This Can't Be True, or Can It?
There is a tremendous amount of fake news available, on the Internet, on the supermarket tabloids, on those email alerts you receive from your less savvy friends and relatives, and now it seems even from the White House press spokesman. Much of this mis-information is generated by people with a political agenda, whose object is to advance their political party at the expense of their political opponents by spreading deliberate lies. Others may start outlandish rumors just to attract attention to themselves. Less reputable print media and broadcast media may either create falsehoods or repeat unverified outlandish statements purely to attract viewers for financial gain.
Another more innocent way some fake stories propagate is that someone who is too naive to distinguish comedy and political satire from actual news will report information from a parody on a comedy site believing it to be actual news. At least several times every year, this happens with some of the over-the-top, obviously-comedy-to anyone-who-has-been-paying-attention stories fabricated by “The Onion”. There have been several Republican politicians of questionable judgement who assumed parodies from “The Onion” were real and tried to use them to “prove” the excesses of liberals.
Unfortunately once a falsehood is published as “fact” in some form, it can spread rapidly by being repeated and re-posted by parties who either want it to be true, or who see or hear it somewhere and are gullible enough to believe it without first verifying what is claimed.
How do you keep yourself from being misled? There are both some common sense techniques as well as web sites that help. As individuals who believe effective government must be based on reality and facts, we must be equipped to counter with facts mis-information when we encounter it from our friends and neighbors.
Consider the source.
Chain emails that you receive describing some reprehensible or alarming “fact” or “event” and telling you to forward that urgent information to all your friends are fake 99.999% of the time. Strong clues are that the most persistent of these chain emails won't give any date or original source for the alarming event but imply it was “just discovered”, when in reality if it ever did occur it was years ago and their account of the event is deliberately misleading to alarm you into forwarding the mis-information without first checking. A number of ridiculous lies, some blatantly racist, about Obama were circulated as chain emails in 2008 and 2012. Some people I would have expected to know better assumed they must surely be true.
Sensational stories that appear only on extremist web sites, extremist talk shows, or check-out counter tabloids don't appear on main stream media for a reason – they make claims that are not verifiable by responsible journalists and which are most likely false. Fox News has a reputation for inaccuracy because once an unverified story echoes around enough right-wing sources, Fox News or a guest on Fox News will report the story as if it is “known”, typically without making even a casual search that would prove it false.
Check Reputable Sources
Stories that become wide-spread while being egregiously false, will eventually come to the attention of the more reputable main-stream media, who will do some actual research and broadcast the falsity of the tale and why it is false. Unfortunately, many who were inclined to believe a story without any evidence tend to be equally hard to un-convince in the face of actual conflicting evidence. When the rate of mis-information is as high as in the 2016 election, the MSM was able to do a marginal job of addressing only the most blatant cases.
There are a number of web sites that specialize in debunking hoaxes. Politically motivated mis-information and conspiracy theories are just one type of hoax, a term which also includes financial scams, some malware assaults, and even irresponsible pranks. Typically a Google search for “hoax” and some of the key words in the claim will point you to one or more of these debunking sites. The following is an initial list of such sites. If someone knows of additional sites that should be added to the list, send an email to our webmaster.
Hoax-slayer.com
TruthOrFiction.com
FactCheck.org
PolitiFact.com
Washington Post Fact Checker (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/ )
thatsfake.com
Thatsnonsense.com
Snopes.com
The Snopes site has enjoyed a long reputation for non-partisan hoax-busting. The following review of Snopes appeared on the old hoaxbusters.org web site with attribution to littlewebwagon.net:
“People that have a hard time accepting the truth have a hard time accepting the findings of Snopes.com. The main reason that Snopes is accused of bias by some folks is that facts have a notoriously liberal bias. The attacks against Snopes are prompted by the religious and political leanings of the attackers. A large number of hoaxes are aimed at people of the religious and political right. Then, when the hoax has been exposed, they become upset and defensive, attacking the messenger, not the message.”
“Snopes is officially known as the "Urban Legends Reference Pages." That's "reference," as in they research stuff and list their reference material for all the world to see. They have, through the years, become the "tell-all final word" in the hoax-debunking world. That is because of their ability to thoroughly research and document most hoax questions sent their way. The Snopes story is not a secret and has always been available to the public. The story about how the Mikkelsons met and founded their site jibes with interviews seen in other print media. Plus, through the years, they have been vetted by just about every form of major media (press, radio and TV).”
“Folks that question Snopes generally lean to the conservative side ideologically. Getting at the truth is not something reserved for the right or the left, though. Being apolitical is exactly what has made Snopes the respected source for hoax debunking that it is today.”
