KAITLIN HENNESSY: Hello everyone and welcome to navigating
international real and fake news.
I'm Kaitlin Hennessy, the program coordinator
at WSU Global Connections.
Tonight presenting is Lorena O'English,
social sciences librarian at Washington State University.
Her specialties include political science, sociology,
theater, and sports.
Thank you for coming today.
I'm going to turn it over to Lorena.
LORENA O'ENGLISH: Excellent.
We're going to go ahead and get started.
And I'm just going to tell you now
that this presentation is a reprise of one
that I gave earlier this year through the WSU Common Reading
Program here on the Pullman Campus.
And I called it current events and conversation keeping up
with international news.
We'll kind of see why I call it that a little bit more.
And then originally I was just going
to talk about keeping up with international news.
But then towards the end of last year, all of a sudden
there was a lot more talk about this fake news thing.
So I decided, I'd put a little bit of that in the talk,
as well and we'd see how they go.
You can see my email is on the screen oenglish@wsu.edu.
And I'm also available on Twitter @wsulorena.
And if you have questions outside of this webinar,
feel free to contact me and I'll try to respond.
So we'll go ahead and get started.
There we are.
So because this originally started as a Common Reading
presentation, I just want to talk a little bit about why
I was talking about international news
in the context of the Common Reading book I am Malala.
And the reason is that I actually
did some looking in one of our other library's
historical databases.
We have historical database for the London Times going back
to about 1750 or something.
And I just did a little bit of research
about Pakistan and Afghanistan in India-- that whole area--
and found out that it was really fascinating.
In the 1830s, you have Russia and the United Kingdom
at war in that area, and it was called the Great Game.
And Russia won.
And then the United Kingdom tries again in 1880.
And not so great.
And then after World War II, you have the partition of India
where India separates India and Pakistan.
And then later on Bangladesh leaves Pakistan.
And then about 150 years after the Great Game
you have the Soviets invading Afghanistan
and just that whole area has basically, for 200 years,
had all of this chaos.
And it's really interesting to think
about that in the background of Malala's story,
looking at the reason why history has something to say
and history and news has something
to say about why things are.
So that got me thinking about this particular topic.
So I'm going to talk about a couple of framing devices.
The first one I'm going to talk about
is the information diet, which is the information
guide or our media diet.
And this is a really interesting book.
You can read it if you want.
You can check it out from the WSU libraries
or through Summit.
But the guy who writes it basically says,
we don't really have information overload.
We're always told that we have information overload.
But that's not true.
What we really have is something that he
calls information obesity, which is that it's not that we
have too much information.
It's that we are really focusing on the wrong kinds
of information.
We're eating too many Doritos and Cheez-Its and not
enough apples and kale.
And the Doritos is People Magazine.
There's room for people.
And there's room for Doritos.
But if you made that your whole diet all the time,
then you're not really going to be having a good information
diet.
So that's kind of our first framing device.
I see, yeah.
Our second framing device is the notion of the filter bubble.
And we'll talk a little bit more about that in a little bit.
But basically the filter bubble is the idea that, in a way,
we're all kind of like--
it's like being in a hollow tube.
If you're in a hollow tube and you shout something,
the sound reverberates back to you.
And so it makes your sound louder.
And that's kind of what the filter bubble is all about.
If you only talk to people who agree with you,
then what happens is the repetition
of claims, the same thing being told over and over
and over again, essentially rebounds back at you
and reinforces your beliefs.
So you are essentially in a bubble,
and your information has been filtered
so much that your ear bubble gets smaller and smaller
and smaller and you're not really open to information
from other sources.
It's kind of related to the notion of the echo chamber.
In fact, I just reversed those.
So all that I just said was actually the echo chamber
because the filter bubble is actually
something completely different.
And the filter bubble is essentially
the idea of personalization.
It used to be, if you use a search engine,
if you used AltaVista or Yahoo, everybody had the same search
engine experience.
But in the last number of years, search engines
have had personalization.
And so what happens is the more you
click on certain types of links, the more likely
they are to send similar links to you.
And you say, well, I can avoid that.
I cannot log into my Google account when I do Google
searches.
So Google doesn't know what I'm doing.
But that's not true.
Even if you're not logged into your Google account,
there are a number of tells that the browser can pick up on.
The search engine can pick up on what browser you're using,
where are you located if you're on a PC.
It pretty much always has location on.
And so it's able to actually track, perhaps not
you precisely, but that computer or someone
in your general area.
And the result of this personalization
is that it sort of enhances the notion of the echo chamber
because you end up seeing the same sorts of things.
They're being pushed to you because you're
living in a bubble and everything's
been filtered by the fact that I like
clicking these sorts of links so that
is what Google is going to push to me based
upon its personalization algorithms.
And it's not just Google that has algorithms.
Facebook does this.
All sorts of websites do this.
The more they build up a profile of you
or your computer or your geographical area,
the more they kind of constrain what they actually
are going to share with.
So that becomes an issue.
We're going to talk about one more framing device.
And that's the notion of confirmation bias.
And I really love this cartoon because this cartoon explains
confirmation bias absolutely.
I've heard the rhetoric from both sides.
It's time to do my own research on the real truth.
And literally the first link that agrees with you
you're going to believe.
And so you're looking for something
that's going to reinforce what you already believe.
And that's just a natural human tendency.
And at the same time, you're avoiding or not
noticing things that might disagree with you.
And that's called confirmation bias.
So you can say I did a search, everything agreed with me,
let's go ahead and do this and not
understand that you're missing a lot of things.
And that's just a natural bias that all of us
have but something that we really
have to be aware of because it is so natural that confirmation
bias happens constantly and we don't even notice it.
So we're going to go back to the filter bubble a little bit.
