LIES

Coronavirus vaccines are capable of altering a person's DNA

- The vaccines contain microchips that allow people to be tracked

- The vaccines contain lung tissue from aborted fetuses

- The vaccines are capable of causing infertility

All of these statements are false, yet a survey showed that 20% of Americans believed at least one of them.

28% of Americans believe that harmful effects of the corona virus vaccine are being deliberately hidden from the public. A survey taken by the University of Oxford revealed that more than a fifth believed that the corona virus crisis is a hoax. 60% of Republicans believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump.

17 % of Americans believe that “a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics.” Belief in these false statements is damaging to all of us. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died, many of them needlessly because so many people, relying on misinformation, refused to follow common-sense advice such as masking, keeping a safe distance, and getting a vaccination.

Although numerous studies showed the 2020 election to be free and fair, millions of Americans believed instead that it was somehow stolen. Hundreds of them, many of them armed, assembled in Washington, D C, on January 6 to try to prevent the Congress from doing its constitutional duty of certifying the election.

The government of the United States is finding it more difficult to function because of the animosity between the two political parties. Much of this hostility has grown out of lies about the supposedly stolen election.

Misinformation, particularly about politics, has always been with us. In 1994 the Weekly World News reported that 12 United States senators, including William Cohen of Maine, were aliens from outer space. Cohen just laughed it off, because who would believe such an outrageous story? That was then, but today outrageous stories are a daily fare.

What has changed? Many elements contributed to the change, but two have been particularly powerful. One is the former President of the United States. The Washington Post kept track of the lies and misleading statements that Donald Trump made in office. It was 16,241. The President of the United States! 16,241 lies in office! How can anyone believe anything that man says?

The second big contributor to the spread of misinformation has been the social media, particular Facebook. 36% of Americans regularly access Facebook for news. Facebook! Not the local newspaper like the Boston Globe! 71% get at least some of their news from Facebook. Papers like the Globe, The New York Times or the Chicago Tribune have editors who check news sources for accuracy. Facebook has no one to check on articles written or posted by your crazy uncle. Facebook is not a news source. It is a platform where anyone can post pretty much anything they want. Why would any sane person believe that what he read on Facebook is news? Misinformation experts see a connection between reliance on social media for news and a belief in false ideas about COVID-19. So it is not just the outrageous liars like QANON and Alex Jones who spread misinformation. It is also common everyday people who spread conspiracy theories through the social media.

According to the French Reboot Foundation, conspiracy theories help explain complicated events where the truth may be too hard to accept. Those who believe conspiracy theories are more likely to accept misinformation, particularly if it seems to confirm what they already believe. Numerous studies have shown that conservatives are far more susceptible to political misinformation than are liberals. As we look at issues involved in misinformation, we can see that almost all of them reflect a conservative point of view. Older people also are susceptible to misinformation. Being an older person myself, I am not sure why that is so. Perhaps it is because until recently traditional news sources were pretty reliable, unlike QANON or Facebook.

What can be done about this? Fake news hurts people, and people who are hurt can sue. One of Alex Jones’s most outrageous lies was that statement that the shootings of 20 children and 6 teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax. Ten families sued Jones. The court ruled against him. People who spread harmful misinformation need to be held accountable.

Arizona State University offers some guidelines that come help protect us from fake news.

1. Pay attention to where your news is coming from.

“If it's coming through your Twitter, Facebook or Instagram feed, don't think of it as information from those platforms, because it’s not,” said Scott Ruston, a researcher in ASU’s Global Security Initiative. "Ask yourself, 'Who is this coming from and what is the background?' If the article you read makes accusations, ask yourself, 'Who does this benefit? What’s the underlying source material?' For example, the U.S. Department of State recently identified disinformation campaigns about the coronavirus in Europe," Ruston said. In those cases, strident claims about dangers to residents were made in order to undermine the government.

2. If you get information from social media, check the original source.

“When someone asks you where you heard something, if your first inclination is to say Twitter, you need to stop and check because Twitter itself tells you nothing,” said Kristy Roschke, co-director of the News CoLab in the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

“Twitter gives people a feed of people who will tell you things," she said. "Ask questions like, ‘What's the actual post?’ ‘What's the thing that's telling you this piece of information?’ ‘Who is that person?’ 'Is it a media organization you've never heard of before?’ "You can find all of that information in a Twitter profile. There's basic information you can find with a millisecond of extra effort. People who have credibility generally put information in their bios to bolster their credibility.”

3. Within news articles, examine the sources and how they are included.

“Look for how sources are treated and referenced,” Ruston said. “Journalists that work for traditional news outlets like AZCentral, CNN and the New York Times have a set of professional ethics guidelines and will assert their sources. The best is when the sources are named, the next best is when the names have been concealed for the protection of the source. However, it’s appropriate to be skeptical of articles that depend solely on unattributed sources without any kind of corroboration.”

4. Read beyond the headline.

“It's important to read the story fully," Ruston said. "Very often, headlines are misleading and are not there to inform you. The purpose of the headline is to get you to click on the link or to buy the newspaper, or to tune in if you're channel surfing.”

5. Get your news from a variety of sources.

People should check with additional news sources to confirm information they feel strongly about. “If you read something and if your reaction is any sort of extreme emotion, outrage or unmitigated joy, that’s a clear indicator that you should definitely read more deeply,” Ruston said. “Many of the disinformation examples we’ve come across in our research are designed not to inform but rather to activate a strong anger or fear response.”

6. When you see your friends and family share misinformation, correct them.

“Always be kind when helping people identify misinformation. Don't insult people's intelligence," Roschke said. “Don't repeat lies, because when you emphasize the thing that they got wrong, they're actually cognitively more likely to remember the thing they got wrong. You want to provide them with new information that comes from a source as reputable as possible.”

7. Find out what other information is out there.

“I really believe in expertise, which is why I really like NPR as a news source because there is deep expertise both from perspective of journalistic integrity and in selection of credible sources,” said Nadya Bliss, executive director of the Global Security Initiative. “I've actually done this where somebody will tweet something and I would think, ‘That's interesting, I wonder if it's true.’ Then, I will go separately into a Google search and pull up the news articles on it and see what's written about that topic.”