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Lies, damned lies, and Brexit statistics

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Lies, damned lies, and Brexit statistics

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Both sides of the EU referendum campaign are bombarding us with charts, facts and numbers, intending to convince us of their arguments. But we all know the famous adage "Well, you can prove anything with facts."

What are we to make of claims about the impact on the economy of leaving the EU, or the figures about how much we spend on membership, and where else it could be spent? Suggestions that future trade deals away from the EU will be a better deal for the UK, or worse than what we have now?

Looking at a rather frivilous claim last week gives us some insight into just how easy it is to twist even a small set of figures to make the case for and against Brexit.

On Friday the Leave.EU campaign sent a tweet saying "Watching #Eurovision on Saturday? More countries outside the EU have won than those inside #LoveEurope"

It's hardly the most important issue at stake, but I couldn't believe it could possibly be true by any measure, so I decided to investigate. Here are the different ways I found to prove it was wrong. And to also prove that at the same time, it was indeed totally correct.

Have more countries from outside the EU won the Eurovision Song Contest than countries within the EU?

No.

16 current member states have won Eurovision: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom have all had at least one night of Eurovision glory.

Ten countries who have never been in the EU have been crowned Eurovision champions: Azerbaijan, Israel, Monaco, Norway, Russia, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine and Yugoslavia. And one of those doesn't exist anymore.

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What about number of victories by each country? Maybe non-EU countries win Eurovision more frequently?

No.

Countries who are currently EU member states have won the contest a total of 48 times since it started. Countries who have never been members of the EU have only won it sixteen times.

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But surely it makes a difference if people were actually members of the EU when they won it?

Good point. Not every country that is currently an EU member state won the contest while being a member of the EU.

The UK won twice in the sixties before joining, and Baltic states Estonia and Latvia both won in the early 2000s before becoming EU members in 2004. The Netherlands even won the contest in 1957 before the European Economic Community came into being.

There are 13 occasions when a country that is now in the EU won the contest before it joined the European Union. This makes the total score a lot closer. 35 wins to 29 wins.

But still in favour of the European Union members winning Eurovision.

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Lies, damned lies, and Brexit statistics

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Both sides of the EU referendum campaign are bombarding us with charts, facts and numbers, intending to convince us of their arguments. But we all know the famous adage "Well, you can prove anything with facts."

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Your handy postcard-sized guide to statistics

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Your handy postcard-sized guide to statistics

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Your handy postcard-sized guide to statistics

"The best financial advice for most people would fit on an index card." That's the gist of an offhand comment in 2013 by Harold Pollack, a professor at the University of Chicago. Pollack's bluff was duly called, and he quickly rushed off to find an index card and scribble some bullet points - with respectable results.

When I heard about Pollack's notion - he elaborated upon it in a 2016 book - I asked myself: would this work for statistics, too? There are some obvious parallels. In each case, common sense goes a surprisingly long way; in each case, dizzying numbers and impenetrable jargon loom; in each case, there are stubborn technical details that matter; and, in each case, there are people with a sharp incentive to lead us astray.

The case for everyday practical numeracy has never been more urgent. Statistical claims fill our newspapers and social media feeds, unfiltered by expert judgment and often designed as a political weapon. We do not necessarily trust the experts - or more precisely, we may have our own distinctive view of who counts as an expert and who does not. Nor are we passive consumers of statistical propaganda; we are the medium through which the propaganda spreads. We are arbiters of what others will see: what we retweet, like or share online determines whether a claim goes viral or vanishes. If we fall for lies, we become unwittingly complicit in deceiving others.

On the bright side, we have more tools than ever to help weigh up what we see before we share it - if we are able and willing to use them. In the hope that someone might use it, I set out to write my own postcard-sized citizens' guide to statistics. Here's what I learnt.

Professor Pollack's index card includes advice such as "Save 20 per cent of your money" and "Pay your credit card in full every month". The author Michael Pollan offers dietary advice in even pithier form: "Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants." Quite so, but I still want a cheeseburger. However good the advice Pollack and Pollan offer, it's not always easy to take. The problem is not necessarily ignorance. Few people think that Coca-Cola is a healthy drink, or believe that credit cards let you borrow cheaply. Yet many of us fall into some form of temptation or other. That is partly because slick marketers are focused on selling us high-fructose corn syrup and easy credit. And it is partly because we are human beings with human frailties.

With this in mind, my statistical postcard begins with advice about emotion rather than logic. When you encounter a new statistical claim, observe your feelings. Yes, it sounds like a line from Star Wars, but we rarely believe anything because we're compelled to do so by pure deduction or irrefutable evidence. We have feelings about many of the claims we might read - anything from "inequality is rising" to "chocolate prevents dementia". If we don't notice and pay attention to those feelings, we're off to a shaky start. What sort of feelings? Defensiveness. Triumphalism. Righteous anger. Evangelical fervour. Or, when it comes to chocolate and dementia, relief.

It's fine to have an emotional response to a chart or shocking statistic - but we should not ignore that emotion, or be led astray by it. There are certain claims that we rush to tell the world, others that we use to rally like-minded people, still others we refuse to believe. Our belief or disbelief in these claims is part of who we feel we are.

"We all process information consistent with our tribe," says Dan Kahan, professor of law and psychology at Yale University.

In 2005, Charles Taber and Milton Lodge, political scientists at Stony Brook University, New York, conducted experiments in which subjects were invited to study arguments around hot political issues. Subjects showed a clear confirmation bias: they sought out testimony from like-minded organisations. For example, subjects who opposed gun control would tend to start by reading the views of the National Rifle Association.

Subjects also showed a disconfirmation bias: when the researchers presented them with certain arguments and invited comment, the subjects would quickly accept arguments with which they agreed, but devote considerable effort to disparage opposing arguments.

Expertise is no defence against this emotional reaction; in fact, Taber and Lodge found that better-informed experimental subjects showed stronger biases. The more they knew, the more cognitive weapons they could aim at their opponents.

"So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature," commented Benjamin Franklin, "since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."

This is why it's important to face up to our feelings before we even begin to process a statistical claim. If we don't at least acknowledge that we may be bringing some emotional baggage along with us, we have little chance of discerning what's true. As the physicist Richard Feynman once commented, "You must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool."

The second crucial piece of advice is to understand the claim. That seems obvious. But all too often we leap to disbelieve or believe (and repeat) a claim without pausing to ask whether we really understand what the claim is. To quote Douglas Adams's philosophical supercomputer, Deep Thought, "Once you know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means."

For example, take the widely accepted claim that "inequality is rising". It seems uncontroversial, and urgent. But what does it mean? Racial inequality? Gender inequality? Inequality of opportunity, of consumption, of education attainment, of wealth? Within countries or across the globe? Even given a narrower claim, "inequality of income before taxes is rising" (and you should be asking yourself, since when?), there are several different ways to measure this.

One approach is to compare the income of people at the 90th percentile and the 10th percentile, but that tells us nothing about the super-rich, nor the ordinary people in the middle. An alternative is to examine the income share of the top 1 per cent - but this approach has the opposite weakness, telling us nothing about how the poorest fare relative to the majority. There is no single right answer - nor should we assume that all the measures tell a similar story. In fact, there are many true statements that one can make about inequality. It may be worth figuring out which one is being made before retweeting it.

Perhaps it is not surprising that a concept such as inequality turns out to have hidden depths. But the same holds true of more tangible subjects, such as "a nurse". Are midwives nurses? Health visitors? Should two nurses working half-time count as one nurse? Claims over the staffing of the UK's National Health Service have turned on such details.

All this can seem like pedantry - or worse, a cynical attempt to muddy the waters and suggest that you can prove anything with statistics. But there is little point in trying to evaluate whether a claim is true if one is unclear what the claim even means.

Imagine a study showing that kids who play violent video games are more likely to be violent in reality. Rebecca Goldin, a mathematician and director of the statistical literacy project STATS, points out that we should ask questions about concepts such as "play", "violent video games" and "violent in reality". Is Space Invaders a violent game? It involves shooting things, after all. And are we measuring a response to a questionnaire after 20 minutes' play in a laboratory, or murderous tendencies in people who play 30 hours a week?

"Many studies won't measure violence," says Goldin. "They'll measure something else such as aggressive behaviour." Just like "inequality" or "nurse", these seemingly common sense words hide a lot of wiggle room.

Two particular obstacles to our understanding are worth exploring in a little more detail. One is the question of causation. "Taller children have a higher reading age," goes the headline. This may summarise the results of a careful study about nutrition and cognition. Or it may simply reflect the obvious point that eight-year-olds read better than four-year-olds - and are taller. Causation is philosophically and technically a knotty business but, for the casual consumer of statistics, the question is not so complicated: just ask whether a causal claim is being made, and whether it might be justified.

Returning to this study about violence and video games, we should ask: is this a causal relationship, tested in experimental conditions? Or is this a broad correlation, perhaps because the kind of thing that leads kids to violence also leads kids to violent video games? Without clarity on this point, we don't really have anything but an empty headline.

We should never forget, either, that all statistics are a summary of a more complicated truth. For example, what's happening to wages? With tens of millions of wage packets being paid every month, we can only ever summarise - but which summary? The average wage can be skewed by a small number of fat cats. The median wage tells us about the centre of the distribution but ignores everything else. Or we might look at the median increase in wages, which isn't the same thing as the increase in the median wage - not at all. In a situation where the lowest and highest wages are increasing while the middle sags, it's quite possible for the median pay rise to be healthy while median pay falls.

Sir Andrew Dilnot, former chair of the UK Statistics Authority, warns that an average can never convey the whole of a complex story. "It's like trying to see what's in a room by peering through the keyhole," he tells me.

In short, "you need to ask yourself what's being left out," says Mona Chalabi, data editor for The Guardian US. That applies to the obvious tricks, such as a vertical axis that's been truncated to make small changes look big. But it also applies to the less obvious stuff - for example, why does a graph comparing the wages of African-Americans with those of white people not also include data on Hispanic or Asian-Americans? There is no shame in leaving something out. No chart, table or tweet can contain everything. But what is missing can matter.

Channel the spirit of film noir: get the backstory. Of all the statistical claims in the world, this particular stat fatale appeared in your newspaper or social media feed, dressed to impress. Why? Where did it come from? Why are you seeing it?

Sometimes the answer is little short of a conspiracy: a PR company wanted to sell ice cream, so paid a penny-ante academic to put together the "equation for the perfect summer afternoon", pushed out a press release on a quiet news day, and won attention in a media environment hungry for clicks. Or a political donor slung a couple of million dollars at an ideologically sympathetic think-tank in the hope of manufacturing some talking points.