And I'm not going to do this for this talk.
I don't have a lot of time, and I'm
kind of moving back between links.
So I'm kind of doing some things abbreviated.
But everything that I show you is going
to be made available to you.
You can actually find the links in this presentation.
And you'll see, at the end, that I've
created a library guide that has all the links, as well.
So don't feel like you need to write down any links
or worry about that because they're all
going to be there for you.
But we're going to see that it's a little awkward sometimes
moving between the PowerPoint and the internet.
So I just wanted to minimize that a little bit.
So I really recommend watching this TED Talk.
I think I got the year wrong.
I think I said 2013.
It's actually 2011.
But Eli Pariser basically came up with this idea.
Then he wrote the book based upon it.
And it's a really interesting read.
And here's the thing.
Even if you don't watch the TED Talk or read the book,
you can find enough information about the filter
bubble online to really get a good idea of it.
And the more you read about it, the more
you're going to realize that it's actually really true.
And we're going to see an example of that.
So what it'll do-- let's cross our fingers
and see if this works.
I'm going to hit a couple taps, and we are
going to go to the internet.
And we are going to look at our first tap, which is--
this is a project from the Wall Street Journal.
And this is blue feed, red feed.
And what they did was they created two separate Facebook
feeds with the kind of resources that someone
on the blue or more liberal side might
choose versus someone on the conservative, more redder site.
And you can see, if we go ahead and look at this-- let's go
ahead and choose.
Here, I'm in the Affordable Care Act right now.
And you can see, based upon what shows up in somebody's Facebook
feed, these are the sorts of links that we see.
And we can see a very big difference
between our blue feed and our red feed.
And this is an example of the filter bubble at work.
If all you subscribe to are web sites
and feeds of a particular persuasion,
then that's what you're going to see.
And you can see that the realities diverge.
And it's hard to believe that you're actually
dealing with people who are living in the same existence
because their views are so disparate.
So that's the filter bubble.
And there's a need, cross out of it, and think about some
of the other sorts of things that are out there.
So we're going to move back to the power point.
And this was successful.
Excellent.
And let's go on and talk about the next thing.
So thinking about this notion of filter bubbles,
I've been talking about filter bubbles
in the context of personalization and algorithms.
But there are other filter bubbles
that we deal with that are based upon things that
don't have anything to do with what particular site we click
on in an internet browser.
One thing is ideology.
And you get a sense of that looking
at the website for a red feed and blue feed.
One thing is your status or your situation.
You're college students.
Well, I remember when I was a college student in the 1980s.
I read my campus newspaper religiously,
but it had very little international news
or national news.
And there was a lot stuff going on that I was really interested
in, but I also wanted to know what
was going on in my own state.
But a lot of times, I just didn't know.
And I was always wondering.
And occasionally I'd buy The New York Times.
But it was a little bit intimidating to me
at that time.
It was also expensive.
So I was really happy when USA Today came out
because it actually provided me with a way
to keep up with news a little bit more
in a more affordable way.
So being a college student, being busy, not necessarily
maybe always having time for news,
maybe focused on other sorts of things--
that can kind of be a little bit of a bubble
for what you're doing.
Geography can matter, as well.
I'm in Pullman.
And I don't know where you all are.
But sometimes you're in a big city,
like Seattle or New York or an international city.
Sometimes you're in Pullman, Washington.
Our library might be a little bit smaller.
There might be a few less sorts of resources and opportunities
that there might be in bigger areas.
So sometimes that might limit the ideas that I'm exposed to.
Financial situation.
If I don't have a lot of money and I can't afford cable,
I can't watch the news--
I'm going to miss out.
And I see someone agreeing to me.
If you're in an area where you don't
get exposed to the greater world,
then you miss out on a lot of things.
I missed out on a lot of things in the early 80s,
a lot of things in the early 90s.
And even now I still don't understand
what was going on in Bosnia in the 1990s.
That just went right out of my head.
So our financial situation matters.
And so the effect of all of this, the effect and the effect
of this, is to reinforce the notion of the filter
bubble and the echo chamber because your inputs are
constrained and so you make up your mind based
upon less information.
So what happens when you have competing filter bubbles?
Because that can happen.
You might believe in different things
that just cognitively don't work.
So you have cognitive dissonance.
You just can't deal with all of it.
And you just go back and turn on Netflix
and watch Ace Ventura Pet Detective
for sixth or seventh time and say to,
today is a day for information obesity.
And let's just go on with it.
So that's just real life.
That's the way it always works.
So it's talk a little bit about sources.
And the first thing that I want to talk about is, you're busy.
You're busy.
You don't have a lot of time.
You're students.
You may be parents.
You maybe deal with elderly parents.
You might have a job.
You might have all those things at the same time.
So you've got a lot going on.
So I'm going to show you some resources
of minimal to increasing complexity.
And if you just want to start with one or two of them,
that's great.
If you want to look at some of the more expansive sources I
have, that's great, too.
Most of these are going to be from a US point of view,
but not all of them.
And that's a really good way to think about breaking out
of the filter bubble or the echo chamber,
by looking at how news is being perceived in other countries
through different sorts of eyes.
And we'll see that we also have some international sources, as
well, because, after all, this is a talk about keeping up
with international events.
And I want to be really clear.
This is not anything remotely, remotely at all a full list
or even a best list.
It's not.
These are things that I've been exposed to.
These are things that I've learned about-- some pretty
recently.
And these are things that I thought
I wanted to share because they seemed to have some value.
So a few things I want to think about.
One of the things you're going to see
is that you're going to notice that I really definitely
have a bias towards traditional sources.
And there's a couple of reasons for that.
One of these is that I'm an old--
I was born in 1963.
And so I really still think kind of analog
rather than digital sometimes.
