In the age of social media, the notions of truth, information, and knowledge are all changing. These notions were once amorphous and invisible - the kinds of airy, invisible topics only philosophers and a few scientists studied. But today truth, information, and knowledge are all represented, constructed, and battled about online. Page views, shares, and reactions clue individuals and companies in to what spreads from machine to machine and mind to mind. Content editable by users online is negotiated and changed in real time. In this chapter we'll look at the problems and opportunities afforded by social media in relationship with truths and knowledge.

"Fake news" and “post-truth”

Much has been made in recent years of "fake news." This is a term, favored by the President of the United States among others, that circulates ubiquitously through social as well as traditional media. And Oxford Dictionaries presented "post-truth" as its "word of the year:" But what do these terms mean, and what do they have to do with social media?

To understand these terms, we have to look closely at what we expect with the word "news" and notions of truth and "fake"-ness. These conversations start with the concepts of objectivity and subjectivity.

Objectivity and subjectivity

To be objective is to present a truth in a way that would also be true for anyone anywhere; so that truth exists regardless of anyone’s perspective. The popular notion of what is true is often based on this expectation of objective truth.

The expectation of objective truth makes sense in some situations - related to physics and mathematics, for example. However, humans' presentations of both current and historic events have always been subjective - that is, one or more subjects with a point of view have presented the events as they see or remember them. When subjective accounts disagree, journalists and historians face a tricky process of figuring out why the accounts disagree, and piecing together what the evidence is beneath subjective accounts, to learn what is true.

Multiple truths = knowledge production

In US society we did not used to think about knowledge as being a negotiation among multiple truths. Even at the beginning of the 21st century, the production of knowledge was considered the domain of those privileged with the highest education - usually from the most powerful sectors of society. For example, when I was growing up, the Encyclopedia Britannica was the authority I looked to for general information about everything. I did not know who the authors were, but I trusted they were experts.

Enter Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, and everything changed.

The first version of Wikipedia was founded on a more similar model to the Encyclopedia Britannica than it is now. It was called Nupedia, and only experts were invited to contribute. But then one of the co-founders, Jimmy Wales, decided to try a new model of knowledge production based on the concept of collective intelligence, written about by Pierre Lévy. The belief underpinning collective intelligence, and Wikipedia, is that no one knows everything, but everyone knows something. Everyone was invited to contribute to Wikipedia. And everyone still is.

When different people's perspectives are involved, there can be multiple and even conflicting truths around the same topic. And there can be intense competition to put forth some preferred version of events. But the more perspectives you see, the more knowledge you have about the topic in general. And the results of negotiation between multiple truths can be surprisingly accurate when compared with known truths. A 2005 study in the prominent journal Nature comparing the accuracy of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia found they had around the same numbers of errors and levels of accuracy.

What are truths?

So what qualifies as “a truth”? Well, truths are created and sustained from three ingredients. The first two ingredients are evidence and sincerity. That is, truths must involve evidence - pieces of information that could or can be seen or otherwise experienced in the world. And truths must involve sincerity – the intention of their creator to be honest.

And the third ingredient of a truth? That is you, the human reader. As an interpreter, and sometimes sharer/spreader of online information and “news”, you must keep an active mind. You are catching up with that truth in real time. Is it true, based on evidence available to you from your perspective? Even if it once seemed true, has evidence recently emerged that reveals it to not be true? Many truths are not true forever; as we learn more, what was once true is often revealed to not be true.

Truths are not always profitable, so they compete with a lot of other types of content online. As a steward of the world of online information, you have to work to keep truths in circulation.

Why people spread "fake news" and bad information

"Fake news" has multiple meanings in our culture today. When politicians and online discussants refer to stories as fake news, they are often referring to news that does not match their perspective. But there are news stories generated today that are better described as "fake" - based on no evidence.

So why is "fake news" more of an issue today than it was in the past?

Well, historically "news" has long been the presentation of information on current events in our world. In past eras of traditional media, a much smaller number of people published news content. There were codes of ethics associated with journalism, such as the Journalist's Creed written by Walter Williams in 1914. Not all journalists followed this or any other code of ethics, but in the past those who behaved unethically were often called out by their colleagues and unemployable with trusted news organizations.

