“Dad, my friend says that Stargate was actually based on a real event – the pyramids are actually landing pads for aliens!”
“Really? Why does he think that?”
“He said he found a website….”
Such is the battle that parents face in this day of internet freedom.
At least his recent home-schooling assignments have been around internet safety, which is a broad topic ranging from malware, viruses and phishing through to ‘fake news’.
Now obviously there are many systems in place, especially on the school servers and my own home network that protect against those software attacks. It is the content of websites that prove to be a trickier minefield to navigate.
Content
How do you explain to a nine and five year old that just because it’s on the internet, doesn’t make it true? Both of them are regular YouTube watchers, which alone requires supervision to one extent or another – the company doesn’t yet enforce or vet its content before allowing its publication so that the inappropriate things actually do get filtered out by the minor’s settings. A parent has to basically keep checking and tell their child to turn off inappropriate content.
(NB. It’s worth pointing out that YouTube has a kids app- but content producers have to make the effort to rate your content as kid-friendly to get on it. This mean’s my son’s obsession with Minecraft ‘tubers is not fulfilled because the streamers won’t label up as kid-friendly.)
Allowing self-regulation on such sites may ease the mammoth administrative burden and attract more content, but few channels will want to restrict their potential audience by slapping a kid friendly badge to it.
But that’s only part of the problem. The other is the freedom to set up a website about anything you want. This website required no more technical effort to build and publish other than obtaining the domain (very cheap these days) and learning how to use a site building program like WordPress. In fact most domain hosts will sell you site building software that is less technical than WordPress, to make it even easier to publish your site.
In a matter of hours, you could have a brand new site proclaiming whatever you like.
Regulation
Ok, you may say, but there are laws about the internet! This is true, but the laws are dependent on the country of origin, which in this context are all about the servers your site is hosted on.
If you publish on UK servers, for example, then your content is subject to the legislation there which means your content can potentially be subject to the laws of libel, defamation, trade and descriptions, fraud; not to mention the various anti-terrorism and criminal legislation that exists to keep its subjects safe. There is no freedom of speech here either, the UK can impose censorship too, legally.
So you host your fake news website somewhere else, you should be able to find somewhere that has few restrictions or doesn’t enforce its internet laws. Your site is published and with some attention to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) you can get listed on search engines and generate traffic.
This basically means that the saying ‘you can find anything on the internet’ has some serious weight. My fake news website can publish completely fictional conspiracy theories, should I choose, and I can even design the pages to resemble a mainstream news site to add credibility to it. Chuck in some advertising with google or someone and to the passing visitor it looks just like the real deal.
Anyone looking for ‘pyramids as landing pads’ should find my fake news listed among all the Stargate references as well as all the conspiracy pages. Job done!
Education
Having explained all this to my son, the next question to answer is naturally: ‘how can I tell which is fake and which is true?’
This isn’t a straightforward answer, especially when major news agencies have all been accused of misinformation, sensationalism and fake news. Cronyism between government and media is so old a relationship it’s practically expected and the shock revelations that destroys careers just part of the changing favours of the powerful….
Then again, that viewpoint could be a manipulation through films like James Bond’s Tomorrow Never Dies where a media cartel creates news stories to manipulate government for its own agenda…
But here lies the crazy land. Here it is easy to get sucked in to the world of conspiracy and counter-conspiracy, a place where if some one dares to think it, there is already a tenuous link to be made to another theory. A place where fiction is held as truth and validated through its nebulous connections with other ‘truths’ rather than the evidence or the scientific process.
So what is the answer to that question, then? We can’t be there to point out which sites are legit and which are fake, not least when in truth we may be wrong in our pronouncements.
My answer then, to my son, is the title of this piece – consider the source.
Don’t believe anything that hasn’t got citations of sources that can be verified and checked.
Good examples of sites that do this are Wikipedia, which insists on citations to back up its content and will tell you when a point is lacking one. Many news articles now also list where they get their information from, even if they just reference another publication. If you are satisfied with the origin of the information, then you can better decide whether to believe it.
What is the context of the information?
We all know that facts and statistics can be spun in different ways, so it’s worth bearing in mind the point of the piece. You can present the number of empty hospital beds as either an organisational failure or evidence of success fighting a pandemic. It’s also worth remembering that photos and video clips can be staged and used out of context – as demonstrated by the recent Presidential election in the USA.
Does the publisher have a motive or bias when presenting the information?
Many news outlets have an affinity with certain political viewpoints- in the UK there are Conservative favouring and Labour preferring papers, not to mention the pro- EU and pro- Brexit ones, etc. etc. The website could also be financially incentivised to publish pieces promoting one thing or another and get a commission for driving web traffic or sales. Also- Have they been negatively affected by the topic being presented?
Can you reproduce the ‘facts’ or claims from first principles?
Many sensationalist claims are often taken as truths, even when logically they don’t make sense and can be refuted through basic application of the scientific method. Myth busting sites and programmes repeatedly do this to debunk some of the ridiculous things put into the public mind, but can you do this yourself? Believers of a claim can always rebuke the debunkers with allegations of camera tricks and CGI, but if you can perform an experiment yourself you can avoid all that nastiness.
Conclusion
The internet undeniably has a major influence in our lives and in the absence of state censorship and dictates on what we should believe, many individuals and organisations will always seek to exploit that.
It is therefore left to the individual to sort through the nonsense and lies and seek out the nuggets of truth and honesty. This can only be achieved through understanding the nature of the digital landscape, and then applying some conditions and ratification on what we find. We must set up these benchmarks personally and be rigorous in our considerations before accepting what we find into our own worldview.
I appreciate that this reality makes elections really difficult when trying to judge the reliability of what they present to you to win the vote and to that I would say using my points above would be critical in your decision making.
But one last point, to all the fantastical conspiracy theorists and those worried by the sheer scale of potential BS out there: Does it really affect you?
It’s worth noting that the majority of conspiracy theorists live in the western ‘free’ democratic nations, so if their ideas are true then these agencies have produced an era of relative prosperity and comfort. You are free to date who you want, live where you want, have children when you want and enjoy the natural world around you. Food is easily obtainable (compared to generations before) and happiness is there for the taking.
At the end of the day, these are things that matter and if history shows that the leadership were all lizards, then props to them for keeping us fed and entertained!
One response
I have thought about these things myself and how you would explain what makes a credible source and what doesn’t. I think it comes down to your own knowledge and experience as well as your ability to do your own research into a question or topic. Those with little world experience or lacking in knowledge or education will be more easily led. Those with research skills and from a higher educational background will be able to form their own conclusions. These research skills are something that should now be taught at a younger age, I didn’t learn them myself until I went to university.