VIDEO 1: Crash Course Navigating Digital Information #1

Generations ago, if you wanted to share an opinion with the public you’d have to write to the
newspaper and hoped they would publish it. There was no other way for strangers to hear your
story or your perspective.

The internet changed how we communicate; we can talk across time and space we can connect
across geographical and political boundaries we can create organizations and communities find
people with similar interests or we can lift people up when they feel down. But when information
flows that freely, dangers are inevitable, misinformation unintentionally incorrect information and
disinformation information that's wrong on purpose spread quickly online as do hate speech and
propaganda. olys we can easily create online world where we only see information we already
agree with or that lines up with our point of view for instance if i only followed people on twitter
who were team blake i would have been pretty blindsided win care it won the bachelorette and
the same could be said for you know actual elections

and because we use information for all kinds of decisionInformation for all kinds of decisions
misinformation and disinformation are really powerful this is true for small everyday decisions
restaurant reviews effect where we eat and for much larger issues like choosing a college to
attend or a place to work the quality of our information directly shapes the quality of our
decisions and the quality of our decisions of course shapes the quality of our shared experience
as you talk about bad or questionable information that includes fake news the kind of news
reporting that is totally false which is a huge problem especially on social media and during
breaking news events and it's a problem across all political ideologies and perspectives but i'm
just talking about fake news were also talking about information that is incredible because the
author of that content isn't enough the wording on the topic take a blog of serious sounding
fitness tips from someone who loves himself is but isn't qualified to give professional help advice
about information that comes from writers or organizations that have something to lose from the
whole truth like a company that sells toasters creating best poster . com to publish lists of the
best toasters with their brand at the top of every west or friends who can be neatly find videos
but supposedly through which it is pronounced to give when you know that give is pronounced
gf but the thing is quality of information was on a spectrum it's not a duality good information
and about information it is our job to evaluate the information that we receive find out where it
falls on that spectrum and decide how to use it going forward but as a species we are not very
good at judging the quality of information on the internet in fact we've always been . at it in 2002
as study with over 2,000 participants reported that websites design with the most frequently i
mentioned factor in judging a website's credibility when asked to choose which of two sides has
more credible 46% of participants used the look of the website and their evaluations adults and
young people like still typically evaluate information based on factors unrelated to its content
how it works whether they've used it before or who referred them to eat in 2016 our friend
stanford history education group released a study of over 7,000 little school high school and
college students when asked to evaluate online information they based their evaluations on
asides look and feel they focused on things that a website creator could easily change like the
url the about page school or work that technique doesn't work well one of the things that
participants had to do was judge minimum wage . , says about you guessed it the minimum
wage in claim to bust myth behind a minimum weight lifting ways the grazing it would hurt the
economy many students never virtue that site with by a public relations firm working for a group
that wants to keep minimum wages go the firm represents industries that stand to benefit from
paying employees that in other words the creator of this website has something to lose by telling
both sides of the minimum wage to pay so we can't believe trust them to do so i discovered that
during the study some students also felt the presence of certain types of content on a website
meant it was more reliable like when students found something they don't was evidence on the
pages is take or an anecdote perhaps they assumed that meant the entire page with more
reliable and they often didn't check the sources because you know it's better that you will never
check sources forgettable participants also within an article that was actually an advertisement
for shell oil 70% of high school students rated it as more reliable than a traditional news story
why because of this pie chart of the top statistics and infographic sarapin easy and effective
ways to communicate facts and evidence but that doesn't mean that all charts or trustworthy like
yours another chart it says b 96% of the time this guy is green the existence of this chart is no
more proof of its validity then say a spooky noise this proof that your house is haunted put back
to be stanford history education group study over 80% of middle school students didn't correctly
identified but this was an add either even though it was labeled sponsored content sponsor
content means a company paid the publication for is based on its side hoping to advertise with a
post that looks like a news article and as you may know who sponsored content also shapes a
lot of discourse on youtube and its effective advertising because many of us can't help but
believe that what looks like a news article must in fact be one thanks . bibles argue that the
students in that study are still learning and though probably get better at evaluating information
when i get olderalso tested with phd first year college students from a pretence university and
professional fact checkers from major news organizations that the people who go through each
copy and a news story to make sure that all the facts are accurate there are far too few of them
in this world but anyway how effectively would you guess those three groups evaluated
information quality all the professors in a college student obviously achieve academic success
and are smart thoughtful people they also didn't do well with the experiment with evaluating
online sources day to focused on superficial things like the sites layout how much content the
side had and whether it linked to other sites a focused largely on appearance and the presence
of things like evidence and links not their content or their value and the strategies motherboard
to an extent in the early days at the internet but things are much more complicated now and
there are many misleading or false or is that cite sources that either don't say with a reported to
say or or themselves also puts its misinformation all the way down to the information from the
good as i mean it is literally their jobs but it's nice to know that they were good at the factors did
well because they employed a variety of carefully home skills to decipher fact from fiction and
we're going to were in those skills to gather from the fact checkers in our next episode also the
one at s