Today, thanks to Web 2.0 and social media sites, nearly anyone can create and widely circulate stories branded as news; the case study of a story by Eric Tucker in this New York Times lesson plan is a good example. And the huge mass of "news" stories that results involves stories created based on a variety of motivations. This is why Oxford Dictionaries made the term post-truth their word of the year for 2016. “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

People or agencies may spread stories as news online to:

• spread truth
• influence others
• generate profit

Multiple motivations may drive someone to create or spread a story not based on evidence. But when spreading truth is not one of the story creators' concerns, you could justifiably call that story "fake news." I try not to use that term these days though; it's too loaded with politics. I prefer to call "news" unconcerned with truth by its more scientific name...

Bullshit!

Think I'm bullshitting you when I say bullshit is the scientific name for fake news? Well, I'm not. There are information scientists and philosophers who study different types of bad information, and here are some of basic overviews of their classifications for bad information:

• misinformation = inaccurate information; often spread without intention to deceive
• disinformation = information intended to deceive
• bullshit = information spread without concern for whether or not it's true

Professors Kay Matheisen and Don Fallis at the University of Arizona have written that much of the "fake news" generated in the recent election season was bullshit, because producers were concerned with winning influence or profit or both, but were unconcerned with whether it was true.

Bullshit and other deceptive "news" stories were particularly prevalent around the 2016 Presidential election, when tensions were high and influence on the minds of US voters held great value.

It is not always possible to know the motivation(s) behind a story's creation. Indeed, on social media it can be difficult to determine the source of information. But there have been some cases where identified sources were clearly trying to deceive, or were bullshitting - creating content that would spread fast without caring whether it was true.

Cases of bad information spread reveal different intentions, including destabilization of the US government, and profit. There have been multiple cases of "news" story "factories," in which people work together informally or are even employed to create news stories. The New York Times investigated one factory in Russia, a nation whose government's interference in the US election is now the subject of a federal investigation. And Wired Magazine reported on a factory in Macedonia in which teens created election-related news stories for profit.

There is evidence that the systematic creation of election-related stories had a considerable effect on the 2016 US Presidential election. Donald Trump's victory was considered a victory by self-proclaimed "Trolls" and others who collaborated in publishing online content to defeat Hillary Clinton. Some of these content creators celebrated their campaign, including its disregard for truths, in an event they called the Deplora-Ball.

Mark Zuckerberg initially denied responsibility for Facebook's spread of deceptive stories. Now Facebook moderators are beginning to flag "disputed news". But it is likely "news" factories will continue produce stories not based in truth as long as there are readers who continue to spread them.

The Alt-Right: From fake news to domestic terrorism

2016 saw the fast growth online of a right-leaning political aggregate in the US known as the Alt-Right (first mentioned in Chapter 5). The Alt-Right and related "white nationalist" groups have framed themselves in response to movements based on identity politics - groups that rally or identify around a race, ethnicity, upbringing, or religion rather than a political party. But many refute the notion that these groups are formed around identity, particularly when white supremacy - which centers on oppressing other races - has been so closely associated with Alt-Right media and demonstrations.

What seems to have brought the Alt-Right together more than identity politics is their approach to news - which they often discount as biased - and truth or "reality" - which in their culture it has been acceptable to manufacture for political use. Karl Rove of the second Bush administration was an early purveyor of Alt-Right ideology, who insisted that people in power create their own reality (and therefore truths.) The Alt-Right movement has followed this philosophy, recruiting followers through memes that imagine situations that fit with their politics. One Alt-Right blogger professed clear political intentions behind disinformation he spread in a profile by the New Yorker Magazine - disinformation which spread widely prior to the 2016 election.

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

~ Karl Rove to a NYTimes reporter in 2002

Bullshit that really took off

According to politifact, some big headlines from 2016 of stories not based in truth included these:

• Hillary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of a pizza shop.
• Democrats want to impose Islamic law in Florida.
• Thousands of people at a Donald Trump rally in Manhattan chanted, "We hate Muslims, we hate blacks, we want our great country back."