But the other reason is that I'm a librarian.
And there's some things about traditional news sources
that I really value.
So I just want to talk about some of these things.
And these things aren't limited to traditional news sources.
These are also things that we can think about
as we look at more modern news sources,
as we look at news from blogs or news
from different sorts of websites,
or news that we hear on a podcast, et cetera.
These are just some things to think about.
What is the notion of a code of ethics?
And here I'm going to do my little thing here.
But go over and switch to the Society of Professional
Journalist Code of Ethics.
And this is something that's important to me.
This is the notion that, if you are a reporter,
that you subscribe to a certain code of ethics--
and not always.
People actually err.
People make mistakes.
People cheat.
People lie in journalism, as well as any other profession.
But still there really is this idea
of a code of ethics that colors what news is
and what news is about and the kind of things that people do.
The second thing is the notion of expertise.
And if you're a journalist, if you
are a reporter who's been covering a beat for awhile,
you really know.
You know your community.
You know your issues.
You know what's going on.
You have you developed expertise over time
as you learn how to do your job.
Sure, if you start off as a cover reporter,
you don't know very much.
But over time you learn things.
And whether you're an investigative reporter
or a crime reporter, given a couple of years,
most reporters in the community are really
going to know all the dirt, where all the bodies are
buried, and what all the issues are, and who to talk to.
And these are really important skills--
knowing your community and knowing the areas
upon which you actually write your stories.
Curation.
Curation is big for me.
So I don't want to be hit with a huge amount of stuff.
I would be happy to see the top picks.
So I like a well curated list.
Not everybody does.
Some people like to get a lot of stuff thrown at them
and have the fun of choosing what they want to see.
So I'm going to show you some resources that are curated,
as well as some resources that just throw a lot of stuff
at you and let you choose.
But I value curation.
And curation just means that these stories are selected
in place for a particular purpose,
that they have something to say, that they establish
a story, a narrative, along the way,
and they're going to choose this story and not that story.
Now sometimes that can be problematic
because sometimes things can be overcurated,
leaving out important things.
Sometimes also curation can move more into biased content.
So you have to watch out for that.
But for the notion of it, I think
it's a good place to start.
There's also the notion of archiving.
I want to know that I can go back.
And if I'm reading a story and I think to myself,
hmm, I think I read about something about
that five years ago, I want to know
that I can go back to that.
If we're talking about internet resources,
there's a really cool resource that I
don't include on this called the Wayback Machine
for the Internet Archive.
And if you've never looked at it, write that down--
Internet Archive Wayback Machine-- because it's amazing.
What it enables you to do is to go to any website,
let's say, WSU's website and see what
it looked like at various points over the last 15 or 20 years.
Well, it's really interesting to look and see
what the WSU webpage looked like in 1997
compared to what it looks like in 2017.
So not everything is covered by the Internet Archive.
And it doesn't cover every day.
But it does let you go back and archive the web,
see what the web looked like in the past.
And that can be really important as you're trying to figure out
whether something is true.
Sometimes what happens is they say, oh, it's like this,
it's like this, and it's like this.
And you're like, no, it's not.
And I can prove that.
Yes somebody else remembered that I talked about that.
You can tell that I love the Wayback Machine because I
really want to talk about that.
But in addition to the Wayback Machine for online sources,
let's also talk about archiving physical copies of newspapers
in databases and on the web and in microfilm
so that you can go back to it and get information.
And I think that's a really important thing so
that things are not ephemeral.
Sometimes on the web, a site exists
and then three weeks later it's gone.
And with traditional sources, all that information there
is a paper trail or an online paper trail
that you can follow to get information.
Fact checking.
That's a really big one.
Newspapers have fact checking departments-- newspapers, news
magazines-- they have fact checking departments
and they have lawyers.
And they know how to use both of those.
So it's more likely that the information being provided
is legitimate than perhaps some other sorts
of nontraditional sources that may not
have fact checkers or lawyers making
you use the fact checker.
Multiple viewpoints are really important.
Reporters are trained to actually try
to get multiple perspectives so that you
can see that every story has different sides.
Now that can be problematic sometimes.
Sometimes there really is just one particular or two ways
to look at things.
And then you say, oh, I have to go find somebody else.
And so you find somebody on the fringe.
And that just messes up the whole context
of what you're trying to say.
There's actually a name for that.
It's called false equivalence.
And it's like sometimes you say, well, we
have to provide equal time to this theory and that theory
when one of the theories is clearly a crackpot theory.
So you can go a little bit too far with multiple viewpoints,
and you can go a little bit too far with all of this.
But in general multiple viewpoints is really important
because you have to recognize, we
want we don't want to have our new source be an echo chamber.
We want to recognize that there are competing viewpoints
out there with differing perspectives.
Retractions.
Sometimes things are printed wrong.
So retractions being printed or put online,
being archived-- so you can go back and find them later--
being prominently viewable so that they can be identified.
It's really nice if a news outlet
has a public editor or an ombudsman whose job is
to basically hold the news resource's feet to the fire
and make sure that they're properly serving their readers.
Also want separation of advertising and editorial.
Sometimes bloggers will review products and not
tell you that they were given that product for free.
So I want to be sure that there is a distinction between what
I read on the editorial page and what I read in the news page.
I also got follow up.
One of the things about traditional news sources
is you do have people with beats, and you do
have time to actually continue a story across weeks, months,
years, et cetera, in series.
So you can kind of build up a way for you
to continue to learn more about the story
as it progresses over time.
I also want investigative reporting.
Investigative reporting identifies
some of the hugest disasters and calamities and miscarriages
of justice of over time.
But the thing is, investigating reporting
is also very expensive.
And it requires resources, including
things like foreign bureaus.