Just as often, the answer is innocent but unedifying: publication bias. A study confirming what we already knew - smoking causes cancer - is unlikely to make news. But a study with a surprising result - maybe smoking doesn't cause cancer after all - is worth a headline. The new study may have been rigorously conducted but is probably wrong: one must weigh it up against decades of contrary evidence.

Publication bias is a big problem in academia. The surprising results get published, the follow-up studies finding no effect tend to appear in lesser journals if they appear at all. It is an even bigger problem in the media - and perhaps bigger yet in social media. Increasingly, we see a statistical claim because people like us thought it was worth a Like on Facebook.

David Spiegelhalter, president of the Royal Statistical Society, proposes what he calls the "Groucho principle". Groucho Marx famously resigned from a club - if they'd accept him as a member, he reasoned, it couldn't be much of a club. Spiegelhalter feels the same about many statistical claims that reach the headlines or the social media feed. He explains, "If it's surprising or counter-intuitive enough to have been drawn to my attention, it is probably wrong."

OK. You've noted your own emotions, checked the backstory and understood the claim being made. Now you need to put things in perspective. A few months ago, a horrified citizen asked me on Twitter whether it could be true that in the UK, seven million disposable coffee cups were thrown away every day. I didn't have an answer. (A quick internet search reveals countless repetitions of the claim, but no obvious source.) But I did have an alternative question: is that a big number? The population of the UK is 65 million. If one person in 10 used a disposable cup each day, that would do the job.

Many numbers mean little until we can compare them with a more familiar quantity. It is much more informative to know how many coffee cups a typical person discards than to know how many are thrown away by an entire country. And more useful still to know whether the cups are recycled (usually not, alas) or what proportion of the country's waste stream is disposable coffee cups (not much, is my guess, but I may be wrong).

So we should ask: how big is the number compared with other things I might intuitively understand? How big is it compared with last year, or five years ago, or 30? It's worth a look at the historical trend, if the data are available.

Finally, beware "statistical significance". There are various technical objections to the term, some of which are important. But the simplest point to appreciate is that a number can be "statistically significant" while being of no practical importance. Particularly in the age of big data, it's possible for an effect to clear this technical hurdle of statistical significance while being tiny. One study was able to demonstrate that unborn children exposed to a heatwave while in the womb went on to earn less as adults. The finding was statistically significant. But the impact was trivial: $30 in lost income per year. Just because a finding is statistically robust does not mean it matters; the word "significance" obscures that.

In an age of computer-generated images of data clouds, some of the most charming data visualisations are hand-drawn doodles by the likes of Mona Chalabi and the cartoonist Randall Munroe. But there is more to these pictures than charm: Chalabi uses the wobble of her pen to remind us that most statistics have a margin of error. A computer plot can confer the illusion of precision on what may be a highly uncertain situation.

"It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong," wrote Carveth Read in Logic (1898), and excessive precision can lead people astray. On the eve of the US presidential election in 2016, the political forecasting website FiveThirtyEight gave Donald Trump a 28.6 per cent chance of winning. In some ways that is impressive, because other forecasting models gave Trump barely any chance at all. But how could anyone justify the decimal point on such a forecast? No wonder many people missed the basic message, which was that Trump had a decent shot. "One in four" would have been a much more intuitive guide to the vagaries of forecasting.

Exaggerated precision has another cost: it makes numbers needlessly cumbersome to remember and to handle. So, embrace imprecision. The budget of the NHS in the UK is about £10bn a month. The national income of the United States is about $20tn a year. One can be much more precise about these things, but carrying the approximate numbers around in my head lets me judge pretty quickly when - say - a £50m spending boost or a $20bn tax cut is noteworthy, or a rounding error.

My favourite rule of thumb is that since there are 65 million people in the UK and people tend to live a bit longer than 65, the size of a typical cohort - everyone retiring or leaving school in a given year - will be nearly a million people. Yes, it's a rough estimate - but vaguely right is often good enough.

Be curious. Curiosity is bad for cats, but good for stats. Curiosity is a cardinal virtue because it encourages us to work a little harder to understand what we are being told, and to enjoy the surprises along the way.

This is partly because almost any statistical statement raises questions: who claims this? Why? What does this number mean? What's missing? We have to be willing - in the words of UK statistical regulator Ed Humpherson - to " go another click ". If a statistic is worth sharing, isn't it worth understanding first? The digital age is full of informational snares - but it also makes it easier to look a little deeper before our minds snap shut on an answer.

While curiosity gives us the motivation to ask another question or go another click, it gives us something else, too: a willingness to change our minds. For many of the statistical claims that matter, we have already reached a conclusion. We already know what our tribe of right-thinking people believe about Brexit, gun control, vaccinations, climate change, inequality or nationalisation - and so it is natural to interpret any statistical claim as either a banner to wave, or a threat to avoid.

Curiosity can put us into a better frame of mind to engage with statistical surprises. If we treat them as mysteries to be resolved, we are more likely to spot statistical foul play, but we are also more open-minded when faced with rigorous new evidence.

In research with Asheley Landrum, Katie Carpenter, Laura Helft and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dan Kahan has discovered that people who are intrinsically curious about science - they exist across the political spectrum - tend to be less polarised in their response to questions about politically sensitive topics. We need to treat surprises as a mystery rather than a threat. Isaac Asimov is thought to have said, "The most exciting phrase in science isn't 'Eureka!', but 'That's funny...'" The quip points to an important truth: if we treat the open question as more interesting than the neat answer, we're on the road to becoming wiser.

In the end, my postcard has 50-ish words and six commandments. Simple enough, I hope, for someone who is willing to make an honest effort to evaluate - even briefly - the statistical claims that appear in front of them. That willingness, I fear, is what is most in question.

"Hey, Bill, Bill, am I gonna check every statistic?" said Donald Trump, then presidential candidate, when challenged by Bill O'Reilly about a grotesque lie that he had retweeted about African-Americans and homicides. And Trump had a point - sort of. He should, of course, have got someone to check a statistic before lending his megaphone to a false and racist claim. We all know by now that he simply does not care.

But Trump's excuse will have struck a chord with many, even those who are aghast at his contempt for accuracy (and much else). He recognised that we are all human. We don't check everything; we can't. Even if we had all the technical expertise in the world, there is no way that we would have the time.

My aim is more modest. I want to encourage us all to make the effort a little more often: to be open-minded rather than defensive; to ask simple questions about what things mean, where they come from and whether they would matter if they were true. And, above all, to show enough curiosity about the world to want to know the answers to some of these questions - not to win arguments, but because the world is a fascinating place.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 8 February 2018.
My recent book is "Fifty Inventions That Shaped The Modern Economy". Grab yourself a copy in the US or in the UK (slightly different title) or through your local bookshop.

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Your handy postcard-sized guide to statistics

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"The best financial advice for most people would fit on an index card." That's the gist of an offhand comment in 2013 by Harold Pollack, a professor at the University of Chicago. Pollack's bluff was duly called, and he quickly rushed off to find an index card and scribble some bullet points - with respectable results.

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A lot of links

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Critical evaluation forms and information

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Full text of the lecture as delivered at the Royal Television Society on 28 September 2017:

I am honoured to be asked to deliver this, the first annual Steve Hewlett memorial lecture.

Thank you to the RTS, the Media Society and to Rachel for inviting me to deliver it. It's great to have Steve's boys - Freddie, Billy, Bertie - here, his sister Sue and other members of the family too.

Steve's death was news - national news - which, had he been here to see it and to see you all gathered here for the first annual Steve Hewlett memorial lecture - would have produced one of those characteristically laconic Hewlett chuckles.

It was news, of course, because millions had grown used to turning up the car radio or stopping the ironing or waiting before turning on the kettle to make sure they not miss the latest weekly instalment of the Hewlett cancer chronicle - in which a middle aged man described the pain in his oesophagus; the splitting of his nails or chapping of his feet; the search for the drug or the treatment that might buy him some relief and some more time before the end which he sensed and we sensed was coming all too fast.

"To cut a long story short" was one of Steve's catchphrases. His tales from the medical frontline - many of his tales - were, of course, anything but short and could, of course, be all too painful to listen to. Few would have imagined that they would be a recipe for broadcasting gold. Except, perhaps, for Steve. They were one last reminder of his sixth sense which meant he knew, he just knew, the stories that would engage an audience and, boy, did he know how to tell them.

It was something I saw from the moment I first met him. I was as establishment as you could get - a BBC trainee straight out of university who'd been schooled at the Oxford Union debating society. Steve, on the other hand, carried the aura of radical chic which came from his time at the new and positively daring Channel 4 where, it was said, he'd made a film giving a Marxist interpretation of cricket - combining two of his greatest passions.

Years later, he would become editor of Panorama and inherit me as his deputy. We accidentally made history together - and not in the way we would have liked - by becoming the first ever programme to have an interview with the prime minister blocked from transmission by a court ruling. "Cutting a long story short" it involved me falling out with a certain Alex Salmond for the first but certainly not for the last time. Steve could have blamed me. But he backed me. It's what great editors do but it is something they can only do if like Steve, they are rigorous in their approach to the facts, open minded to the views of their critics and brave enough to take editorial risks and to defend their team when they do.

Even more years after that he and I would talk regularly - both on air and off - about the issues he analysed and explained as presenter of Radio 4's Media Show. It was there that Steve won the Nick Clarke Award for an interview which the judges described as 'challenging, well argued, well structured, well informed, impartial and courteous'. A fine summary of his journalism.

What brought us closer, though, was our shared experience of cancer. When I was recovering from the surgery which successfully removed my tumour but robbed me of my voice, Steve reassured me and wrote in the Radio Times that the audience would get used to my new throaty sound. When he told me about his diagnosis I wrote him a beginners guide on how to cope with chemotherapy. I still fondly recall the marathon cancer chat we had during a more than two hour drive from my home in London to the University of Essex to help open their new journalism course. When I finally arrived and got Steve off the phone I realised I'd forgotten to talk about what I called him in the first place to discuss - journalism!

Tonight I'm determined not to repeat that mistake. I am here to talk about the business - you might even dub it a calling - which Steve loved. A love and a calling which so many of you share. Telling stories about the world we live in. Stories designed to explain it to people, to reveal things they don't but ought to know. Stories that educate, inform and, yes thank you Lord Reith - entertain. Or what we call, rather less inspiringly, news and current affairs.

Themes

So, to cut a long story short my message tonight will be that:

News is too important to be reduced to a three letter word - OMG or LOL or WTF - with all else left hidden by the all powerful algorithms which prioritise emotion - whether empathy or anger - over facts and analysis.

But that is the risk given the rise of news on social media.

