HOW TO SPOT FAKE NEWS

The internet is swimming in fake news. It is easy to be taken in by information that seems true but is far from it. Some of it is created by deluded people who see conspiracies everywhere. A lot of it is shaped by dishonest people who want to influence their readers. Several foreign countries try to influence events in the United States, such as elections. We need to be careful not to play their games. Some web sites want to get readers to click onto them because they get paid for every click. Readers are more likely to click onto sensational “news,” so it is profitable to report astonishing “information.” Some fake news was never intended to be believed. It is satire. Some readers lack the sense of humor to recognize the satire and take it seriously.

Readers who are looking for conspiracy theories find them in the web sites they follow and repeat them on social media. Since conspiracy seekers read each other’s social media, they create an echo chamber that carry the same stories. Mind Tools offered Six Ways to Spot Fake News.

1.Develop a critical mindset There are people out there who conspire to get us to believe stuff that isn’t so. Be suspicious. If it sounds extreme, check it out. Don’t believe everything you read.

2. Check the sources Really check them. ABCNewscom.co is not what it appears. ABCNews.com is a real news source. ABCNewcom.co is able to copy the logo of the real news site but it publishes fake news. If you aren’t familiar with the author, check him or her out. You might find that the author of sensational news does not have a very good reputation.

3. See who else is reporting the story Can you find the story in any mainstream media? Some people have attacked what Sarah Palin called the “lamestream media.” But the media have editorial standards and trained reporters. Most professional news sources have bias, and they all make mistakes once in a while, but professional publications are not going to publish outright lies or stories that they haven’t checked for accuracy. A year or so ago I saw a report of a celebrity’s death on the Facebook newsfeed. When I went to check it on other sources, I couldn’t find other reference because it was fake news. Don’t believe stuff that is reported only on the social media.

4. Examine the evidence Does the story offer facts to back itself up? Don’t be too quick to believe it if it offers no facts. If it offers facts, check them out.

5. Don’t take images at face value Don’t believe everything you see. With modern technology those who spread false information can put people into a photograph or take them out. The doctored photo may look genuine, but the picture it presents never happened. 6. Check that it sounds right

If the news sounds unbelievable, it may be because it isn’t true. Check the story on a reliable fact checker like Snopes. Snopes will examine the facts of the story and let you know if it true, false, partly true, or out of date. I have received false stories that invited me to verify them on Snopes. When I did that, I found that Snopes had labeled them as false. I have also received messages that told me I couldn’t believe what I read on Snopes. Conspiracy theorists hate Snopes because it exposes how they play fast and loose with the truth, but Snopes has no agenda except to check the veracity of information flying around the internet.

If you want to find the truth, get your information from reliable sources, mainstream media. Use Facebook if you want, to keep in touch with your friends and family, but don’t use it as a source of information about what’s going on in the world.

Making Decisions

Theories are a part of life. They are a way of dealing with things we don’t understand and making decisions about circumstances we meet. Ideally our theories evolve as we learn more about a mystery we are trying to comprehend. Misused, however, theories can become a hindrance to understanding, and decisions based on faulty theories will not lead to useful conclusions.

Conspiracy theories are invalid if they cannot be proven with historical or scientific evidence. They are typically highly improbable. Finding conspiracies where none exist is a mental illness which psychologists call illusory pattern perception.

Some conspiracy theories are not theories at all. They are deliberate lies told to influence the gullible. Many of the statements that come out of the Trump administration are examples of this. In our next posting we will tell how to guard against invalid conspiracy theories and lies posting as theories.

These theories are typically about secret government plans or plots to take control of the world or the government. They often accuse some group of plotting to take over the country. Jews, Catholics, the Illuminati, George Soros, liberals have all been accused of such plots. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a book written over a hundred years ago, accuses the Jews of a plot to take control of the world. Although the book has long since been shown to be a forgery, the accusation keeps popping up. Sometimes it is a conspiracy of world bankers (shorthand for Jews) who are involved in the plot. George Soros, a Jew, has been accused of handing out one hundred dollars to rioters (protesters) for causing trouble.