I value newspapers of record like the New York Times
or The Washington Post or The London Times
or The Economist that have foreign bureaus in places
like London or Venezuela or Nairobi or Pakistan
so that I can get the viewpoint from people who are actually
embedded in a community and not the viewpoint of someone
who's sitting in the United States,
trying to get a sense of what people are talking
about in those various places.
But the thing is that not all of these elements
are always going to be present.
And also there are failures.
Every single thing-- we have failures of ethics.
We have failures of curation.
We have failures of multiple viewpoints.
We have failures of investigative reporting.
All those things are going to happen.
But being aware of those and looking out
for those sorts of resources is something to think about.
So now we're going to start talking about some sources.
But one thing I wanted to mention
is you're going to see that I'm actually
a big fan of sources that provide summaries,
just the basics of the news.
And so I had thought about this a little bit.
Do they provide value to other people?
And one of the things I thought about
is a journalistic tradition called the five W's and an H,
which is how, when a journalist writes an article,
all the important information is at the top.
That's the most important information.
And then as you go further down the article,
you're actually giving still crucial information
and then more detail and more detail and more detail.
And so that structure is really helpful.
And snippets, it's usually the same thing.
Snippets, or summaries, are usually
going to be what's continued in the lead, the most
important information.
And journalists are trained to look at who, what, where, why,
when, and how--
all of those.
Those are the important things are supposed
to be in the first couple of paragraphs and the snippets
to give you the most important information.
So even if you just read the first paragraph or a snippet
or a summary, you're still going to have an idea of something
that's going on.
You still have values to learn something.
Something else, by the way, that journalists
are trained to think about in the context of who, what,
where, why, and how, of course, is the old Watergate dictum--
follow the money.
And that's always the important one.
So let's talk about some sources.
And I started off as summaries because that's
the very first thing I'm going to do.
This is one of my favorite things.
This is a relatively new service called The Skimm.
It's available by email.
There is an iOS app that you pay for.
That's how they monetize.
And it's freely available on the web.
And you can subscribe to it.
You can also follow them on Facebook.
They are a daily email blast.
And their tagline is making it easier for you to be smarter--
and mostly domestic content, some international content.
They provide summaries, links out other sources.
The links will generally provide you sources
that are freely available.
Heavily curated by two journalists.
And they have a very definite tone.
And they're very snarky, very fun--
an enjoyable thing to read in the morning.
There's a six week archive back on the web--
thinking about archiving.
And they also have The Skimm guides, that are explainers.
And you know this is just a really low threshold way
to start.
Just sign up for The Skimm, and you'll
be able to actually have a good idea of what's
going on with some of the different perspectives that
are around it.
So that's a good place to start.
Now I also want to talk about The New York Times.
And I know everyone's familiar about The New York Times.
But it is a newspaper of record.
There are other newspapers of record.
There's The Washington Post.
There's the LA Times, The Chicago Tribune.
But The New York Times is certainly one of the oldest.
And one of the things that I'm not sure people realize
is that they have a very amazing educational rate, which
is just like--
digital access $1 a week.
And so I think it might even be less than that.
But it's a really good deal.
$1 a week-- that's certainly less than you spend on coffee.
And you'll get web access and smartphone and tablet apps.
And I really recommend it.
I do it myself.
And I love it.
I love having access to it on my phone and on my tablet,
as well as on the web.
But you can also get access to it through the WSU libraries.
And I've given you a link there.
And that will also be on the library guide.
Now I want you to look at the screen.
And you'll notice, if we look over there,
that there is this little thing over here in the corner that
says world.
And most of the time, we really don't pay much attention
to that fact.
Most of the time, frankly, we don't pay attention
to any of these things on the very top.
We just start going down, which is the way people
look at web sites.
But let's go ahead and see what happens when you actually
click on that World link because something that happens
is interesting.
So let's go back to the late 19th century in Paris.
And there was a journalist there who
started a paper called The Paris Herald.
And it was very popular, especially with ex-pats
because they did a really good job of kind
of covering United States news and international news.
And over time, it became The Herald Tribune and then
The International Herald Tribune.
People like Ernest Hemingway read it and wrote for it.
And it was really important newspaper
in the early part of the 20th century.
And The New York Times bought it some years ago.
And they've incorporated it into The New York Times' site.
So what you don't realize is The New York Times
is really two different papers.
It's The New York Times and The New York Times World,
and they're actually kind of distinct because they actually
have some different people involved with them.
And the thing is that some of this content
is incorporated into the regular New York
Times and the physical paper.
But a lot of it isn't.
So there's a lot of content beyond what
you're going to see in the physical newspaper.
So I'm going to go ahead and do our little thing here.
And we're going to go look at it very quickly.
Let's go find The New York Times.
Here we are.
So here I am in The New York Times world.
And you can see there's some basic sorts of things, the kind
of things what's going on.
And then I can choose.
I can look at things-- let's go ahead
and look at what's happening in the Middle East.
And I can click on this.
And like I said, this is going to provide me New York Times
quality articles but from different sorts of perspectives
looking at different sorts of areas.
And most of these articles are not
going to be available on the regular paper.
So I'm getting different sorts of stuff.
So let's go back to our power point.
The other thing that I wanted to mention
is that you can also follow The New York Times
World or individual journalists' accounts on Twitter
or Facebook.
And the nice thing about The New York Times and social media
is that, like many sources, they give you
a certain number of free articles a month
if you don't subscribe.
It can be anywhere from one to 10.
In The New York Times case, it's 10.
But with the social media articles,
generally, if you have used up all of your 10 sources
that month.
If you click on a link from Twitter Facebook,
you'll generally be able to read the article, which
is really kind of nice.
I particularly like their newsletters.