AND given signs of an erosion of trust in the UK media, I will argue we need to learn from Steve's open minded willingness to challenge the conventional wisdom.

AND to embrace a mission to engage with the audience we are not currently reaching.

That will involve finding new ways to ensure on air diversity - not just gender, ethnicity and age but, crucially, background too.

And what should come with it - diversity of thinking.

Finally we will need to re-make the case for impartial news media.

The challenge

Let's begin - as Steve might have said - at the beginning.

When Steve first became a journalist people had the choice of just three TV channels. There were no news channels, websites, blogs or social media Apples were what you put in a pie. Galaxies a chocolately treat. Don't worry this isn't going to become the journalistic equivalent of the four Yorkshiremen sketch.

But - bear with me just for a moment - spin on to when Steve became editor of Panorama and I was his deputy in the mid 1990s. There were now - wait for it - four terrestrial channels. Sky TV had just been invented. As had the worldwide web just been invented.

But you know all that. What you may not know is what the latest figures show:

When those between 16 and 24 "watch" a broadcast they're only watching on what their mums and dads would call "the telly" or 'the Box" on just over a third of what the statisticians call viewing occasions [Routes to Content, BBC TV Audiences]

More and more access news on their smartphones - almost a half whilst in bed, a little fewer on the bus or train and, wait for it, a third whilst on the loo [Reuters Digital News Report, 2017]

No wonder those same 16-24 year olds are watching less than half an hour of TV news a week - a fall of third in under five years [Ofcom News Consumption Report, 2016]

To summarise a little crudely - fewer and fewer young people are watching news on TV. More and more of them are getting it whilst looking at their phone on the loo.

To summarise rather less crudely let me quote one of the bosses of one of those corporate giants who pose the greatest challenge to the old ways of doing things - the head of Google News - Richard Gingras who I met a week or two back in Silicon Valley. He, bear in mind, is a veteran journalist who's had ink on his fingers not a teenage techie.

"We came from an era of dominant news organisations, often perceived as oracles of fact. We've moved to a marketplace where quality journalism competes on equal footing with raucous opinion, passionate advocacy, and the masquerading expression of variously-motivated bad actors."

Gingras points out what is, perhaps, the key challenge posed by social media - "Affirmation is more satisfying than information. Always has been."

Now before I move on to what I think we should do to respond to these challenges and before anyone assumes I am in despair. let's just note that BBC News reached three-quarters of adults in the UK each week in 2016/17; more than any other news provider.

And we are trusted - 91% of under 34s came to BBC 2017 election coverage in the week of the vote.

And, if you'll forgive me an immodest note here, record numbers are tuning in to that old veteran - the Today programme even in our sixtieth year.

But one stat I've learned preparing for this speech made me realise that we cannot say complacently "The young will grow into watching or listening to BBC. After all we did."

It's a stat about Facebook which - remember fellow Twitter obsessives - is really where more and more people get their news. BBC News has an impressive 44 million followers on the site. Yet most of our stories don't actually reach more than a tenth of that figure - four million. The algorithms tend to favour what people like and share and people like and share things which produce an emotional reaction. So following the BBC doesn't put it high on your news feed. You must follow it AND you and family and friends must choose to like or share it regularly which only really happens when people think OMG, LOL or WTF.

But perhaps the figure that raised my eyebrows the highest was those for trust.

Trust in UK media is down by 7% in the latest data from the Reuters Digital News Report - way ahead of the United States but still down

And in one YouGov survey a while back Wikipedia entries were judged to be marginally more trusted than the BBC. Market researchers would tell you that it's within the margin of error BUT it does tell you something

What's the problem?

What underlies this decline in trust? It is due, I believe, to two main factors - the increased polarization of our society and our national debate and the increased use, particularly by the most committed & most partisan, of social media and alternatives to what they call MSM - the mainstream media.

In the space of just three years the country has seen a referendum on whether to split up the UK followed by one on whether to split away from the EU, had two general elections, changed prime ministers, gone from having a majority government to a minority propped up the DUP and seen the unlikely rise and rise of an opposition leader who was at first regarded by himself, never mind anyone else, as having no chance of getting and no interest in having the job.

But it is not just politics that is divided. Our society is. Jon Snow spoke powerfully and movingly in his MacTaggart lecture about his encounters with the residents of Grenfell Tower. "Where were you? Why didn't you come here before?" some shouted at him.

I had my own experience of how the news we report is seen and heard on the streets - not at Grenfell Tower - but on the streets of Finsbury Park in the early hours of 19 June. It was a hot night. The windows of my bedroom in Highbury in North London were open when I heard the scream of sirens and the insistent buzz of low flying helicopters.

I did - what so many of our listeners and viewers do now - I reached not for the radio on switch or the remote control but for my phone and went to Twitter. Just down the road police had closed off a road after a van had struck worshippers outside a mosque. I threw on some clothes, rang the office and ran down the road where within seconds I was surrounded by a group of young Muslim men waving their mobile phones at me.

They were angry - and not just because some were desperate to get beyond the blue police tape that was now blocking their route to see if family and friends were safe. Why - they demanded to know - are you not calling it terrorism? They showed me the BBC's report which described a "collision". So too, in fairness, did other mainstream sites like Sky News.

I tried explaining that news organisations always waited for the police to determine whether an incident was an accident, an attack or, indeed, terror. They weren't impressed. They thought we were on their side of those who wanted to cover up attacks on their community. They said they trusted their own media more.

It is a pattern we see increasingly. People who seen themselves as not part of the establishment - whether young Muslims, Scottish Nationalists or UKIP-ers, Corbynites or Greens, backers of Leave pre-referendum but, since the vote, backers of Remain - have not just complained about the coverage of what they increasingly refer to as the MSM. They have their own alternative media sites - Wings over Scotland or Westmonster or The Canary or - in the case of the pro EU crowd - a new newspaper - The New European.

They would all be horrified to be compared with each other since what motivates them is the belief that the other lot are not just mistaken but an existential threat to the future of their country but they have and do often respond in similar ways to what they call the mainstream media.

Their most shared and liked stories are attacks on the MSM and the BBC in particular for ignoring their stories or giving too much coverage to the other side. They share a certainty fuelled by living in a social media bubble that we reporters and presenters are, at best, craven - obeying some dictat from our bosses or the government - and, at worst, nakedly biased.

Some might respond to this by saying - it was ever thus. Broadcasters and the BBC in particular have been accused of bias by politicians ever since a young Winston Churchill launched an assault on the BBC for its coverage of the General Strike in 1926. You cannot, he argued, be impartial between "the fireman and the fire".

But these times are, I believe, different. Firstly, because the fracturing of our politics means the criticism is coming from all sides and from grassroots campaigns not just whichever of the government or opposition feels most vulnerable. Secondly because back then the purpose of the attacks was to bully and intimidate the BBC or, occasionally, ITN into changing the way it reported a particular story or to drop this or that programme or journalist.

Our critics now see their attacks as a key part of their political strategy. In order to succeed they need to convince people not to believe "the news". When I interviewed Paul Mason - formerly a distinguished colleague at the BBC and Channel 4 - now a hyper-partisan campaigner for Jeremy Corbyn he told me "we see the media as the enemy navy, we need our own navy."

Campaigners on the left as well as the right have been looking and listening and learning at what has happened across the pond. They know that there is method behind what some regard as the madness of The Donald's attacks on the "failing" press as purveyors of "fake news".

Italy's leftwing populist Beppe Grillo has described the Italian media as "the opium of the people, they hide the truth to reassure you, while you slowly die." In Germany the right-wing Alternative for Germany party (AfD) have revived the Nazi insult "lugenpresse" meaning "lying press"

Attacks on the media are no longer a lazy clap line delivered to a party conference to the raise the morale of a crowd of the party faithful. They are part of a guerrilla war being fought on social media day after day and hour after hour.

So, if, as I argue, we'd be wrong to simply ignore this challenge how should we respond to it?

The response

Once again I turn to Steve for my inspiration. Steve, as I've said, was a student radical. More Jon Snow than Nick Robinson. He led a rent strike. He was a student Communist. So dangerous was he considered that his career at the BBC was held back by one of those famous Christmas trees on his personnel file. So, Steve went to Channel 4 to work on a new series called Diverse Reports.

In Steve's own words "there was a clearly defined purpose. Wherever you can find the liberal consensus probe it, probe it, probe it. And if there's another way of looking at it, broadcast it". And broadcast it he did making the only show I've heard of which examined the case for restoring capital punishment.

When we worked together at Panorama, Steve angered some of his colleagues and, I suspect, many of his mates by commissioning a film spelling out that high strength cannabis or skunk could and did lead to psychosis.

When he died he was working on a series examining Celebrity which he said would have presented the Kardashians as "very serious role models"

I believe that we should do exactly what Steve proposed. Precisely how is not for me to decide. One possibility is a series, like Diverse Reports, labelled and separate from mainstream news. Another is a platform for opinions like Viewsnight - Newsnight's experiment. But I doubt either will have the Heineken effect of reaching the people other news cannot normally reach.

So, my instinct is that we should build this mindset into all the programming we do so that we ask questions - and can share online items that ask questions - which are all too often not asked.

Again and again over the years views which start off being seen as extreme quickly become the new conventional wisdom. There are examples of this on both left and right and others that don't fit neatly into the political spectrum. Monetarism and the economic theories of Milton Friedman were seen by many in politics and the media as eccentric, right-wing and foreign until they were absorbed into the Treasury's bloodstream in the late 1970s and taken up by both major parties. Green politics followed the same path. So, too, did gay rights. As did the idea that demanding immigration controls is not racist. Now, ideas once widely dismissed - like re-nationalising major industries or abolishing nuclear weapons - allow Jeremy Corbyn to claim that he is now in the political "mainstream".

Let's be clear. Though, I don't propose handing the airwaves to first one side then another to deliver a televised press release or party conference speech. These ideas would be analysed and challenged as rigorously as any other.

Challenging the conventional wisdom

I wrote a book a few years ago called "Live from Downing Street". The theme that emerged again and again was not bias - to this party or that...to right or left - but this slowness to challenge the conventional wisdom of the day.

I wrote about Churchill's pre war warnings about the dangers of German re-armament being heard by radio listeners not here in his own country but in the United States.

Churchill desperately wanted to give a radio talk on the Home Service (that's how things worked in those days. You gave a talk rather than popping up to be interviewed in Radio 4). But the last recorded talk on that subject - as against others which the BBC's founder John Reith was happy to have Churchill talk on - was in 1935.