There is a tremendous amount of fake news available, on the Internet, on the supermarket tabloids, on those email alerts you receive from your less savvy friends and relatives, and now it seems even from the White House press spokesman. Much of this mis-information is generated by people with a political agenda, whose object is to advance their political party at the expense of their political opponents by spreading deliberate lies. Others may start outlandish rumors just to attract attention to themselves. Less reputable print media and broadcast media may either create falsehoods or repeat unverified outlandish statements purely to attract viewers for financial gain.
Another more innocent way some fake stories propagate is that someone who is too naive to distinguish comedy and political satire from actual news will report information from a parody on a comedy site believing it to be actual news. At least several times every year, this happens with some of the over-the-top, obviously-comedy-to anyone-who-has-been-paying-attention stories fabricated by “The Onion”. There have been several Republican politicians of questionable judgement who assumed parodies from “The Onion” were real and tried to use them to “prove” the excesses of liberals.
Unfortunately once a falsehood is published as “fact” in some form, it can spread rapidly by being repeated and re-posted by parties who either want it to be true, or who see or hear it somewhere and are gullible enough to believe it without first verifying what is claimed.
How do you keep yourself from being misled? There are both some common sense techniques as well as web sites that help. As individuals who believe effective government must be based on reality and facts, we must be equipped to counter with facts mis-information when we encounter it from our friends and neighbors.
Consider the source.
Chain emails that you receive describing some reprehensible or alarming “fact” or “event” and telling you to forward that urgent information to all your friends are fake 99.999% of the time. Strong clues are that the most persistent of these chain emails won't give any date or original source for the alarming event but imply it was “just discovered”, when in reality if it ever did occur it was years ago and their account of the event is deliberately misleading to alarm you into forwarding the mis-information without first checking. A number of ridiculous lies, some blatantly racist, about Obama were circulated as chain emails in 2008 and 2012. Some people I would have expected to know better assumed they must surely be true.
Sensational stories that appear only on extremist web sites, extremist talk shows, or check-out counter tabloids don't appear on main stream media for a reason – they make claims that are not verifiable by responsible journalists and which are most likely false. Fox News has a reputation for inaccuracy because once an unverified story echoes around enough right-wing sources, Fox News or a guest on Fox News will report the story as if it is “known”, typically without making even a casual search that would prove it false.
Check Reputable Sources
Stories that become wide-spread while being egregiously false, will eventually come to the attention of the more reputable main-stream media, who will do some actual research and broadcast the falsity of the tale and why it is false. Unfortunately, many who were inclined to believe a story without any evidence tend to be equally hard to un-convince in the face of actual conflicting evidence. When the rate of mis-information is as high as in the 2016 election, the MSM was able to do a marginal job of addressing only the most blatant cases.
There are a number of web sites that specialize in debunking hoaxes. Politically motivated mis-information and conspiracy theories are just one type of hoax, a term which also includes financial scams, some malware assaults, and even irresponsible pranks. Typically a Google search for “hoax” and some of the key words in the claim will point you to one or more of these debunking sites. The following is an initial list of such sites. If someone knows of additional sites that should be added to the list, send an email to our webmaster.
Hoax-slayer.com
TruthOrFiction.com
FactCheck.org
PolitiFact.com
Washington Post Fact Checker (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/ )
thatsfake.com
Thatsnonsense.com
Snopes.com
The Snopes site has enjoyed a long reputation for non-partisan hoax-busting. The following review of Snopes appeared on the old hoaxbusters.org web site with attribution to littlewebwagon.net:
“People that have a hard time accepting the truth have a hard time accepting the findings of Snopes.com. The main reason that Snopes is accused of bias by some folks is that facts have a notoriously liberal bias. The attacks against Snopes are prompted by the religious and political leanings of the attackers. A large number of hoaxes are aimed at people of the religious and political right. Then, when the hoax has been exposed, they become upset and defensive, attacking the messenger, not the message.”
“Snopes is officially known as the "Urban Legends Reference Pages." That's "reference," as in they research stuff and list their reference material for all the world to see. They have, through the years, become the "tell-all final word" in the hoax-debunking world. That is because of their ability to thoroughly research and document most hoax questions sent their way. The Snopes story is not a secret and has always been available to the public. The story about how the Mikkelsons met and founded their site jibes with interviews seen in other print media. Plus, through the years, they have been vetted by just about every form of major media (press, radio and TV).”
“Folks that question Snopes generally lean to the conservative side ideologically. Getting at the truth is not something reserved for the right or the left, though. Being apolitical is exactly what has made Snopes the respected source for hoax debunking that it is today.”