Let's see if I actually included that link here.
I'm going to go back over here.
And we're going to go find The New York Times' newsletters.
These are great.
These are email things that you can sign up for.
And the Interpreter covers world news.
You can see some of them are regional.
Here's Canada, another world one.
And these are really great because they give you
these little snippets.
They give you a sense of what you
need to know understand what's going on in the world--
not a huge amount of detail, just the basics.
If you want more detail, you can click on a link
and read the full story.
But at least in the snippet, you're getting the basics.
So we're going to go back over here.
So I'm going to progress a little bit.
Reuters News Service.
Reuters is actually a news service
that provides content to the newspapers.
But they have a freely available site
for members of the general public, as well.
And let's go ahead and take a look at it.
And let's see.
Here we are.
And you can see, if I go over here--
and you can see business, markets, et cetera--
I can go over and choose--
I'm looking at the United States' edition,
but they have editions for all these other countries, as well.
And they're going to be in the actual language of the country.
So that helps me see news from different perspectives.
And Reuters is high quality.
It's very legitimate.
They have reporters all over the world.
And they provide news, as well as
podcasts that you can watch online or download, RSS feeds.
And they have a really nice little app
that you can download.
I have it on my own phone.
And it's really cool to get used to that.
And they also have an ethics statement
with their trust principles.
The next one--
I just want to make one more comment about email blasts.
Some people say oh I get too much email.
I can't stand to have another email.
And I'm, like, that's really true.
We do get too much email.
But, again, it goes back to that notion of information obesity.
If I actually cut back a little bit on my winter [INAUDIBLE]
and other sorts of email lists that I'm on
and actually did a few more news lists,
I would actually be more informed.
I don't have to read them every day.
But I subscribe to a number of these.
I really like Foreign Policy Interrupted,
which is women in the foreign policy community .
And it's basically a source that amplifies their voices.
The Economist puts out some really good newsletters.
Here's a really nice one that keeps me up [? on things. ?]
Foreign policy--
I actually like foreign policies lists so much that I actually
subscribed to it.
I got really good education rate.
And the thing is that think tanks and research institutes
and policy organizations and opinion
journals on every side of the political spectrum
generally have these sorts of newsletter blasts.
So go to a site that looks interesting to you
and look to see what kind of publications-- and they
probably going to have an email newsletter
blast that's going to give you access to things for free.
A couple more things--
Public Radio International.
This is just amazing.
Let's go a take a look at this one over here.
And let's go find it.
Sorry, I'm kind of squinting.
I don't have my glasses, and I'm navigating two screens.
But I love PRI.
It's just great.
And you can see, one of the things that it has is--
I can go over here, these links over here in the corner.
I can click on Global Post.
And this is going to give me the latest stories.
And I can click on these and get the full story.
But I get a wide variety of stories
that I wouldn't otherwise have seen.
And if I would rather get them in audio format,
I can different stories as podcasts.
And I can watch them online or download them.
And you can see, I can also look at the sections.
And there's a wide variety of topics and sections.
So this is actually a really good way
to keep up with international news.
Next thing we're going to look at is Global Voices.
And Global Voices is a different sort of tool.
Go back here.
And this is another source that's
going to give us things from different perspectives.
And you can see--
Africa, America-- and I can go up here and see it
in different-- if I speak another language,
I can actually read news in these languages, as well.
So right now we're looking at the English edition.
And, again, I'm getting international news
that I probably wouldn't see in my own newspaper
or through my own filter bubble.
This really breaks my filter bubble, breaks my echo chamber,
and exposes me to a lot of different things.
And I can just skim the latest stories.
And I can subscribe to their email blast
or follow them on Facebook or get a daily email.
Or I can look at these more intently if I wanted you.
Look at our next resource--
Unfiltered News.
This one is just the coolest thing
because what this does is they actually have this--
it's this technology partnership with Google News.
And what they do--
let's get rid of this--
is they look at Google News, and they
look at what stories are not being talked
about in a particular area.
So let's go ahead and skip the tutorial here.
I'm going to choose the United States.
And you can see, these are topics that are less
reported in the United States.
And I could choose different countries if I want.
Or I could use this little filter bubble sort of thing.
And these are some of the stories that I can see it
if I'm interested in looking at what's going on
with FC Barcelona, you'll see that this actually
has to do with soccer.
Because this is actually pulling things
from guilt from Google News.
So there's a random aspect of this that is just really cool.
And the way they figure out what is not being talked about
is they have Google News' data to draw upon,
and they're actually able to look and see
what's being talked about, what links are being clicked
in Spain or Egypt versus the links that are being clicked
in the United States.
So this a really great way to see how people are looking
at news in different ways.
We really used to the echo chamber of the United States
news.
And we forget about the fact that everybody has news.
So how do we incorporate this into our lives
and our practice?
So I really believe in low key, low threshold
ways of doing this.
I don't want it to be too elaborate.
So I like my email newsletters.
I like my read it later apps.
I used a really cool tool called Instapaper.
And this is an example of it.
If I find an article, I can use a bookmark link to save it.
Once I've saved the article, I can read it online.
And I read it in this beautiful format.
No ads.
The links all work.
I see pictures.
And it just is easier to read.
I can increase the font if I want.
I can make it more narrow.
I could do all sorts of things.
I could even use just this little click over here
and have it read out loud to me while I'm
on the elliptical trainer or I can send it to my Kindle
and read it that way.
So these are all weigh--
And since I started using Instapaper,
I read so many more news articles
because I read them when I want to not when I see them.
But I save them and read them later,
and I read them without the ads and in a much more easy to read
format.
So this is really handy.
Or you can also use digital radio and podcast
because one of the things is that all of us
end up spending a lot of time standing in line.