How do we know this? Well, Churchill complained to a young BBC producer who visited him at Chartwell, his country house, on the day after Neville Chamberlain returned home from signing his agreement with Hitler in Munich and declared 'peace for our time'. A memo records their meeting. They spent hours discussing the Nazi threat and 'Churchill complained that he had been very badly treated in the matter of political broadcasts and that he was always muzzled by the BBC of the Government.'

That producer was, incidentally, called Guy Burgess. So it was that, on 1 October 1938, the man who would become his country's most famous traitor tried to reassure the man who would become its saviour that the BBC was not biased.

The way Churchill was handled is a powerful warning of the dangers of the BBC believing it is being balanced by silencing the voices of those who do not represent conventional wisdom. It is an answer to all those who complained that Nick Griffin - who is, let me stress, no modern-day Churchill - should never have been invited on to Question Time. It's a riposte to Brexiteers who fill my time line with demands that I should not interview "that failed leader" Nick Clegg or the Remainers who say the same about Nigel Farage and to those who argue that Nigel Lawson should never be interviewed about climate change. He - they - should, be challenged and if, as Lawson did on Today recently, they get their facts wrong we should say so. But they should not be silenced.

The former Culture Secretary John Whittingdale, warned some months ago that we would face sanctions and fines from Ofcom unless we end what is alleged to be our anti-Brexit bias.

My response now is what it was then - back in March - when I tweeted "Do not adjust your set. Normal service from the BBC means you will hear people you disagree with saying things you don't like (that's our job)."

The lesson of Corbyn

Ever so briefly, and you might think rather surprisingly, I was hailed by Jeremy Corbyn's backers as confirming their view that the BBC was biased against him.

I was interviewed by Lyn Barber soon after he became Labour leader and whilst I was unwell and off work. She wrote in the Sunday Times: "Was Robinson as shocked as I was by the way the BBC (and other media) rubbished Jeremy Corbyn?"

"Yes" I apparently replied - though I blame the chemotherapy I was then taking for my lack of normal caution - before adding: "Although I was off work, I did drop a note to a few people after his first weekend saying this is really interesting and we owe it to the audience to sound as if we're interested."

My point then was not that my colleagues weren't treating him fairly. They were quite properly reporting on the widespread opposition he faced in his own shadow Cabinet and the Parliamentary Labour Party. My point was that the ideas that made Corbyn popular - whether scrapping Trident or renationalisation - should be examined and interrogated in their own right and not simply as a cause of rows or splits.

Talking to my own children - two of whom are voters and one who soon will be - they are really not interested in whether this or that idea was considered outlandish three decades ago. In my view too many interviews with Jeremy fail to take him and his ideas seriously enough. And when we do his supporters complain that we're being hostile or aggressive.

It is Jeremy Corbyn who now says he is a prime minister in waiting and, I assume, he wants to be treated as such.

Not just diversity of people - diversity of thinking

It has become fashionable to argue that one of the reasons the media failed to spot political movements like the rise of Corbyn, the rise of anti-EU feelings or the rise of Trump is because journalists are "too far removed from those who" they report on.

Jon Snow in his MacTaggart argued that the media was "comfortably with the elite, with little awareness, contact or connection with those not of the elite".

Ofcom's Chief Executive Sharon White has told broadcasters that the regulator will soon start asking them to provide more data on the social class of those they employ.

The BBC's James Purnell has said the Corporation is considering introducing targets.

Once again I think back to my experience with Steve. We first met when I was a trainee TV producer working on Brass Tacks, a BBC current-affairs programme based in Manchester. In Manchester note. I was from the area. He'd been a student there. We - it - had a different perspective from people at TV Centre.

Our team included a former merchant seaman with a broad Scouse accent and arms covered in tattoos. I have worked with few like him in TV since.

When I was Political Editor I often felt the best-known member of my team was Paul Lambert - or 'Gobby', as everyone called him. He was the man who stood in Downing Street shouting questions at those going in or coming out of Number 10. He didn't speak with the rootless received pronunciation of many in broadcasting but in the Estuary English used by millions.

Now I confess to being a tad sceptical about targets for employing the right number of working class journalists but transparency and the data it produces are the right way to start this debate - just as they have done, albeit not quite so intentionally, with issue of women's pay in the industry. But ...moving swiftly on ...

What really matters as Ofcom's Sharon White has said is "diversity of thinking not just visible diversity" or, indeed, diversity of accents.

You see Jon Snow was, in my view, too harsh on himself. No-one doubts that this privileged public school son of a bishop who had tea with the prime minister when he was a young man cares passionately about the lives of people from a very different background to himself.

His reporting from Grenfell required what all good reporting does - a commitment to get to the truth, tenacity and, yes, empathy. Jon's empathy stems from his values, his time as a charity worker and the work he now does with countless charities. His background is not a bar.

Take another famous John. My esteemed colleague at the Today programme John Humphrys. His journalism is rooted in an altogether more humble background - a grammar school boy from the Welsh Valleys. Some of his best reporting has been from the places he grew up observing the changes that had happened in his own lifetime.

We need more of both sorts of John!

When I moved to the Today programme someone - who will remain nameless - suggested that I should become the programme's Northern voice. Proud though I am of being a boy from the North West and willing though I am to bang on about Manchester and United in particular I had to gently point out that I'd lived for longer in North London than the North of England.

However, this boy from the right side of the tracks - from what used to be called the Cheshire stockbroker belt - loves nothing more than getting out of his comfort zone.

A few years back I made a documentary called "The Truth about immigration" which pointed out what I thought was obvious but others seemed to regard as controversial. To the young, the well off and those working in the big cities immigration often represented a cultural diversity to be relished, a better choice of local food shops and take aways and, yes, a cheap cleaner, builder or, even, nanny. But to other people it represented an unsettling change in the area they'd grown up in; an overcrowded GP waiting room or queue to get into the local school and competition for both jobs and wages.

Hearing both those attitudes is what represents diversity of thinking - it also represents BBC impartiality.

It involves not just who we employ but how we do our jobs. We should get out more, we should study the polls with more not less intensity and we should look for underlying trends. That does not mean extending still further the fatuous vox poppery that is a substitute for a serious examination of voter attitudes. Filming on a high street until you have obtained clips of contradictory opinions tells the viewer next to nothing.

Bias?

I suspect the biggest cause of viewers and listeners feeling any broadcaster is biased is their sense that they are not hearing views from people like themselves. Quite naturally, they assume that the reason they don't is that their views are deemed unacceptable.

A survey carried out for the BBC more than a decade ago in 2006 found that more than half of respondents thought broadcasters often failed to reflect the views of 'people like me'. Those most likely to say this were middle-aged C2DEs - those without access to the internet and those with least interest in news and current affairs.

I'm not aware of a more up to date survey but I fear it would not be that different today.

I recall a time when I was Political Editor and I asked a producer at TV Centre - as then was - to interview a family outside London on what they thought about some controversial cut to public spending. When the pictures arrived in my edit suite the "set up" shot - which established who they were - consisted of them reviewing photographs of their recent family safari photo. I refused to use them demanding to know how many people in Britain could afford the ten grand which I guessed it would cost to take three kids to Africa?

A Mission to engage

When I joined the BBC back in the mid 80s News & Current Affairs, as it was then called, was split between two factions who were at war with themselves. The 'Birtists' - disciples of his 'mission to explain', which insisted that analysis had to come before the demands of good pictures or compelling storytelling and the BBC old guard he'd been hired to tame.

The warring factions reminded me of Monty Python's Life of Brian, in which the People's Popular Front of Judea was determined to fight the Popular People's Front of Judea instead of joining forces to confront their common enemy - in this case the threat posed to serious broadcasting by the advent of multi-channel TV and much greater consumer choice.

I had been recruited by the old BBC but soon found myself adopted and promoted by the Birtists. I remain an unapologetic cheerleader for his view that knowledge and expertise are critical to good reporting. The specialist editors at the BBC which have now spread to ITV and Sky are his legacy.

But I propose that it is now time to add a Mission to engage alongside Birt's Mission to explain. i.e. to reach out to those who currently do not make the BBC their first choice either because they do not treat news bulletins and current affairs programmes as "appointments to view" and consume an increasing part of their news via social media or because they are convinced that we are part of the MSM.

And the target I'd much rather explore is one that challenges us to engage more people from the groups that we currently struggle to reach.

Re-making the case for impartiality

Underpinning all that I have proposed it will be necessary to re-make the case for impartiality.

Too many of my generation now treat it like the weather - as a natural phenomenon rather than understanding that it is an artificial legal requirement which could easily be reversed if viewers, listeners and readers stop believing in it.

There is a danger that a growing number will question whether impartiality still has any real meaning, whether it is an establishment plot to limit debate and whether it can be sustained in an era of almost infinite media choice.

That is what happened in the United States. American media regulation was always less restrictive than it was here - allowing radio shock jocks for example. But what was known as the "Fairness doctrine" did, though, ensure that a single network could not broadcast from a single perspective, day after day, without presenting opposing views.

However, the US equivalent of Ofcom - the Federal Communications Commission - scrapped it in the Reagan era on the grounds that it 'restricts the journalistic freedom of broadcasters...[and] actually inhibits the presentation of controversial issues of public importance to the detriment of the public and the degradation of the editorial prerogative of broadcast journalists'.

So, we ended up with where we are now - two-thirds of right-wingers watch one news network - Fox News of course. Liberals tend to watch CNN, MSNBC or the old terrestrial networks. As a result there are no 'shared facts' in American public life. This was obvious long before Trump's election. When President Obama tried to open a debate on healthcare reform Fox News said it would introduce socialist death panels in which government bureaucrats would decide who lived and died. On the other side liberals filled MSNBC with claims that Republican wanted to kill the poor. We are still no closer to resolving that debate and TV News is not helping.

There is still a powerful case for impartial journalism which seeks to inform rather than influence or sway or respond to commercial imperatives. For decades the worlds of impartial and partial journalism have been separate. Broadcasting offered one, print the other. You could have news, or news plus views. Now, though, these worlds have converged.

On my TV and my iPad BBC and Sky 'impartial' news channels co-exist with news-and-views channels from America, the Qatari-based Al Jazeera and English-language news services funded by the Chinese, Russian, French and Iranian governments. And that's just in English.

Fox News is disappearing from British homes but RT - which in many ways is its left wing equivalent - is increasingly popular here. It is funded by and run from Moscow. It doesn't just promote the Kremlin's views on issues such as the Ukraine or Syria it encourages political forces it believes will weaken its enemies - the governments of the West.

RT has had more Ofcom rulings against it than any other news network. In my view it should not be treated with a lighter touch simply because it has a small - albeit growing - audience.

