Three years ago I wrote a survival guide for normal people, because I knew that many people were feeling overwhelmed by two things. First, we already lived in an Information Age that bombards us with too much to process. And second, in 2017 the pace of news was too fast, too breathless, and just too much.
So I advised a few things: wait 24 hours to let a story play out before even beginning to make up your mind about it; become an expert on one issue or topic, and be a student on the rest; and make time for beauty. You can read the whole thing here.
Three years later, information overload remains a problem. But the bigger challenge for many people now is an overwhelming sense of confusion. And when the people despair of the truth, it opens the door to chaos, and to dishonest leaders who can “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.” That story always has an unhappy ending.
I was talking the other day with friends when one of them began talking about how hard it is to know what’s true. I told her that this has become a huge concern for me as well. We agreed: a country can’t function without a healthy information system.
Moments later, my friend asked if I’d heard that Anthony Bourdain died under suspicious circumstances. I had not heard that. I quickly googled what she was talking about, and saw that the only source for such a rumor was a website called Neon Nettle. I read an article on Snopes.com, which detailed the ways that the Neon Nettle post made claims without any evidence.
I went back to my friend and expressed how taken aback I was that this was something she took seriously. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Later that day I wrote down a few things that stood out as I tried to grasp how something so obviously false could be taken seriously by someone who is a smart, sensible, educated person with a college degree, who is by no means shut off in some kind of closed feedback loop: she listens to This American Life and reads the New York Times.
Here’s what I came up with:
1. Watch movies. Read the news.
2. Look at Instagram for entertainment and inspiration, and less so for information. Memes are not news.
3. Understand the difference between innuendo and established fact.
4. Learn how to distinguish levels of certainty about what is innuendo and what is fact.
5. Don’t share something — online or in person — if you can’t cite 3 hard facts that you know to be true in support of the story.
Watch Movies. Read the News.
My friend and I agreed that TV news is less reliable than print. I have hammered this drum over and over through the years. There are some things TV news is good at, like covering real breaking news as it happens, or producing in depth reports that grab your attention in a way that print can’t. But for day in, day out news consumption, rely on print to form your sense of the world rather than TV. TV’s main imperative is to keep you watching, and that can often lead it to distort our sense of proportionality — not everything is breaking news — or to focus on the sensational rather than the imperative.
Look at Instagram for entertainment and inspiration, and less so for information. Memes are not news.
My friend sent me an Instagram post from a figure she trusted who has established credibility in the realm of religion and family counseling. Danny Silk is a Christian pastor or teacher who is identified as part of the “senior leadership team of Bethel Church in Redding, CA.” Bethel is a highly influential hub of white evangelical Christianity, known primarily for its growing ecosystem of musical artists. It is a non-denominational, charismatic megachurch that places a high emphasis on miracles and the supernatural.
Silk has written five books on family dynamics and faith, and his website says he offers “tools and training to strengthen connection with the most important people in your life.” But of late, he has taken to voicing concern over child trafficking. On its face, that seems uncontroversial. But Silk is also using hash tags affiliated with the Qanon conspiracy theory movement and making shadowy references to a “worldwide network of elite pedophiles and child traffickers.” This is where Silk’s Instagram activism moves from potentially helpful to definitely harmful. But the shift is lost on most people. I’ll explain why further below, but for now, let’s focus on one distinguishing characteristic of Silk’s posts, and of Instagram in general.
Most Instagram posts don’t offer citations for claims. In other words, if someone makes a claim, they don’t usually include a link to a website where you can read more and see where the claim is coming from. Or if it’s from a book, they don’t usually cite the book and the page number. In fact, Instagram is built in such a way that you can’t actually click on a link in the caption. In that way, it’s uniquely designed to make it hard to offer citations, which is one of the fundamental building blocks of making claims that are supported by evidence. That’s why you so often see people saying that there is a link in their bio page to whatever they’re talking about. But even that is problematic. The bio does not stay connected to the post in question, and so the post with the unsupported claim continues to float out there on the internet and on our phones without any supporting evidence, unless the poster decides to include a link in the caption just for the sake of information integrity. Given all the incentives not to do so that are built into the platform, that is rare.