So while we're standing in line, why not
quickly catch up on our read it later apps or quickly listen
to a podcast.
And for a lot of these things, you
don't even have to have an internet connection or a lot
of juice in your phone.
My Instapaper updates every time I'm on a Wi-Fi network.
And so even if I don't have Wi-Fi,
I can open it up and see the most recent thing
that I saved and actually just go ahead and start reading it.
So I have significantly expanded the variety of articles
that I've read and actually reading
them, which are two very different things, by using
this, by looking for a way to actually incorporate
this in a way that's easy.
I really believe in easy.
I don't believe in complexity.
So the way most of us get news is through aggregators.
We get it through-- it's not going to sites like PR directly
or Global Voices, but we get it through links on Flipboard
or Google Play or Facebook or Twitter.
And that kind of brings us into the notion of fake news
because those aggregator sources are more likely to actually
show us fake news sites-- either links
that people share or the kind of things that in Facebook show up
on the news feed to the side.
So let's talk about that a little bit.
When we talk about fake news, we're
not talking about The Onion.
Three years ago, if you asked me about fake news,
I would have said, oh, you mean The Onion.
But I'm not talking about these sorts of charming humor sites
that actually say a lot about modern times
in the context of humor.
I'm talking about something that is a little bit more not
as sweet as The Onion.
So I like this typology of fake news
that's about done by Claire Wardle writing in the Columbia
Journalism Review.
And she talks about authentic material
used in the wrong context.
And that, for example, might be a picture or some video
of a protest march in one country
that is being claimed to actually be
happening in another country.
Or we might have imposter news sites.
I almost fell for that.
I found something really interesting.
And it looked like it was from ABC.
And I'm like, oh.
But it wasn't from ABC.
It was from abc.com.co.
And they had taken some of the branding elements from ABC.
And so you wouldn't know that it was
fake news if you didn't really carefully look at the URL.
So it's really easy to get [INAUDIBLE] false by that.
Fake news sites-- the kind of things
that we think about when we think about fake news.
The pope is behind Donald Trump or some of the other things
that we saw last year.
Manipulated content-- that might be photographs.
A couple of years ago, I did a Common Reading talk
about manipulated photo--
it is very easily fooled by these sites.
That's very true.
It's very easy to be fooled by manipulated photographs.
But there are ways to get around that.
I did a talk on, how can you tell
whether those crazy pictures in your Facebook feed are real.
And there's actually tools that help you
trace the provenance of images.
And those are just some really cool tools that you can use.
Then we also have parody content,
which would be like fake Steve Jobs or fake Donald Trump.
So we're not going to talk about this very much because you
guys all know that fake news is not really fake news.
Fake news is really misinformation, disinformation,
distortion, and lies.
And it's done intentionally for a profit.
Those Macedonian kids, they made over $60,000
because people clicked on the links they made.
And they made all this money in ad revenue.
So it's very attractive.
And they make this fake news to be attractive.
It's carefully written to appeal to the sorts of things
that make us actually click on links.
It's made to be delicious.
It's made for you to want to read it and want to share.
It's very intentional.
And it's not just in the United States.
Fake news is happening in Germany.
It's happening in India, where they're
using not Facebook but the more commonly
used WhatsApp as a way.
So basically fake news will adapt
itself to fit the technology that's made available.
And the thing is it's confusing.
And one of my favorite tools is actually
the Pew Center for Internet Technology and Society.
And they do really good surveys.
They do high quality surveys.
Take a look at them.
Just do a Google search for Pew Internet,
and you'll find their site.
In their data, they have wonderful, good social science
data.
And their data sets are available for you to download.
So that's kind of the opposite of fake news.
This is one of their surveys.
And you can see that the majority
says fake news has left Americans
confused about basic facts.
But at the same time, they're also
confident in their ability to recognize fake news.
That's a little bit untrue.
There's a really interesting psychological theory called
the Dunning-Kruger effect.
And the Dunning-Kruger effect says that people actually
think they're better at things than they really are.
Because it's our own personal echo
chamber about who we are in a way,
our own little filter bubbles.
But the fact is really that most of us
have been fooled by fake news and most of us
have shared fake news.
Sometimes we don't have all the skills.
This one is from a really interesting study
done from Stanford just last November.
They say our digital natives may be
able to flip between Facebook and Twitter
while simultaneously uploading a selfie to Instagram.
But when it comes to evaluating information
that flows through social media channels,
they are easily duped.
And this was a really easy study talking about all this.
So what do we do?
So here we have another survey from Pew.
And they asked people, who should
take the responsibility for stopping
the spread of fake news.
And people said, it should be a government.
It should be social networking and search engine sites.
And yet it should also be us.
So let's talk about this a little bit.
The government-- we have in the Czech Republic and in Germany
and in Finland--
we have governments that are actually
setting up fake news units.
And that might be a little bit problematic.
I'm a little bit disturbed by that
because it really can be this notion of state sponsored spin.
You attack fake news by in a way framing it
in a way that might also be fake.
And I love this little graphic from The Washington Post
about how Russia used news in the Czech Republic.
And you can see how it makes its way all the way
through the extremists, all the way down
to the moderate politicians and general citizenry.
Social networking sites-- so Facebook.
Actually you probably saw--
I think it was last week when you
logged into Facebook-- there are tips to spot fake news.
And they are working with fact checking groups
to automatically flag fake news, the kind of stuff
that you see in the sidebar menu.
They're also changing their advertising practices
to make it less remunerative for people
to actually do fake news, doing intensive education efforts,
and making it easier for you to report if you see this.
Is this the best way?
Not necessarily.
So there is a professor at WSU Vancouver called Mike Caulfield.
And we're going to learn a bit more about it in just a second,
too.
Let's see if I can find this.
