the weather in that location on that day. It’ll show you how to check a Wikipedia page for recent vandalism and how to search the text of almost any printed book to verify a quote. It’ll teach you to parse URLs and scan search result blurbs so that you are more likely to get to the right result on the first click. And it’ll show you how to avoid baking confirmation bias into your search terms.
In other words, this guide will help you become “web literate” by showing you the unique opportunities and pitfalls of searching for truth on the web.
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