Bottom line: Instagram is a bad place for establishing between truth and fiction, maybe a uniquely bad place.
Understand the difference between innuendo and established fact.
As I talked to my friend at one point, she kept coming back to a true statistic, that sex trafficking is a $150 billion industry. (I know that’s true because I checked on reputable websites, which I’ll talk about more further down). She said that there must be powerful people being involved in anything with that much money.
This is innuendo. It is hinting at something, but not saying it.
There must be powerful people involved? Who? Where is the evidence?
Innuendo depends on the belief that powerful people can control the independent media to suppress information that is damaging to them.
But the idea that powerful politicians would plot together to organize a child trafficking ring betrays an ignorance of how politics actually works and who most politicians are. Most politicians are incredibly risk averse and go out of their way to avoid anything controversial. Sure the occasional individual is caught in a sex scandal, but that’s the result of individual impulse. A child trafficking ring? That’s more like a secret society, and the only way to believe this is to give one’s self over to the notion that *people in power* are soulless ghouls, rather than actual human beings.
There is one factual counterargument to all this: the Catholic Church abuse scandal. But remember how that came to light? It was through independent journalism. The news and media industry is too diffuse, especially in the age of the internet, to suppress much of anything. Because you know what motivates journalists to find big stories of wrongdoing and actual abuses of power and the vulnerable? It’s not just altruism, though there are many journalists who are motivated by noble ideals. It’s also ambition, that most basic of human instincts.
Let’s get back to innuendo though. The biggest reason that this is a dangerous and even poisonous standard for believing something, or sharing information based on it, is that it makes all of us vulnerable to abuse. If anyone can be smeared in the public square — on social media or elsewhere — simply on the basis of circumstantial evidence or even claims that don’t have a shred of evidence behind them, then you, or people you love, or figures you support who are doing important work in the world can be attacked with nothing but lies, and there won’t be much you can do about it.
This is a radical lowering of standards for how we know what is true and false. It’s noteworthy that Christian leaders are contributing to this erosion of knowing, since truth is at the heart of the Christian faith. They might claim to be liberating people from a “controlled narrative” in the mainstream media, but that is a distraction from the factual, substantive standards for information that I’m talking about here.
Accusations of wrongdoing must be supported by evidence. If there isn’t credible evidence, you shouldn’t share information online and on social media that hints that there might be wrongdoing.
Now let’s talk about how to determine what’s good evidence, and what isn’t.
Learn how to distinguish levels of certainty about what is innuendo and what is fact.
One of Silk’s recent Instagram posts has seven slides. The first six are all apparently taken from a legitimate, established anti-trafficking organization called the EndIt Movement. They list various statistics about human trafficking, all of which are accurate and represent a real problem.
But the seventh slide is distinctly different. First, it is the only slide with an image. It shows someone dumping a big cup of coffee into another cup of coffee that’s already full, with coffee spilling everywhere onto the table. And the font is different from the first six slides. These might seem like small differences, but if you want to be a valued and positive citizen of the web in these times, you need to develop a detective’s nose for sniffing out misleading and deceptive information. What this seventh slide is doing is building on reality-based statistics about a real and disturbing problem, and then sneaking in an unverified, unsupported claim at the end.
The last slide reads: “There is still a worldwide network of elite pedophiles and child traffickers.” The point of the coffee photo is to demonstrate what happens to “a normal conversation” when he brings up this “worldwide network of elite pedophiles.”
There is no support for this claim in Silk’s post. That’s because it doesn’t exist. But Silk is making claims like this, and also using hash tags like #noonecanstopwhatiscoming that are known references to the Qanon political cult, which ultimately claims that President Trump is preparing to expose this very same “network of elite pedophiles.”