Yes.
He actually argues that it's actually
harmful to news literacy.
And his point is that a lot of this stuff
is too difficult to do.
And we should actually really more
focus on network activities.
And we'll talk about that a little bit later.
I'll give you some resources to explain where he's
coming from in different ways.
We also have Google doing the same thing.
And Google actually has this little fact check thing.
You can see, this is a search I did--
Obama, Kenya, birth certificate.
And you can see, I do that search
and the first thing that comes up with something from Snopes.
And it's even going to tell me Fact Check
by snopes.com is false.
And they're also trying to, again,
change the rules for ad revenue.
And in the long term, people are thinking
about technical solutions.
One really cool thing is the Trust Project.
And the Trust Project--
many journals have recognized that people have, because
of things like echo chamber and filter
bubble and cognitive bias, some people
have lost their faith in the news.
So the Trust Project is this big project
being done to create real sorts of modes and indicators
to actually work to regain the trust of the American people.
We also have a number of browser applications.
I don't have time to show these.
But this is pronounced awesome.
This one is from the University of Indiana.
This is the one, if I were going to use these,
I would actually use this one--
Hoaxy-- more than some of these others.
Because the problem that some of these others,
I'm not really so sure about.
There are a lot of these fake news detectors.
And I really worry about sorts of these--
I think that they are good starting points.
But I certainly wouldn't use them all the way.
But there are good starting points.
This is such a new thing.
Even though fake news has been around forever,
this iteration of it, the way it can spread like wildfire,
is new.
And it's going to take while for these sorts of tools
to actually really make a difference.
There's also really cool fact checking sites.
We're all familiar with Snopes.
But there's a really cool thing called the International Fact
Checking Network because it turns out--
Let's ahead and find that.
Where is my international fact checking network?
Here we are.
--that fact checking is happening all over the world.
And so this is actually this really cool project
that is gathering the fact checking
arms in various countries and making it sort
of an international effort, which I
think it's a really cool thing.
And you can see this map actually
shows you all the different places that have fact checking.
And here's some of the services available in Australia,
the charmingly named Crikey, Get Fact and also a reminder
that fact news is not just about fake news.
It's not just about politics.
There's a lot of fake news about medicine topics.
And you can see here, we have the Medical Observers Metafact
as a way to talk about that sort of different disciplinary
aspect to fake news.
And then finally there's us.
So one of the things is that, when it comes to us,
one of the things we have to kind of think about
is looking outside of our Facebook feed,
not just the things that show up on a feed.
But if we have a friend who has a different political
persuasion, maybe go look at his or her site
and see what he or she is sharing, not just the stuff
that's showing up on your feed.
Because remember personalization, filter
bubble-- all that sort of stuff is happening.
You want to memorize the Breaking News Consumers
Handbook.
One of the things it says is don't trust stories
that site another news outlet as the source of the information.
Or don't trust a story where, if you go look it up,
you see it repeated over and over and over again.
Because sometimes what happens is
something like a game of telephone, where stories--
that's a good question.
I will answer that.
--where stories basically get distorted all on the way
and become more and more crazy and wild.
Or you actually have networks of fake news people
who are actually repeating what each other is saying so
that, if you say, oh, I want to triangulate and see
if there are other sources that agree with this,
you'll see exactly the same thing.
So when I say triangulate, I mean focus more
on these traditional sources because you say, well,
if somebody is showing up on Twitter or Facebook
and it's not on The Washington Post or The New York Times.
You might say, first of all, they've got to scoop.
And is it really that important to see it immediately?
I would kind of wait and see what more traditional media
outlets are saying.
Second of all, it could be very sketchy.
And third of all, it might just had happened
and they just really lucked into an amazing scoop.
So I'd be really careful and really
think about this Breaking News Consumer Handbook.
But you really need to think about expanding your filter
bubble.
Some people say, I have enough friends
of different political persuasions.
I'm going to see it all on my Twitter feed or my Facebook
feed.
Again, they don't because of personalization.
This really cool study that just came out
was basically people who say the news will find me
through social media.
That's not true.
They don't see all the news.
They see very definitely filter bubble news.
One of the things you really want to think about
is reading the full story.
This actually is a link from Slate Magazine.
And they look at data from an organizational called
Chartbeat.
So every time you click on a link,
every time you save something to Instapaper, all
that is being logged.
And Chartbeat sees that.
And Chartbeat can actually see where people actually
turned away from a site.
And it turns out that, if you're looking
at an article on the web, a lot of people
don't make it past 50% of the article.
Now remember we have our who, what, where, when, and how.
All the most important information
is up at the top theoretically.
But a lot of times, some of the most really useful details
are at the bottom.
So sometimes people just start reading an article or maybe
they just see the headline.
How many of us can say that we have never
shared an article just from the headline?
I have.
But the thing is, a lot of times it's
really better to read the full story because you
will see a lot more nuance if you read it
all the way through.
So you want to break out of that,
of just reading the first paragraph
or just going to the 50%, and actually read the whole thing.
Now I'm a big fan of annotation.
And one of the things that you can do
is, that Instapaper site that I showed you,
you may have noticed--
oops, I hope I didn't--
I don't know what I just clicked.
Let's go back over here where we were
looking at it very quickly.
And you'll notice that I actually
had a little bit of highlighting here.
I'm going to really regret this.
Hopefully, you remember that there
was something that was actually highlighted on that screen.
Because when I'm reading Instapaper on my phone,
on my tablet, or online I can highlight stuff
and I can add in notes.
I can annotate it just like you would
annotate a scholarly article.
So as I'm reading it, if I see things that I disagree with,
I don't just say, oh, I disagree with that and go on
and then completely forget about it.
I write myself a note and maybe I come back and investigate
it a little bit more.