Buzzfeed tracked the rates at which election stories spread on Facebook in 2016, and found these false stories out-performed true election stories:

• “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President”
• “WikiLeaks CONFIRMS Hillary Sold Weapons to ISIS”
• “IT’S OVER: Hillary’s ISIS Email Just Leaked and It’s Worse than Anyone Could Have Imagined”

None of the listed stories was based in truth, but readers spread them wildly across their social networks and other online spaces. And many readers believed them. Take "pizzagate": In response to the pizza shop story, one man showed up with a gun at the pizza shop at the center of the story and fired shots, attempting to break up what he believed was a massive pedophilia operation.

Which leads to a new question. We understand now some of the reasons bullshit and other bad information spreads online. But why are readers and social media users so ready to believe it?

Bugs in the human belief system

• One tendency is belief perseverance: You want to keep believing what you already believe, treasuring a preexisting belief like Gollum treasures the ring in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series.

The other tendency is confirmation bias: the brain runs through the text of something to select the pieces of it that confirm what you think is already true, while knocking away and ignoring the pieces that don't confirm what you believe.

These tendencies to believe what we want to hear and see are exacerbated by social network-enabled filter bubbles (described in Chapter 4 of this book.) When we get our news through social media, we are less likely to see opposing points of view, which social networking sites filter out, and which we are unlikely to see on our own.

There is concern that youth and students are particularly vulnerable to believing deceptive online content. But I believe that with some training, youth are going to be better at "reading" than those older than them. Youth are accustomed to online content layered with pictures, links, and insider conversations and connections. The trick to "reading" in the age of social media is to read all of these layers, not just the text.

Dr. Daly's steps to "reading" social media news stories in 2017:

5. Before you share, consider fact-checking. Reliable fact checking sites at the time of this writing include:

• politifact.com
• snopes.com
• factcheck.org

That said - no one fact-checking site is perfect.; neither is any one news site. All are subjective, and liable to be taken over by partisan interests or trolls.

fake news

A term recently popularized by politicians to refer to stories they do not agree with.

misinformation

Inaccurate information that is spread without the intention to deceive.

disinformation

Information intended to deceive those who receive it.

bullshit

Information spread without concern for whether or not it's true.

knowledge construction

The negotiation of multiple truths as a way of understanding or "knowing" something.

confirmation bias

The human tendency for the brain to run through the text of something to select the pieces of it that confirm what you think is already true, while knocking away and ignoring the pieces that don't confirm what you believe.

belief perseverance

The human tendency to want to continue believing what you already believe.

Did you get all that?

Let's see if you can differentiate the truths and the bullshit.

Match the type of deceptive information to the best definition, according to this chapter.lkkj

1. misinformation
2. disinformation
3. bullshit
4. fake news

• A. information intended to deceive
• B. information spread without concern for whether or not it's true
• C. a term recently popularized by politicians to refer to stories they do not agree with
• D. misinformation = inaccurate information; often spread without intention to deceive

A 2005 study in the prominent journal Nature comparing the accuracy of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia reported which study results?

1. The Encyclopedia Britannica had no errors and was far more accurate than Wikipedia.
2. Wikipedia had no errors and was far more accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica.
3. Wikipedia and The Encyclopedia Britannica had around the same numbers of errors and levels of accuracy.

Which top-performing election story of 2016 is false?

1. “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President”
2. “WikiLeaks CONFIRMS Hillary Sold Weapons to ISIS”
3. “IT’S OVER: Hillary’s ISIS Email Just Leaked and It’s Worse than Anyone Could Have Imagined”
4. All of the above are false.
5. None of the above; all are headlines of true stories.

According to the video, what has led to the rise of the Alt Right? (Choose the most complete answer)

1. The anonymity and networks afforded by the internet
2. A backlash among some white men against social movements including feminism, globalization, and racial justice
3. Both of the above
4. Neither of the above.

In what ways does research cited here suggest humans will tend to believe deceptive "news" stories?

1. We treasure our pre-existing beliefs
2. We have an intuition for what is true and what is not true
3. We reject new information that goes against what we already believe
4. All of the above
5. A and C only