All this leads some to argue that TV news should go the way of print. It should be free of controls and customers should pick the product that suits them best. Rupert Murdoch's son James, when he was still chairman of BSkyB in his Mactaggart lecture launched an all-out assault on a system of regulation which he described as 'authoritarianism'.

How, in an all-media marketplace, can we justify this degree of control in one place and not in others? The effect of the system is not to curb bias - bias is present in all news media - but simply to disguise it. We should be honest about this: it is an impingement on freedom of speech and on the right of people to choose what kind of news to watch.

Before the 2010 election he lobbied the Conservatives hard to dismantle the regulator he found so irksome. A senior Tory minister has told me that had the party secured a majority it was his expectation that Ofcom would have been weakened or dismantled altogether, the Murdoch company News Corp would have taken full control of BSkyB and James Murdoch would have got his way and turned Sky News into a channel to challenge what he saw as the BBC's innate liberal bias.

Rupert Murdoch has dubbed Sky as "BBC Lite" and was once asked whether he wanted to make his British channel more like his American one. He replied: "I wish."

Naturally, as an impartial BBC man I have no views on whether the Murdochs's should or should not take control of Sky but I think this debate has not ended.

Indeed, to be fair to James and Rupert, Mark Thompson argued when he was the BBC's Director General "in the future maybe there should be a broad range of choices. Why shouldn't the public be able to see and hear, as well as read, a range of opinionated journalism and then make up their own mind what they think about it?"

I wonder now that he is at the "failing...fake news" New York Times he still feels quite as sanguine. I don't.

I believe that we should not rely on our past and our record day to day to make our case - important though they are. We should tell our audience that the BBC is not owned, run or controlled by the government, media tycoons, profit seeking businesses or those pursuing a political or partisan agenda

It is staffed by people who regardless of their personal background or private views are committed to getting as close to the truth as they can and to offering their audience a free, open and broad debate about the issues confronting the country. They will always seek to broadcast what they know, be open about what they don't and ready to admit when they get things wrong...to deliver what Carl Bernstein calls 'the best obtainable version of the truth.'

Best obtainable version of the truth

So, how do we do more to be seen to broadcast the best obtainable version of the truth?

Let's go back to my experience in Finsbury Park when I believe we should have been clearer about why we weren't instantly using the language that those following the story closest were.

I make no criticism of the tiny handful of people working in the newsroom that night. This story was far from unique. The explosion which rocked the Manchester Arena was called just that - an explosion for some time before it was called terrorism. Caution in these situations is right. The BBC will rather not be the first for news if it earns the joke slogan "Not wrong for long."

But - and it is a big but - it taught me that we should be much more open and explicit about what we know and what we don't and how and why we do what we do.

An off the shelf line or two which explained how and when we decide to call things terror attacks could have been added to the initial reports.

My bosses will not thank me for this and they may fear that it will produce even more complaints than we get now but I urge them to widen this approach further by, for example, translating the next set of Producers Guidelines - the BBC's bible of editorial standards - into fluent human that can be tweeted, blogged, broadcast (it doesn't really matter which) in real time as stories are reported.

I have seen the costly, wasteful, debilitating hours that are spent parsing this or that phrase into how to answer a complaint about an item that was broadcasts weeks if not months earlier. Let's move more quickly...show our workings more...confidently assert why we're doing what we're doing or, when necessary, admit a mistake swiftly and move on.

Let's not leave the editorial debate we had on the metaphorical cutting room floor along with the footage we didn't use but pin at least some of it up and then - when complaints do follow - point to what we said and did at the time.

I'm delighted that the BBC has invested in a Reality Check - fact checking - unit. Contrary to the complaints of many who oppose Brexit they helped many BBC outlets to say that the claim made in the EU referendum campaign that £350 million a week was being sent - that word was crucial - to Brussels was untrue. Indeed, I said as much to camera on a BBC1 special a few days before polling and what's more I used a pen to put a great big cross through the claim.

I did, incidentally, also say that the Remain claim that every household in Britain would be £4,300 a year better off was misleading and impossible to verify.

I confess that I discussed having a sort of giant fridge magnet made to attach to the Vote Leave bus carrying the words of the many independent figures who pointed out the inaccuracy of their central claim.

That might have been just a tad OTT but I suspect we will have to get more and not less assertive about stating what is true and how we know it even as we also point out that many ferocious political debates simply consist of competing and unverifiable claims about the future.

A last word

Permit me a last word about why despite all the turbulence I've described and we're all familiar with I am confident about the future. It's thanks to the success of the programme which sixty years almost became known as "Listen whilst you dress" or "Background to shaving".

In the year I joined the BBC the "Today programme" as it became known was threatened - or so we were told - by the arrival of another American import. After nylons, Mars bars and burgers came...wait for it...breakfast television.

Frank & Selina on the BBC's sofa...the so-called "famous five" including Parki, Anna and Frostie on TV-AM would, once and for all, knock Today off its perch.

But Today survived and, what's more it thrived - trouncing breakfast TV - securing double the audience of the TV sofas.

And in this the era of Twitter and Facebook, podcasts and downshifting, viewing on your iPad, on the loo as well as in your sitting room it has a record listenership.

The reason? Because, at its best, Today tells the audience what they need to know in a way they understand hearing not just from political and business leaders but also from the best and the brightest in science, the arts, religion and, yes, fashion - one of Britain's most successful industries. It broadcasts too - and must in my view hear more - the experiences of ordinary folk with stories to tell not, I stress, the two a penny opinions of the TV vox pop or radio phone in.

It succeeds not because it necessarily makes people go OMG or LOL or WTF - although hopefully we do do that often enough. It succeeds because it passes what Steve used to call the "My Mum" test. I hope I am not patronising his Mum Vera or, indeed, mine too much when I say that it is the best test of our journalism - whether it would seem relevant, comprehensible and engaging to our Mums, our Dads, our brothers or sisters - indeed anyone of any age or gender or background who is not a news junkie or political trainspotter.

In a world in which there is ever more information but it gets ever harder to reach the people you want to reach our challenge is to engage people we could once take for granted. It is that mission which - along with the Steve Hewlett scholarship - would be a fitting testimony to Steve.

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Full text of the Steve Hewlett Memorial Lecture

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Full text of the lecture as delivered at the Royal Television Society on 28 September 2017: I am honoured to be asked to deliver this, the first annual Steve Hewlett memorial lecture. Thank you to the RTS, the Media Society and to Rachel for inviting me to deliver it.

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Tim Harford's Guide to Statistics in a Misleading Age

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Tim Harford's Guide to Statistics in a Misleading Age

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"The best financial advice for most people would fit on an index card." That's the gist of an offhand comment in 2013 by Harold Pollack, a professor at the University of Chicago. Pollack's bluff was duly called, and he quickly rushed off to find an index card and scribble some bullet points - with respectable results.

When I heard about Pollack's notion - he elaborated upon it in a 2016 book - I asked myself: would this work for statistics, too? There are some obvious parallels. In each case, common sense goes a surprisingly long way; in each case, dizzying numbers and impenetrable jargon loom; in each case, there are stubborn technical details that matter; and, in each case, there are people with a sharp incentive to lead us astray.

The case for everyday practical numeracy has never been more urgent. Statistical claims fill our newspapers and social media feeds, unfiltered by expert judgment and often designed as a political weapon. We do not necessarily trust the experts - or more precisely, we may have our own distinctive view of who counts as an expert and who does not.

Nor are we passive consumers of statistical propaganda; we are the medium through which the propaganda spreads. We are arbiters of what others will see: what we retweet, like or share online determines whether a claim goes viral or vanishes. If we fall for lies, we become unwittingly complicit in deceiving others. On the bright side, we have more tools than ever to help weigh up what we see before we share it - if we are able and willing to use them.

In the hope that someone might use it, I set out to write my own postcard-sized citizens' guide to statistics. Here's what I learnt.

Professor Pollack's index card includes advice such as "Save 20 per cent of your money" and "Pay your credit card in full every month". The author Michael Pollan offers dietary advice in even pithier form: "Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants." Quite so, but I still want a cheeseburger.

However good the advice Pollack and Pollan offer, it's not always easy to take. The problem is not necessarily ignorance. Few people think that Coca-Cola is a healthy drink, or believe that credit cards let you borrow cheaply. Yet many of us fall into some form of temptation or other. That is partly because slick marketers are focused on selling us high-fructose corn syrup and easy credit. And it is partly because we are human beings with human frailties.

With this in mind, my statistical postcard begins with advice about emotion rather than logic. When you encounter a new statistical claim, observe your feelings. Yes, it sounds like a line from Star Wars, but we rarely believe anything because we're compelled to do so by pure deduction or irrefutable evidence. We have feelings about many of the claims we might read - anything from "inequality is rising" to "chocolate prevents dementia". If we don't notice and pay attention to those feelings, we're off to a shaky start.

What sort of feelings? Defensiveness. Triumphalism. Righteous anger. Evangelical fervour. Or, when it comes to chocolate and dementia, relief. It's fine to have an emotional response to a chart or shocking statistic - but we should not ignore that emotion, or be led astray by it.

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There are certain claims that we rush to tell the world, others that we use to rally like-minded people, still others we refuse to believe. Our belief or disbelief in these claims is part of who we feel we are. "We all process information consistent with our tribe," says Dan Kahan, professor of law and psychology at Yale University.

In 2005, Charles Taber and Milton Lodge, political scientists at Stony Brook University, New York, conducted experiments in which subjects were invited to study arguments around hot political issues. Subjects showed a clear confirmation bias: they sought out testimony from like-minded organisations. For example, subjects who opposed gun control would tend to start by reading the views of the National Rifle Association. Subjects also showed a disconfirmation bias: when the researchers presented them with certain arguments and invited comment, the subjects would quickly accept arguments with which they agreed, but devote considerable effort to disparage opposing arguments.

Expertise is no defence against this emotional reaction; in fact, Taber and Lodge found that better-informed experimental subjects showed stronger biases. The more they knew, the more cognitive weapons they could aim at their opponents. "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature," commented Benjamin Franklin, "since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."

This is why it's important to face up to our feelings before we even begin to process a statistical claim. If we don't at least acknowledge that we may be bringing some emotional baggage along with us, we have little chance of discerning what's true. As the physicist Richard Feynman once commented, "You must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool."

The second crucial piece of advice is to understand the claim. That seems obvious. But all too often we leap to disbelieve or believe (and repeat) a claim without pausing to ask whether we really understand what the claim is. To quote Douglas Adams's philosophical supercomputer, Deep Thought, "Once you know what the question actually is, you'll know what the answer means."

For example, take the widely accepted claim that "inequality is rising". It seems uncontroversial, and urgent. But what does it mean? Racial inequality? Gender inequality? Inequality of opportunity, of consumption, of education attainment, of wealth? Within countries or across the globe?

