MediaWise #IsThisLegit program

Mendel

Senior Member.
I'm describing a video that demonstrates three simple debunking steps for social media and offers help debunking misinformation. In my opinion, it's like a basic vaccination against conspiracy theories: it's the attempt to teach the basic debunking steps we all use, to everyone.


Source: https://youtu.be/MUiYglgGbos


The youtuber SmarterEveryDay talked to Katie Byron, who runs the Google-funded MediaWise program at the Poynter Institute of Journalism to help teens fight misinformation online.
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The first part of the talk presented a simple 3-step fact-checking method that helps avoid re-tweeting misinformation.
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  1. Who's behind the information?
  2. What's the evidence?
  3. What do other sources say?
The idea is that is the source is not trustworthy, if there is no evidence, or if you can't confirm it, you should exercise click restraint and not share this information.

The video then goes on to demonstrate this method on two example tweets, introducing the tools of reverse image search and browsing laterally (open more tabs to follow different lines of information).
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In a second segment, the video introduces the concept that faster information sharing gets rewarded on social media, and in order to achieve this, news is often not verified, putting the burden on the consumer to verify the information themselves.
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To verify information, media users should apply the above 3-step process; but if that is inconclusive, they can share the information with the MediaWise project on Twitter @MediaWise with the hashtag #IsThisLegit, and their team will try to help.
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Excerpt from the video description, citing sources (the OODA loop relates to a concept that fast information processing is rewarded, which I glossed over in my summary):
External Quote:
Seriously, if you can't tell if something on the internet is fact or fiction, tag @MediaWise and use the hashtag → #IsThisLegit ←and they'll help you figure it out.

GET SMARTER SECTION

Here's a great poster of the 3 Questions to ask yourself before you share something online: https://sheg.stanford.edu/civic-onlin...
Follow @MediaWise on:
-Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mediawise/
-Twitter: https://twitter.com/MediaWise
-YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2DP...
-Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MediaWise/
If you see content you're not sure about, tag it with #isthislegit and the MediaWise team will help you figure out if it's real.

Play with Ben Eater's OODA Loop simulation here: https://eater.net/ooda-loop
Learn about the OODA Loop here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
Developed by COL John Boyd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bo...)

More about MediaWise:
MediaWise is led by The Poynter Institute (https://www.poynter.org/) in partnership with the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG https://sheg.stanford.edu/), the Local Media Association (LMA https://www.localmedia.org/) and the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE https://namle.net/ ). It is part of the Google News Initiative (https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/) and funded by Google.org. The program aims to teach 1 million teenagers how to learn fact from fiction on the internet by 2020, with at least half of them coming from underserved or low-income communities.
 
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Google is also offering a media literacy program, and I've seen it advertised on youtube.
https://prebunking.withgoogle.com/
View attachment 74701
(Unfortunately, I'm unable to quote from the English version of the page, since the language setting does not work for me.)
"The requested URL /en was not found on this server."?

10000 PhDs, and they still can't put information on a webpage?

It's more a presentation than prose, so doesn't quote well, but some coherent bits of it include:

External Quote:
Prebunking is a technique to preempt manipulation online.
Prebunking messages are designed to help people identify and resist manipulative content. By forewarning people and equipping them to spot and refute misleading arguments, these messages help viewers gain resilience to being misled in the future.
...
Why Prebunking
Online manipulation is a complex problem and multiple approaches are needed to curb its worst effects. Prebunking provides an opportunity to get out ahead of online manipulation, providing a layer of protection before individuals encounter malicious content.
...
Common Manipulation Techniques
A manipulative message is often made compelling by an underlying logical fallacy or rhetorical strategy that tricks people. Highlighting these techniques can help people resist a wide array of manipulative messages online by equipping them to identify and refute misleading styles of argumentation rather than specific pieces of information. Jigsaw and other researchers have found that the following techniques recur frequently in misinformation across time and contexts.
Emotional Language...
False Dichotomy...
Cherry Picking...
Fake Experts...
Red Herring...
Scapegoating...
Ad Hominem...
Polarization...
Impersonation...
Slippery Slope...
Decontextualization...
There's also a link to a document that seems to expand on all of the above https://prebunking.withgoogle.com/docs/A_Practical_Guide_to_Prebunking_Misinformation.pdf
 
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