Some have claimed that the moon shot never happened. It was done in Hollywood, and the American government has been fooling people ever since. Not only did the American government fake the moon shot, according to some. It also was somehow complicit in the attacks in September 11, 2001.

What kind of mind comes up with ideas like these, and how gullible must people be to accept such things as true? All of these conspiracies are harmful to someone. The charge that global warming is a liberal hoax has been harmful to everyone. In February 2015 Senator Inhofe brought a snowball onto the floor of the Senate, thereby proving (in his mind) that global warming was a hoax. At about the same time a conservative whom I knew smirked on a cold winter day as he asked, “Has anyone heard anything about global warming lately?” Another conservative I knew conceded that the world was getting warmer. “But we don’t know,” he insisted, “if it was caused by man.” On the surface that seems to be a reasonable position. After all, we know that the earth has gone through and recovered from several Ice Ages. That was before human beings existed in the large numbers they do now or had the power to make such a drastic impact on the environment.

However, there is ample evidence that global warming, or climate change, if you prefer, is caused by human activities. People release 35 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, largely by burning fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. That means it traps heat from escaping earth’s atmosphere, and that is what makes the earth become warmer each year.

Under the Obama administration major steps were taken toward cutting back on greenhouse gases. One major accomplishment was the Paris Accords, which was signed by 194 countries. The signers agreed to cut emissions in their countries.

In the United States these cutbacks were achieved by improving fuel economy in automobiles and using more renewable energy. From 2008 to 2015 carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. fell 9.5 percent. Another way emissions were cut was by switching from coal to natural gas for power plants. Gas is much cleaner than coal and releases less greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. During the Obama administration natural gas production rose 28 percent in the United States.

One of the first things Donald Trump did in his misrule was to withdraw the country from the Paris Accords. He lifted the restrictions on fuel economy in American cars. He promoted what he called “beautiful, clean coal,” a meaningless phrase. He appointed Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt had worked as a lawyer for energy companies in the past. He finally resigned in 2018 under charges of questionable ethics. Before he resigned, he pulled the teeth from many of the environmental-friendly policies that had been put in place during the Obama administration.

Conservatives still question whether climate change is real, but its evidence is all around us, and it gets more frightening every day. As I write, an area of 780 square miles in California has burned. That’s half the size of Rhode Island. The fires have been getting larger every year. That’s because climate change has brought warmer, dryer conditions to the forests. Other parts of the world are experiencing the same phenomena. Indonesia, Brazil, and Australia have all face devasting fires in recent years. One study estimated that climate change makes these fires 30 percent more likely.

Forest fires are not the only natural phenomenon gone awry. Each year we are hit with more strong hurricanes. That is because the conditions for the storms increase over warmer ocean waters. It is ironic that some people think measures intended to decrease greenhouse gases put an unnecessary burden on business. However, the reverse is true. Procedures to cut emissions create new business opportunities, and they cost much less than the damage done by fires and hurricanes.

Another conspiracy theory that has created havoc in the United States is the charge that the coronavirus is a hoax. Forcing people to wear masks in public places is a violation of their freedom. Anyway, the virus is not as deadly as it seems. It is hardly more dangerous than the flu, and it will disappear by itself anyway. Not only that, but vaccines for the virus will inject people with something that will allow them to be tracked.

Unfortunately this view of the virus did not come from someone’s sick speculation. It came from an outright lie. By the President of the United States! This was revealed in Bob Woodward’s book, where the President told Woodward that he understood how dangerous the coronavirus was, but he didn’t want to alarm people! This was in Woodward’s book. Tapes of the Trump’s words were played on television, so there could be no doubt about them. It is hard to understand why anyone would believe anything he says. By the summer of 2020, fact checkers at The Washington Post determined that Trump had told 20,000 lies since the beginning of his term. Because of the President’s failure to reveal the truth about the virus’s danger and his urging businesses and schools to reopen before they had dealt with the pandemic, businesses have failed and almost 200,000 Americans have died.