So I'm reading articles critically,
and I'm taking notes about them.
And I can do this on Instapaper, and I
can do this on other sites, like Medium.
You may be familiar with Rap Genius, which
is way of actually kind of crowdsourcing out lyrics.
There's also a version of it called
News Genius, which lets you actually annotate the web.
You can actually annotate blogs or the State
of the Union address or etc.
So that you or other people who use
News Genius tool can actually see those
annotations and have conversations.
And there is a scholarly equivalent
of that called Hypothesis that is used
to annotate scholarly articles.
But also it can be used to annotate anything on the web.
And the more you annotate, the more you talk about things,
the more you discuss--
Hypothesis, by the way, actually requires
you to use your university email account and your identity.
So it really is probably the most rigorous
of all of these things.
The more you do all of this stuff,
the more you investigate and read,
you keep up with the news, you develop your own knowledge,
your own expertise and networks.
And you become part of networks.
And Mike Caulfield, the guy who I was talking about a little bit
earlier, the guy at WSU Vancouver,
has actually written a new book that you can really
download called Web Literacy for Student Fact Checkers.
And I have not added it to the web page yet,
but I will tomorrow.
And then also really partially committing to being informed
means actually supporting newspapers
and news sites with your money because news is not free.
This is your saying yourself, Lorena,
this is a little bit light.
And I admit that it is because I only had 50 minutes,
but only half of it was fake news.
But what I really want you to think about
is this notion of really evaluating
information and developing a little bit of expertise
and knowledge.
And if you become an expert, say,
on things having to do with space exploration
and your friend becomes an expert on political campaign
finance or something, you create these sorts of networks.
And then in your Facebook conversations, in your blogs,
in your larger conversations, you
have this network of people who you trust to actually
be able to say, I actually did some research on that,
and it's legit.
Or it's not legit
Mike Caufield over at WSU Vancouver
is doing something called the Digital Polarization
Initiative, which is actually something
that students can work on.
And this is a way for students to actually investigate
information on the web using tools like Hypothesis.
And you can see they even have a little chrome extension
that you can use to basically look at issues
of digital polarization.
And digital polarization is things like our red feed
and our blue feed.
So that's a really exciting thing.
So I'm going close now.
And I want to close thinking about a couple of things.
We're you go back to the things that I framed my talk around.
And you might have noticed that--
I mention them occasionally, occasionally
with the wrong definitions.
I talked about filter bubbles and echo
chambers and confirmation bias.
But not a lot because I think that was
implicit in what I was saying.
So I want you to think about.
This, I want you to broaden your information diet.
I want you to break out of your filter bubble.
I want you to blow up your echo chamber.
I want you to bury your confirmation bias so deep
you can never find it again.
And I want you to bring on your critical thinking
and your digital and information literacy skills.
The kind of skills that you use when you're
doing scholarly research, you can
apply those same sorts of analytical and critical skills
to looking at news.
And this link right over here, this first one, the one
that says keeping up the news--
this is the link that includes all the resources
that I provided from this talk.
And like I said, I'll be updating it tomorrow.
The second one is actually better.
And it's from Erica Nicel, who is WSU Pullman's Communications
Librarian.
And she has a really nice library [? guide ?]
on fake news.
We will take a quick look at both these.
And then we'll go ahead and do some questions.
So I'm just going to quickly show you.
This is my guide, keeping up with international news.
And this is Erica's guide, evaluate news, fake news,
and beyond.
And she's going to go more into evaluation techniques.
Olivia noted that the news was so different in Kenya.
She had a hard time figuring out what's going on.
Yeah, that's really true.
Sometimes that's hard because you don't know the context.
Sometimes that's good because you
have to exercise different aspects of your brain,
and it really makes you realize that the same thing can be
viewed in multiple dimensions.
Let's see.
Tony commented that it's really easy
to be fooled by these sites.
And it really is because be they are made to fool you.
They are made to appeal to you in a way that
makes you want to click on that in a way that's almost a cue.
If the title looks too good to be true,
then maybe you say to yourself, I really
do have to put on my critical evaluative cap
on as I look at this and do some of the checkmark things
that are traditional--
who published this, what's the URL, when was it published?
Let's look at the language.
Where's the about statement?
And then also some of the more critical thinking
evaluative networks thinking.
Let's see what people are talking about this on.
Is there anything about it on Wikipedia?
Is there anything about it on a fact check
site to kind of do those sorts of strategies?
Tony asks if I believe whether fake news will ever
be more monitored and removed from social media entirely.
No.
Fake news has been around forever.
I read the most wonderful account of fake news in Germany
in the 19th century, where some journalist sitting
in his apartment in Berlin just made up
all these stories about events that were
happening in Great Britain.
He read articles, and he pulled in enough details
to make them seem legit.
But he made up his own interviews.
He made up all sorts of stuff.
Fake news has always existed and always will.
In fact, it's going to get more sophisticated the way it
is now, which means that our skills have
to advance to keep up with it.
So I'm kind of cynical about that.
But the more we're aware of it, the less likely
we are to be fooled by it.
Kaitlin asks, do I think fake news is getting
worse in the United States?
So why do you think it has more attention right now?
I think it has more attention.
I think it's probably a little bit of both but [INAUDIBLE]
more attention.
And a lot of that is really because of there
are more opportunities for news to be shared through things
like Twitter or Facebook.
If you think about 10 years ago when
we didn't have those social media outlets,
it was fake news was maybe something on a blog
or maybe something on some sort of online bulletin board.
But it didn't have the reach that things
have now with our resources like Facebook and Twitter
and the ease of sharing information
and the ease of cloning information and copying
it and manipulating it like manipulating photographs.
So it's here to stay.
But so are we.
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