Even given a narrower claim, "inequality of income before taxes is rising" (and you should be asking yourself, since when?), there are several different ways to measure this. One approach is to compare the income of people at the 90th percentile and the 10th percentile, but that tells us nothing about the super-rich, nor the ordinary people in the middle. An alternative is to examine the income share of the top 1 per cent - but this approach has the opposite weakness, telling us nothing about how the poorest fare relative to the majority.

There is no single right answer - nor should we assume that all the measures tell a similar story. In fact, there are many true statements that one can make about inequality. It may be worth figuring out which one is being made before retweeting it.

If we don't acknowledge that we may be bringing emotional baggage when processing a statistical claim, we have little chance of discerning what's true

Perhaps it is not surprising that a concept such as inequality turns out to have hidden depths. But the same holds true of more tangible subjects, such as "a nurse". Are midwives nurses? Health visitors? Should two nurses working half-time count as one nurse? Claims over the staffing of the UK's National Health Service have turned on such details.

All this can seem like pedantry - or worse, a cynical attempt to muddy the waters and suggest that you can prove anything with statistics. But there is little point in trying to evaluate whether a claim is true if one is unclear what the claim even means.

Imagine a study showing that kids who play violent video games are more likely to be violent in reality. Rebecca Goldin, a mathematician and director of the statistical literacy project STATS, points out that we should ask questions about concepts such as "play", "violent video games" and "violent in reality". Is Space Invaders a violent game? It involves shooting things, after all. And are we measuring a response to a questionnaire after 20 minutes' play in a laboratory, or murderous tendencies in people who play 30 hours a week? "Many studies won't measure violence," says Goldin. "They'll measure something else such as aggressive behaviour." Just like "inequality" or "nurse", these seemingly common sense words hide a lot of wiggle room.

Two particular obstacles to our understanding are worth exploring in a little more detail. One is the question of causation. "Taller children have a higher reading age," goes the headline. This may summarise the results of a careful study about nutrition and cognition. Or it may simply reflect the obvious point that eight-year-olds read better than four-year-olds - and are taller. Causation is philosophically and technically a knotty business but, for the casual consumer of statistics, the question is not so complicated: just ask whether a causal claim is being made, and whether it might be justified.

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Returning to this study about violence and video games, we should ask: is this a causal relationship, tested in experimental conditions? Or is this a broad correlation, perhaps because the kind of thing that leads kids to violence also leads kids to violent video games? Without clarity on this point, we don't really have anything but an empty headline.

We should never forget, either, that all statistics are a summary of a more complicated truth. For example, what's happening to wages? With tens of millions of wage packets being paid every month, we can only ever summarise - but which summary? The average wage can be skewed by a small number of fat cats. The median wage tells us about the centre of the distribution but ignores everything else.

Or we might look at the median increase in wages, which isn't the same thing as the increase in the median wage - not at all. In a situation where the lowest and highest wages are increasing while the middle sags, it's quite possible for the median pay rise to be healthy while median pay falls.

Sir Andrew Dilnot, former chair of the UK Statistics Authority, warns that an average can never convey the whole of a complex story. "It's like trying to see what's in a room by peering through the keyhole," he tells me.

In short, "you need to ask yourself what's being left out," says Mona Chalabi, data editor for The Guardian US. That applies to the obvious tricks, such as a vertical axis that's been truncated to make small changes look big. But it also applies to the less obvious stuff - for example, why does a graph comparing the wages of African-Americans with those of white people not also include data on Hispanic or Asian-Americans? There is no shame in leaving something out. No chart, table or tweet can contain everything. But what is missing can matter.

Channel the spirit of film noir: get the backstory. Of all the statistical claims in the world, this particular stat fatale appeared in your newspaper or social media feed, dressed to impress. Why? Where did it come from? Why are you seeing it?

Sometimes the answer is little short of a conspiracy: a PR company wanted to sell ice cream, so paid a penny-ante academic to put together the "equation for the perfect summer afternoon", pushed out a press release on a quiet news day, and won attention in a media environment hungry for clicks. Or a political donor slung a couple of million dollars at an ideologically sympathetic think-tank in the hope of manufacturing some talking points.

Just as often, the answer is innocent but unedifying: publication bias. A study confirming what we already knew - smoking causes cancer - is unlikely to make news. But a study with a surprising result - maybe smoking doesn't cause cancer after all - is worth a headline. The new study may have been rigorously conducted but is probably wrong: one must weigh it up against decades of contrary evidence.

Publication bias is a big problem in academia. The surprising results get published, the follow-up studies finding no effect tend to appear in lesser journals if they appear at all. It is an even bigger problem in the media - and perhaps bigger yet in social media. Increasingly, we see a statistical claim because people like us thought it was worth a Like on Facebook.

David Spiegelhalter, president of the Royal Statistical Society, proposes what he calls the "Groucho principle". Groucho Marx famously resigned from a club - if they'd accept him as a member, he reasoned, it couldn't be much of a club. Spiegelhalter feels the same about many statistical claims that reach the headlines or the social media feed. He explains, "If it's surprising or counter-intuitive enough to have been drawn to my attention, it is probably wrong."

OK. You've noted your own emotions, checked the backstory and understood the claim being made. Now you need to put things in perspective. A few months ago, a horrified citizen asked me on Twitter whether it could be true that in the UK, seven million disposable coffee cups were thrown away every day.

I didn't have an answer. (A quick internet search reveals countless repetitions of the claim, but no obvious source.) But I did have an alternative question: is that a big number? The population of the UK is 65 million. If one person in 10 used a disposable cup each day, that would do the job.

Many numbers mean little until we can compare them with a more familiar quantity. It is much more informative to know how many coffee cups a typical person discards than to know how many are thrown away by an entire country. And more useful still to know whether the cups are recycled (usually not, alas) or what proportion of the country's waste stream is disposable coffee cups (not much, is my guess, but I may be wrong).

So we should ask: how big is the number compared with other things I might intuitively understand? How big is it compared with last year, or five years ago, or 30? It's worth a look at the historical trend, if the data are available.

Finally, beware "statistical significance". There are various technical objections to the term, some of which are important. But the simplest point to appreciate is that a number can be "statistically significant" while being of no practical importance. Particularly in the age of big data, it's possible for an effect to clear this technical hurdle of statistical significance while being tiny.

One study was able to demonstrate that unborn children exposed to a heatwave while in the womb went on to earn less as adults. The finding was statistically significant. But the impact was trivial: $30 in lost income per year. Just because a finding is statistically robust does not mean it matters; the word "significance" obscures that.

In an age of computer-generated images of data clouds, some of the most charming data visualisations are hand-drawn doodles by the likes of Mona Chalabi and the cartoonist Randall Munroe. But there is more to these pictures than charm: Chalabi uses the wobble of her pen to remind us that most statistics have a margin of error. A computer plot can confer the illusion of precision on what may be a highly uncertain situation.

"It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong," wrote Carveth Read in Logic (1898), and excessive precision can lead people astray. On the eve of the US presidential election in 2016, the political forecasting website FiveThirtyEight gave Donald Trump a 28.6 per cent chance of winning. In some ways that is impressive, because other forecasting models gave Trump barely any chance at all. But how could anyone justify the decimal point on such a forecast? No wonder many people missed the basic message, which was that Trump had a decent shot. "One in four" would have been a much more intuitive guide to the vagaries of forecasting.

Exaggerated precision has another cost: it makes numbers needlessly cumbersome to remember and to handle. So, embrace imprecision. The budget of the NHS in the UK is about £10bn a month. The national income of the United States is about $20tn a year. One can be much more precise about these things, but carrying the approximate numbers around in my head lets me judge pretty quickly when - say - a £50m spending boost or a $20bn tax cut is noteworthy, or a rounding error.

My favourite rule of thumb is that since there are 65 million people in the UK and people tend to live a bit longer than 65, the size of a typical cohort - everyone retiring or leaving school in a given year - will be nearly a million people. Yes, it's a rough estimate - but vaguely right is often good enough.

Be curious. Curiosity is bad for cats, but good for stats. Curiosity is a cardinal virtue because it encourages us to work a little harder to understand what we are being told, and to enjoy the surprises along the way.

This is partly because almost any statistical statement raises questions: who claims this? Why? What does this number mean? What's missing? We have to be willing - in the words of UK statistical regulator Ed Humpherson - to "go another click". If a statistic is worth sharing, isn't it worth understanding first? The digital age is full of informational snares - but it also makes it easier to look a little deeper before our minds snap shut on an answer.

While curiosity gives us the motivation to ask another question or go another click, it gives us something else, too: a willingness to change our minds. For many of the statistical claims that matter, we have already reached a conclusion. We already know what our tribe of right-thinking people believe about Brexit, gun control, vaccinations, climate change, inequality or nationalisation - and so it is natural to interpret any statistical claim as either a banner to wave, or a threat to avoid.

If it's surprising or counter-intuitive enough to have been drawn to my attention, it is probably wrong

David Spiegelhalter, president of the Royal Statistical Society

Curiosity can put us into a better frame of mind to engage with statistical surprises. If we treat them as mysteries to be resolved, we are more likely to spot statistical foul play, but we are also more open-minded when faced with rigorous new evidence.

In research with Asheley Landrum, Katie Carpenter, Laura Helft and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dan Kahan has discovered that people who are intrinsically curious about science - they exist across the political spectrum - tend to be less polarised in their response to questions about politically sensitive topics. We need to treat surprises as a mystery rather than a threat.

Isaac Asimov is thought to have said, "The most exciting phrase in science isn't 'Eureka!', but 'That's funny...'" The quip points to an important truth: if we treat the open question as more interesting than the neat answer, we're on the road to becoming wiser.

In the end, my postcard has 50-ish words and six commandments. Simple enough, I hope, for someone who is willing to make an honest effort to evaluate - even briefly - the statistical claims that appear in front of them. That willingness, I fear, is what is most in question.

" Hey, Bill, Bill, am I gonna check every statistic? " said Donald Trump, then presidential candidate, when challenged by Bill O'Reilly about a grotesque lie that he had retweeted about African-Americans and homicides. And Trump had a point - sort of. He should, of course, have got someone to check a statistic before lending his megaphone to a false and racist claim. We all know by now that he simply does not care.

But Trump's excuse will have struck a chord with many, even those who are aghast at his contempt for accuracy (and much else). He recognised that we are all human. We don't check everything; we can't. Even if we had all the technical expertise in the world, there is no way that we would have the time.