This is the same kind of conspiracy-thinking that led an apparently sincere North Carolina man to take an assault rifle to a pizza shop in DC in 2017 looking for a pedophile ring in the basement, based on the same kind of claims Silk is making here that have no actual evidence. The man fired his gun inside the restaurant and was sentenced four years in prison.
Here’s what you should do if you see a claim that sounds almost too hard to believe.
First, look for established facts in support of each claim that is made. It’s not enough if there’s documented evidence of the six slides, but none for the seventh. Don’t fall victim to manipulation.
Second, understand what an established fact is. A lot of it comes down to sources. I’m not saying you couldn’t come across something true at a website called Neon Nettle, but I am saying that if you read something at a website like that, you need to go looking for corroboration at other websites that are actually news sites. If you can find something printed as fact at a major news website, and a liberal website, and a conservative website, then you’re likely on solid ground. The Associated Press is about as solid as you can get.
Third, understand what an established website is. There are a few things you should be able to find if you’re really curious about whether a website is legitimate or not. First, it should have real people associated with it. Most articles should have the name of a person at the top who wrote it. This is called a byline. It’s a crucial part of establishing accountability for what appears in print. If someone has put their name on an article, they have to stand behind its accuracy.
In addition, legitimate news organizations have editors, real people who actually read the article written by a reporter and push them to write it better, and to make sure things are accurate. Many legitimate news organizations also have a third layer of editing called a copy desk, where articles go through another level of vetting to make sure that they are accurate. That’s the process for everything I write at Yahoo News. It’s the process for all the major news organizations. I understand that many conservatives don’t like the way the news might be interpreted by some of these places, but we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about establishing baseline facts.
Fourth, the more incredible a story seems, the more you should demand of yourself to find tangible, hard evidence for it. This is basic.
By the way, there’s another red flag in Silk’s post. He calls for action, and then offers no actual examples of what kind of action to take.
“Enough already! We need action!” he writes in the caption. But he does not suggest getting involved with one of the several legitimate groups fighting human trafficking. He gives no tangible advice. He says only, “We are looking for mothers and fathers to rise up and command the spiritual atmosphere of a nation! We need leaders who will build us back into a family again.”
The Polaris Project is a nonprofit anti-trafficking group that was founded in 2002, and they wrote a blog post on July 22 that explains how claims like the ones in Danny Silk’s instagram posts “mislead well-meaning people into doing more harm than good.”
There are three ways that unproven claims about a real problem are harmful, Polaris said. First, “a barrage of conspiracy-related reports from people with no direct knowledge of trafficking situations can overwhelm services meant for victims.” Second, “survivors, victims, or even accidental bystanders may lose their privacy or be negatively impacted.” And third, “conspiracies distract from the more disturbing but simple realities of how sex trafficking actually works, and how we can prevent it.”
I encourage you to read the whole post, and to spend time on the Polaris website, which has a lot of good information about human trafficking and how to actually combat it.
Try this: Don’t share something — online or in person — if you can’t cite 3 hard facts that you know to be true in support of the story.
If you’re passing along information from random websites that don’t have bylines, that don’t have editing, then despite your best intentions you’re actually a part of the problem in our information system. You’re playing a part in undermining our ability as a nation to know what’s true or not.
Even in casual conversation, I don’t share things as factual unless I’ve actually looked into whether they are true or not. I’ve been trained to do so over the last 20 years as a journalist.
Just because someone has a lot of followers, or has something positive to say, or has done good in one realm of life, does not mean they have the same training and the same skills of knowing how to discern what is accurate and what is not.
One more reason why all this matters. We are going to trust someone. If we don’t trust the information system that’s in place, we’ll look to a new one. And if we move from trusting an independent media to relying on an information system built around political leaders, we are making ourselves vulnerable to tyranny.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction … and the distinction between true and false … no longer exist,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her book, “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”