It is time for us to learn the truth and reject false conspiracy theories.

MORE CONSPIRACY THEORIES

The conspiracy theories that one hears about seem to be pretty much ideas believed by conservatives. I wondered if my liberal bias prevented from seeing liberal conspiracy concepts for what they are, crackpot ideas. Then I began reading the assertion that both political viewpoints have their own thoughts of secret intrigue.

One writer who offered this idea was Josh Hart, a psychology professor at Union College. Hart gave the idea that climate change is a hoax as an example of a conservative theory. For the liberals, Hart said the thought that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians in 2016 is a conspiracy theory. As I pointed out in my September 4 post, these two theories are not equivalent.

Let’s compare a few other conspiracy theories. First some conservative examples: The shootings of elementary students at Sandy Hook is a hoax. The Moon Landing is another staged hoax. The American government was somehow complicit in airplane crashes in September 9/11. Prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, were involved in some kind of child sex ring in the basement of a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant. The one that liberals are more likely to follow is that Donald Trump hired prostitutes to urinate on a bed in a Moscow hotel.

The conservative conspiracy stories are ludicrous. There is zero evidence to support any of them. On the contrary, major news sources have published evidence things did not happen the way theorists portray them. A sick young man did shoot elementary students at Sandy Hook. Astronauts did land on the moon. A group of Moslem extremists piloted hijacked planes into the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon. The American government had no prior knowledge of the plot. Not only was the story about Democrats being involved in a sex ring false, the restaurant where this supposedly took place didn’t even have a basement. Sarah Palin referred to the mainstream media as the “lamestream” media because it did not publish the conspiracy stories without evidence.

The pee story might or might not be true. It came from a group hired by Hillary Clinton’s campaign against Donald Trump. The campaign hired Fusion GPS to look into Trump’s ties to Russia. Fusion GPS in turn hired Christopher Steele, a retired British intelligence agent. Evidently Steele heard stories about Trump hiring prostitutes to urinate on a bed in a Moscow hotel. The reason he wanted that done is that the bed had once been occupied by Barack and Michelle Obama.

We don’t know if the story is true. If it is true, it is not a nice thing to do, but it pales beside Trump’s many disgraceful acts. There is another difference between the conservative conspiracy theories and liberal theories. That is the strength of the belief. Conservatives are strongly convinced that climate change is a liberal hoax. The Trump administration has eased many of the restrictions put in place by the Obama administration to reduce greenhouse gas. Conservatives are much more likely to consider the coronavirus a hoax and consider rules to wear a mask a violation of their civil rights. They march and demonstrate to protests the tyranny of having to wear a mask.

Liberals are not likely to care about the Trump pee story. If it is true, it does not make that much difference, because much worse things about Donald Trump are already well known.

Finally we come to the conclusion that conspiracy theories are in fact a right-wing phenomenon. Here is what the authors of The Paranoid Style in American Politics Revisited: An Ideological Asymmetry in Conspiratorial Thinking have to say:

“It is often claimed that conspiracy theories are endorsed with the same level of intensity across the left‐right ideological spectrum. But do liberals and conservatives in the United States em-brace conspiratorial thinking to an equivalent degree? There are important historical, philosophi-cal, and scientific reasons dating back to Richard Hofstadter's book The Paranoid Style in Amer-ican Politics to doubt this claim. In four large studies of U.S. adults we investigated the relation-ship between political ideology, measured in both symbolic and operational terms, and conspira-torial thinking in general.