My aim is more modest. I want to encourage us all to make the effort a little more often: to be open-minded rather than defensive; to ask simple questions about what things mean, where they come from and whether they would matter if they were true. And, above all, to show enough curiosity about the world to want to know the answers to some of these questions - not to win arguments, but because the world is a fascinating place.
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Letter in response to this article:
Measuring the universe is intensely statistical / From Stelios Charalambides, New Hampton, NH, US

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Tim Harford's guide to statistics in a misleading age

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"The best financial advice for most people would fit on an index card." That's the gist of an offhand comment in 2013 by Harold Pollack, a professor at the University of Chicago. Pollack's bluff was duly called, and he quickly rushed off to find an index card and scribble some bullet points - with respectable results.

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VoCo: Text-based Insertion and Replacement in Audio Narration

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This video presents a research project called VoCo -- a collaboration between Princeton University and Adobe Research. Our goal is to make it easy to edit audio narrations by typing. Visit our project page: http://gfx.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Jin_2017_VTI/

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Tim Harford explains the numbers and statistics used in everyday life

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See Liberal Facebook and Conservative Facebook, Side by Side

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Politics is back, and so's our politics blog, with rolling coverage of and commentary on what we're fact checking in Westminster and beyond.

Read our snap analysis of claims plus updates on the impact of our fact checking, as politicians gear up for the next general election.

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Full Fact - Full Fact is the UK's independent fact checking organisation

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Full Fact is the UK's independent fact checking organisation

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Manipulating video

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Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos (CVPR 2016 Oral)

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A toolkit

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We were guaranteed a free press, We were not guaranteed a neutral or a true press. We can celebrate the journalistic freedom to publish without interference from the state. We can also celebrate our freedom to share multiple stories through multiple lenses.

But it has always been up to the reader or viewer to make the reliability and credibility decisions. It is up to the reader or viewer to negotiate truth.

News literacy is complicated. In our attempts to discern truth, we are confounded by a 24/7 news cycle. News hits us across media platforms and devices, in a landscape populated by all degrees of professional journalists and citizen journalists and satirists and hoaxers and folks paid or personally moved to write intentionally fake news. All of this is compounded by the glories and the drawbacks of user-generated content, citizen journalism, and a world of new news choices.

Professional journalists themselves face new practical and ethical challenges relating to anonymity, privacy and safety, as well as reliability in their attempts to verify sources of breaking news from social media and user-generated content in all media formats. (The Verification Handbooks are a wonderful lens into this complicated process.) The Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics lists four guiding principles; the first of which is seek truth and report it.

Even news that is vetted by editors and publishers sometimes emerges from that process a bit processed, perhaps leaning in a particular direction.

And word choice itself is connected to truth. Over the course of the last decade we've seen professional news organizations and governments struggle with the politics and potential loadedness of words, notably terrorist and illegal immigrant. (See the AP Stylebook Blog and Reuters Handbook of Journalism.)
On news literacy
In its glossary, Stony Brook University's Center for News Literacy defines news literacy as:

The ability to use critical thinking skills to judge the reliability and credibility of news reports, whether they come via print, television or the Internet.

Our kids need new types of filters. Beyond larger notions of information literacy, I see the case for a specific focus on news literacy. Not as a lesson of good vs. bad. Not as an attempt to pitch traditional media against social media or peer review against popular publication. Not through the examination of hoaky hoax sites. And certainly not as a one-of, checklist type of lesson for a 9th grade social studies teacher in September.

We need to teach the important lessons of everyday civics for new consumption and production landscapes. These lessons involve sustained critical thinking, a practice to engage in regularly as we read and view and inquire with learners of all ages acros s disciplines.

A recent Stanford Graduate School of Education report, Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Literacy assessed the news literacy of students from middle school through college.

Students were asked to perform such tasks as: determine the trustworthiness of tweets, distinguish between news articles and opinion columns, identify ads on a news website, compare and evaluate posts from a newspaper's comment section, identify the blue checkmark that distinguishes a verified Facebook account from a fake one, consider the relative strength of evidence presented by two posters in a Facebook exchange, decide whether or not to trust a photo on a photo-sharing website, determine whether a website can be trusted in an open web search, search to verify a claim about a controversial issue, assess the reliability of a partisan website, identify the strengths and weaknesses of an online video. (p. 6) (Note: Most of these tasks could authentically be taught in our libraries during the natural course of any inquiry project.)

The Executive Summary shared disturbing results:

By high school, we would hope that students reading about gun laws would notice that a chart came from a gun owners' political action committee. And, in 2016, we would hope college students, who spend hours each day online, would look beyond a .org URL and ask who's behind a site that presents only one side of a contentious issue. But in every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students' lack of preparation . . .

Never have we had so much information at our fingertips. Whether this bounty will make us smarter and better informed or more ignorant and narrow-minded will depend on our awareness of this problem and our educational response to it. At present, we worry that democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish. (pp. 5-6)

I see a serious need for librarians to build a few seaworthy arks from the news media flood to aid students in discerning credibility, reliability, and bias in context of their information needs and the context of the text itself. I can see us introducing the broad notion of triangulation to children for whom the word may be difficult to say.
What's going on? Fake news
In the weeks leading up to the election we were drawn to stories about Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump and WikiLeaks' confirmation that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS.

Fake news is not new. But its potential for virality is and our awareness of it is newly awakened. Some suggested it played a role in the outcome of the election. Google and Facebook both announced that they would try to eliminate fake news from appearing in their result lists and newsfeeds by blocking fake news sources from using their ad networks.

This video TEDEd by Damon Brown offers a student-friendly explanation as well as strategies for analyzing news sources:

And fake news is but one flavor of news that is less than accurate. It is but one bucket into which readers and viewers should sort types of truthiness.

Fake news itself comes in a variety of flavors:

Pure fake news sites use fabricated stories to lure traffic, encourage clicks (click bait), influence or profit using intentionally deceptive, but highly intriguing, often sensational information.

Hoax sites also share false information with the intention to trick readers/viewers

Satirical sites present news with a comical, often exaggerated spin

Born digital images and edited images alter and often misrepresent visual reality

In addition, sometimes journalists just get things wrong. Their sources they choose to interview may not offer truth or a full picture. Stories reported in process lack the wisdom of hindsight and may be missing full context.
Post-truth or truthiness
Oxford Dictionaries recently announced post-truth as its 2016 international Word of the Year. Oxford defines the word as relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

It is well worth noting that the concept is not new. Oxford traces post-truth's history from a peripheral term simmering for at least a decade to its dramatic spike this year: in the context of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the presidential election in the US, and becoming associated overwhelmingly with a particu lar noun, in the phrase "post-truth politics."

Back in 2005, Stephen Colbert introduced the Word truthiness, now defined by Wikipedia as a quality characterizing a "truth" that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

While we need to reject the notion of relying solely on from-the-gut verification systems, it is important to recognize that we are not always looking at a binary situation.

Credibility decisions are complicated. Most news is not simply fake or true. News from traditional sources can be suspect as well. Professional journalists engage in rigorous fact-checking and adhere to sets of professional ethics, but they are not entirely immune to bias or agenda or the pressures of a deadline. A single story may tell a part of a larger story at the moment of its publishing. Of course, traditional newspapers feature writing of all sorts-straight reporting, editorials, features, columns, advertisements and comments in their digital versions. Several traditional news sources are to various degrees either right or left leaning. While some admit their bias, others do not.

It is impossible to dismiss the complication that our political news consumption habits have shifted. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit and Tumblr played huge roles in disseminating political information during the past election season. A May 2016 Pew Research Center study found that a majority of U.S. adults - 62% - get news on social media, and 18% do so often. In terms of the total population, this translates to social media news reaching 67% of U.S. adults. The two-thirds of Facebook users who get news there, then, amount to 44% of the general population. Consider this results of this report in the context of with the decline of the newspaper industry also documented by recent Pew Research Center data.

Some Rules of thumb:

Check About and About me pages: Clicking on or investigate authors names to consider their credentials in context should be a regular part of the research journey. (See other tricks below.)

Interrogate urls: We see quite a bit of domain manipulation these days. For instance, what looks like an .edu domain, followed by .co or "lo" is likely a fake or deceptive site. If you are you seeing a slightly variant version of a well-known URL, do a little investigating.

Suspect the sensational: When we see something posted that looks sensational, it is even more important to be skeptical. Exaggerated and provocative headlines with excessive use of capital letters or emotional language are serious red flags.

Go back to the source: When an article mentions a study, if you can, go directly to the source and check its bona fides as well.

Go back to the story again (and again): When was the story written? What is its context? Breaking news will continue to break. Early reports are built from limited information so you'll want to watch a story grow into a fuller picture.

Think outside the reliability box: The old checklist-type tools we used to evaluate websites do not necessarily work. ACRL's Framework reminds us that the notion of reliability can be fluid. Experts know how to seek authoritative voices but also recognize that unlikely voices can be authoritative, depending on need. On Twitter's 10th birthday this year, Poynter, the respected journalism portal, listed 10 Twitter How Tos -guides for using Twitter for journalism from its own archive. Students can benefit from these tips too.

Triangulate: Try to verify or corroborate the information in multiple sources, including traditional media and library databases. You can begin to rule out the hoaxes by checking out sites like the nonprofit, nonpartisan FactCheck.org, or popular sites like Snopes or Hoax-Slayer.

What exactly are you reading?: Even when you find yourself in a traditional news site, identify what type of writing you are reading. Is it news reporting, or a feature story, or an editorial, or work by a guest blogger, or a review, or an op-ed or a disguised ad, or a comment?

Check your own search attitude and biases: Is your search language biased in any way? Are you paying more attention to the information that confirms your own beliefs and ignoring evidence that does not?

Use a little energy: Have you simply satisficed or have you done your due diligence in seeking and validating the best possible sources across media sources?

Stop before you forward (or use): When you see a widely shared or forwarded link, be suspicious of a hoax or a fake story. Can you verify the information outside of the social media platform on which you discovered it?

Be suspicious of pictures!: Not all photographs tell truth or unfiltered truth. Images are normally edited or process, but sometimes they are digitally manipulated. Some are born digital. A Google reverse image search can help discover the source of an image and its possible variations.

Remember Time Magazine's darkening of the OJ mugshot?

Remember Sandy?

Infographics are carefully constructed visual media messages. The data, the evidence, the sources, and the arguments they present beg careful deconstruction, scrutiny and analysis. (See my post.)
Some news literacy vocabulary to introduce in talking about credibility:

cloaked sites appear unbiased and professional but actually advocate on behalf of an organization or cause while concealing their true sources of funding and purpose.

confirmation bias: the tendency to believe information is credible if it conforms to the reader's/viewer's existing belief system, or not credible if it does not conform

container collapse: my own term for our trouble discerning the original information container, format or information type-blog, book, pamphlet, government document, chapter, magazine, newspaper, journal, or section of the newspaper or magazine or journal-once publishing cues are removed and every source looks like a digital page or a printout.

content farm or content mill: a company that employs a staff of freelance writers to create content designed to satisfy search engine retrieval algorithms with the goal of attracting views and advertising revenue.

