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.”

SHOUTING FIRE

We have freedom of speech in this country, but there are limitations on that freedom. As Justice Oliver Wendell Homes, Jr., said, we are not free to “shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” Spreading misinformation is another way to cause harm. Foreign countries, who do not have our best interests at heart, spread misinformation through the social media. Russia, Iran, and North Korea post false stories on Facebook and other media. Their purpose is to create discord, influence our elections, and weaken the country. If people base their voting choices on untruths, the outcome can be a disaster, as it was in the 2016 election.

People have died when decisions were made based on bogus facts. In 1998 an English doctor, Andrew Wakefield, published an article in Lancet, a medical journal. The article stated that the MMR vaccine could cause autism in children. Wakefield had a huge conflict of interest in the issue. He had been highly paid by a law group to find that the vaccine had harmed children. Further, he had faked some of the data in his study. Lancet retracted the article when they discovered the truth. Wakefield also lost his license to practice medicine. Yet to this day some people refused to be vaccinated or allow their children to be vaccinated. MMR protects against measles, mumps, and rubella. People who get any of these diseases can die from them. But no one has died or become autistic from the shot.

Another area where misrepresentation has caused death is information about COVID 19. Unfortunately, many of the lies about the virus come from the President himself. Nearly a quarter of a million Americans have died from the virus. If the country had followed common sense, science-based guidelines, according to some estimates 100,000 fewer would have succumbed to the dread illness. In October 2020 The Guardian said that Facebook was the greatest source of disinformation about Covid-19.

Still another way that social media damages people is the psychological harm to people affected by postings. I know how painful it is to lose a child at any age, but I can’t imagine how terrible it must have been for parents of children killed by a madman at Sandy Hook. But then, to see it called a hoax on Facebook is beyond cruelty. Facebook later closed the accounts of people who posted the terrible lie about Sandy Hook, but for the parents who lost children, the damage had already been done.

Misinformation on social media is unacceptable. It creates harm, and it must be stopped. Facebook has finally stopped postings by holocaust deniers. It also finally decided to stop posts of misinformation about Covid-19. They have the ability to stop these posts of bogus information. They cannot be allowed to permit posts of other harmful lies.

Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act protects the social media from liability for any posts on their sites. That means that anyone can post any kind of harmful information on Facebook, and people harmed by the information cannot sue Facebook. This protection has been abused, and it must be taken away. If the social media were liable for any posts they publish, they would be more careful about what they allow. Revoking Section 203 would make the world a safer place.

The Damage Done by Facebook

It is the nature of politicians to lie, and not only Republicans. (I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinski.) But when the President of the United States makes over 20,000 false statements in three and a half years in office, mendacity is brought to a new low. Unfortunately, in these dishonest times the Great Prevaricator has had lots of help. The social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, have helped him spread his misinformation across the country. The President communicates more through the social media than through official channels, and for the most part these media leave his misinformation untouched. Donald Trump is not the only one who disseminates fabrications through Facebook and others. It is known, for example, that Russia spread lies through these sources to influence the 2016 Presidential election. Facebook was charged with allowing Russians to sow chaos during that election. Since the election was so close, it is very likely that Russian posts on Facebook contributed to the outcome. Other unfriendly powers, like Iran and North Korea, have also spread untruthful statements through Facebook. It is not just foreign powers who spread fraudulent ideas through the internet. Notably QAnon has been posting poisonous ideas for the past three years. QAnon is anonymous, but it poses as an unnamed high-ranking government official. It promotes the conspiracy theory that Democrats are running a pedophile ring, and Donald Trump is leading the fight against the ring. During the 2016 presidential campaign it was charged that Hillary Clinton was involved in such a ring that was located in the basement of a Washington pizzeria, Comet Ping Pong. One man believed the falsehood so strongly that he went to the restaurant armed with a rifle. It turned out that there was no ring, and the restaurant didn’t even have a basement. Marjory Taylor Greene from Georgia seems sure to be elected to Congress. She supports the QAnon conspiracy theories. She also said that Barack Obama is a Muslim, liberal philanthropist George Soros is a Nazi, and she questioned whether a plane really crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. QAnon undermines trust in public institutions through hate speech and the spread of unfound conspiracy theories. Turning Point USA is another group that has been disseminating fraudulent stories. It published pro-Trump comments and misinformation. One of its affiliates, Turning Point Action, was paying teenagers to post messages. Another affiliate, Rally Forge, paid users to cast doubt on mail-in ballots and spread misinformation about the coronavirus. Many of their accounts used stock photos to create false profiles. In April 2020 websites spreading untruthful stories about health on Facebook drew nearly one half a billion views. The top ten sites peddling inaccurate information and conspiracy theories drew nearly four times as many views as the top reputable sites for health information on Facebook. The false claim that pure alcohol could cure the virus led to 800 deaths and 60 cases of blindness after believers drank methanol as a cure. False information and conspiracy theories downplay the public health crisis, spread disinformation about potential remedies and likely safety risks of future vaccines. The social media have taken some steps toward correcting some of the problems created fabrications on their sites. Twitter, for example, has rules against harassment, hate speech, and incitement to violence. They eliminated many accounts that violated these rules. Facebook removed hundreds of fake profiles linked to Turning Point USA. Twitter suspended over one hundred Iranian accounts linked to issues of social justice. When Donald Trump posted a false message that the flu is more deadly than COVID19, Facebook removed the post. Twitter left it in but added a warning label of misinformation. They also prevented it from being shared. Facebook and Google will block all political ads until after the election. We’re glad that the social media is taking some steps to limit deceitful posts on their sites, but what they are doing is not enough. While Facebook and Twitter have removed or labelled some posts as misinformation, lot of disinformation slips through Facebook’s disinformation system. They have stopped publishing posts from QAnon and its affiliates, but individuals can still post QAnon ideas and fabrications. 93,000 active Twitter accounts refer to QAnon in their profile. Since so many people rely on the internet for information, it is unacceptable that so much of the data in cyberspace is fraudulent. Something must be done to correct this. It is not an easy task. Liberals complain that the cloud contains so much prevarication. Conservatives charge that the social media has a liberal bias because so many of the posts that are removed have been placed by conservatives. In a future post we will look at some of the things that can be done to make the social media more honest.b

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.