“Results reveal that conservatives in the United States were not only more likely than liberals to endorse specific conspiracy theories, but they were also more likely to espouse conspiratorial worldviews in general. Importantly, extreme conservatives were significantly more likely to en-gage in conspiratorial thinking than extreme liberals. The relationship between ideology and con-spiratorial thinking was mediated by a strong distrust of officialdom and paranoid ideation, both of which were higher among conservatives, consistent with Hofstadter's account of the paranoid style in American politics.

“Let us now abstract the basic elements in the paranoid style. The central image is that of a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to under-mine and destroy a way of life.” (Richard Hofstadter, 1964, p. 29)

WHO ARE THE BELIEVERS?

The world is full of problems. As soon as one situation is cleared up, another one or three arise. One way to deal with life’s difficulties is to ascribe them to some sort of a conspiracy. Since most conspiracies are not backed by accurate information, using these theories to explain situations, rather than solving problems, usually create new ones.

Conspiracy theories fly at us every day. Some people latch onto these “explanations” of everything, while others see right away that these stories too ridiculous to believe. What makes some people accept these tales while others reject them out of hand? Psychological studies have shown that people who are open to accepting conspiracy theories have some things in common.

Conspiracy followers often have a need to feel unique. They’re likely to be narcissistic, feel alienated and socially isolated. They may feel powerless in relation to the problems they see in the world. Believers may feel that American values are eroding. They look for a scapegoat to blame for the problems. Theorists are suspicious, sometimes to the point of paranoia. They tend to see the world as a dangerous place.

The big problem of the present time is the coronavirus and its effects. Some people find it difficult to deal with the facts of the issue. If they adopt one of the conspiracy theories relating to it, they feel they have some power over it. If government agencies like the CDC are not telling the truth about the virus, the theory makes the virus seem less threatening to them. According to the CDC, over 180,000 Americans have died of the virus. Suppose most of those people died of something else. What if only six percent of those deaths were actually from the virus, and the rest died from other causes. That makes the virus seem less powerful. People who follow that theory can also get a sense of superiority since they know the “real” facts, and they are not taken in like the sheep who believe what they read in the newspapers and see on television news.

Why would the CDC lie about the numbers? Theorists just ignore questions like that, but they tend to disbelieve any authorities, so the CDC might have its own reasons for exaggerating the number of deaths from the virus. Maybe they need to scare people to get the funding they want from Congress.

The truth of the 6 percent story is actually a misreading of a CDC report. The report stated that 94 percent if those who died from the coronavirus had some other health condition. That is why the virus is especially dangerous to older people. Most older people already have some kind of health problems like disease of the heart or lungs. Once people with a health issue came down with the virus, it was likely to exacerbate the existing problem and cause their death. In other words, they would not have died if they had not contracted the virus.

Bill Gates has donated money to research on vaccines to counter the virus. Theorists tend to be skeptical about that too. To them, vaccines are questionable anyway. Further Gates might make a lot of money from the sale of the vaccine. And while they’re at it, theorists promote the idea that vaccines promoted by Gates might contain microchips that will allow “the authorities” to trace the movements of anyone who gets the vaccine.

Josh Hart, a psychology professor at Union College, stated that both Republicans and Democrats followed certain conspiracy theories. Republicans were more likely to believe that climate change is a hoax, whereas Democrats were more apt to be drawn toward the theory that that in the 2016 presidential campaign the Trump team colluded with the Russians.

Perhaps Hart’s examples were an attempt to be fair and see similarities in the mindset of both parties. But a quick look at the examples shows that the events are not equivalent at all. For decades scientists have known that greenhouse gases are creating a climate change. The physical evidence of the change is here for everyone to see: the melting icebergs and the increasingly hotter summers. To deny climate change is to deny obvious facts.

The Trump campaign’s collusions with the Russians is hardly a theory at all. The Mueller report detailed accounts of Russian help to the Trump campaign. More recently the Republican-controlled Senate released an account of even more

collusion between the campaign and the Russians. One of campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s contacts was a Russian intelligence officer. As we look at the existing conspiracy theories, we see that they belong mostly to conservatives. We will explore this further in a later post.