In news media an echo chamber is a metaphorical description of a situation in which information, ideas, or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission and repetition inside an "enclosed" system, where different or competing views are censored, disallowed, or otherwise underrepresentedecho chamber: "." (Wikipedia)

fact checking: the act of verifying assertions either prior to publication or after dissemination of the content

filter bubble: When search tools present with the stories we are likely to click on or share based on our past activity, potentially affirming our biases, we need may be experiencing what Eli Pariser calls a filter bubble,

herding phenomenon: as more journalists begin to cover a story, even more journalists are likely to join the herd, imitating the angle the story initially took rather than developing alternate or original approaches or angles.

native advertising: paid, sponsored content designed to look like the legitimate content produced by the media outlet

satisficing: a portmanteau of the words satisfy and suffice introduced by Herbert Simon in 1956 to refer to the tendency of people, bounded by time limitations, to select good enough information over optimal information

sockpuppet: an online identify created to pose as a party unaffiliated with the media puppeteer in order to deceive.

triangulation or cross verification: Researchers establish validity by using several research methods and by analyzing and examining multiple perspectives and sources in the hope that diverse viewpoints will can shed greater light on a topic.

virality: the rapid circulation of media from one user to another. When we forward sensational stories, often from social media without checking their credibility in other sources, we increase their virality.

Resources for a post truth teaching toolkit:

ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Authority Is Constructed and Contextual: Though aimed at university students, this important document reframes the way we consider authority and is well worth examining with high school students and faculty. The Framework recommends the following student dispositions:Learners who are developing their information literate abilities

develop and maintain an open mind when encountering varied and sometimes conflicting perspectives;

motivate themselves to find authoritative sources, recognizing that authority may be conferred or manifested in unexpected ways;

develop awareness of the importance of assessing content with a skeptical stance and with a self-awareness of their own biases and worldview;

question traditional notions of granting authority and recognize the value of diverse ideas and worldviews;

are conscious that maintaining these attitudes and actions requires frequent self-evaluation.

False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and Satirical "News" Sources: a dynamic Google Doc filled with tips from Melissa Zimdars, Assistant Professor of Communication and Media at Merrimack College.

The Center for News Literacy from Stony Brook University's School of Journalism, offers an impressive Digital Resources Center that includes

Ripped from the Headlines: Fresh news literacy lessons, based on the latest news, ready to use in class

Course Pack: organized around eight major concepts, the 14-module curriculum takes students from the first information revolution of Johannes Gutenberg's printing press to the Digital Age of Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook. Each lesson stands alone or can easily be integrated into your program. Don't miss the very useful new Glossary.

Get a Global View: Instructional resources from the Center's international partners

DIY News Literacy Lessons: Inspiration and lessons templates for creating your own instruction around news literacy concepts.

News Literacy Project: Begun by an LA Times investigative reporter and supported by several newspapers and news organizations, the NLP is an innovative national education program that equips middle school and high school students with the tools to be smart, active consumers of news and information and engaged, informed citizens. Don't miss the four modules, lessons and Check Tool in the Checkology Virtual Classroom.

NewseumED: Learning tools on media literacy. Don't miss the Resources for Promoting Dialogue Post Election and Today's Front Pages

Center for Media Literacy: Dedicated to leadership, education and professional development, the pioneering CML offers a free Global OnRamp (in multiple languages) built around its research-based framework and five key questions for deconstructing and constructing media.

Media Education Lab: Teaching Resources: The University of Rhode Island's Harrington School of Communication and Media offers a wealth of resources. Don't miss Mind Over Media, a crowdsourced website that contains diverse examples of contemporary propaganda on a wide range of social, political, economic and environmental topics, as well as the six-lesson CCSS-aligned high school curriculum unit on contemporary propaganda.

Frank Baker's Media Literacy Clearinghouse: Don't miss the Media's Role in Politics

Verification Handbook for Investigative Reporting: Aimed at professional journalists, but very useful for high school, this companion to the Verification Handbook for Emergency Coverage, which addresses breaking news, provides the fundamentals of online search and research techniques for investigations and takes a deeper into techniques for user generated content investigations

Time For Kids shares a video News Matters in which 6th graders discuss what they are learning about critical thinking and the news. critically about the information they come across.

Project CORA: Community of Online Research Assignments an open access resource for faculty and librarians

Fake News vs. Real News: Determining the Reliability of Sources NYTimes Learning Network

SchoolJournalism.org: News, Journalism and Media Literacy: This rich portal, administered by the Reynolds High School Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, contains a wealth of resources and suggested tools for teachers of journalism and the rest of us. Check out the interdisciplinary News Literacy Model Curriculum and Lesson Plans as well as the Six Principles of News Literacy

Teaching Information Literacy Now, from SLJ Librarian of the Year finalist, Laura Gardner

Fake 'News' in a 'Post-truth' World from reflection from Professor Judi Moreillon who shares: Fake "news" and a "post-truth" world call all school librarians to step up and lead

Resources for building a news literacy toolkit

FactCheck.org: Annenberg Public Policy Center's nonpartisan, nonprofit "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. Check out the post That Chain E-Mail Your Friend Sent to You is (Likely) Bogus. Seriously, for its Key Characteristics of Bogusness and the Viral Spiral page for claims previously checked

Washington Post's Fact Checker: The purpose of this Web site, and an accompanying column in the Sunday print edition of The Washington Post, is to "truth squad" the statements of political figures regarding issues of great importance, be they national, international or local.

PolitiFact.com: a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others who speak up in American politics, run by editors and reporters from the Tampa Bay Times. (Note: I discovered their truth-o-meter after I created the little image for this post.)

Snopes: Since way back in the 90s, Snopes has been dispelling urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.

Hoax-Slayer: Australian Brett Christensen has been debunking email and social media hoaxes and spam since 2003

Craig Silverman's BuzzFeed blog: The founding editor for BuzzFeed, Canada has been writing for many years for a variety of publications on media accuracy and verification issues.

Whois Lookup: This tool allows you to investigate the domain behind a website

CRAAP Test: Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose posted by the Meriam Library, California State University, Chico.

Kathy Schrock's 5W's of Website Evaluation

Does This Website Smell Funny to You? Amy Gillespie's FART test posted in Knowledge Quest will grab middle schoolers' attention

Evaluating Sources Using the RADAR Framework: RADAR stands for relevance, authority, date, relevance, rationale. Mandalios, J. (2013). RADAR: An approach for helping students evaluate Internet sources. Journal of Information Science, 39(4), 470-478.

Previous NeverEnding Search posts: Other favorite resources:

Abilock, Debbie. (2012). True-or not?. Educational Leadership, 69(6), 70-74. Debbie shares her quick and dirty rules of thumb-digital reading strategies, in fact-that will intrigue students, spark their curiosity, and serve as sensible entry points to more sophisticated analyses of ideas. Don't miss the section on Weighing Truths in Wikipedia.

Stanford History Education Group. (2016). Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Literacy.

Stebbins, Leslie F. (2015). Finding Reliable Information Online: Adventures of an Information Sleuth. Rowman & Littlefield.

Stevenson, Sara. (2016). Information Literacy Lessons Crucial in a Post Truth World. Knowledge Quest.
And finally . . .
Nurturing information literate, responsible, active citizens is what librarians do. There are no guarantees of truth from any source. We teach students to be discerning consumers of information. We teach them to deconstruct media messages and construct their own messages. We teach them to interrogate their sources. As the landscape continues to shift, librarians must update our own skill sets and toolkits to guide students in navigating a growingly nuanced universe of news. We must also examine and recognize our own biases so that we are open to contrary and conflicting ideas. This is our banner to wave, our curriculum to co-teach.

Of course, following the paths I've described for critical vetting of the news is work!

This is a new landscape from the one we taught in even five years ago. We need new compasses for navigation.

I do not believe we can stem the tide of fake news and truthiness and political memes and viral rumors and quick rushes to judgment. I do believe that together we can build a few arks.

Welcome to the brave new world of truth.

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Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a "post-truth" world - NeverEndingSearch

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We were guaranteed a free press, We were not guaranteed a neutral or a true press. We can celebrate the journalistic freedom to publish without interference from the state. We can also celebrate our freedom to share multiple stories through multiple lenses. But it has always been up to the reader or viewer to make [...]

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Zeynep Tufekci: Machine intelligence makes human morals more important

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Machine intelligence is here, and we're already using it to make subjective decisions. But the complex way AI grows and improves makes it hard to understand and even harder to control. In this cautionary talk, techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci explains how intelligent machines can fail in ways that don't fit human error patterns -- and in ways we won't expect or be prepared for.

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#VoCo. Adobe Audio Manipulator Sneak Peak with Jordan Peele | Adobe Creative Cloud

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Incredible revelations about Bob Marley are circulating on the internet. According to the story, a retired CIA officer with weeks to live has confessed to assassinating the singer. But it's fake news.

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I love numbers. They allow us to get a sense of magnitude, to measure change, to put claims in context. But despite their bold and confident exterior, numbers are delicate things and that's why it upsets me when they are abused. And since there's been a fair amount of number abuse going on recently, it seems a good time to have a look at the classic ways in which politicians and spin doctors meddle with statistics.

Every statistician is familiar with the tedious "Lies, damned lies, and statistics" gibe, but the economist, writer and presenter of Radio 4's More or Less, Tim Harford, has identified the habit of some politicians as not so much lying - to lie means having some knowledge of the truth - as "bullshitting": a carefree disregard of whether the number is appropriate or not.

So here, with some help from the UK fact-checking organisation Full Fact, is a nine-point guide to what's really going on.

Use a real number, but change its meaning

There's almost always some basis for numbers that get quoted, but it's often rather different from what is claimed. Take, for example, the famous £350m, as in the "We send the EU £350m a week" claim plastered over the big red Brexit campaign bus. This is a true National Statistic (see Table 9.9 of the ONS Pink Book 2015), but, in the words of Sir Andrew Dilnot, chair of the UK Statistics Authority watchdog, it "is not an amount of money that the UK pays to the EU". In fact, the UK's net contribution is more like £250m a week when Britain's rebate is taken into account - and much of that is returned in the form of agricultural subsidies and grants to poorer UK regions, reducing the figure to £136m. Sir Andrew expressed disappointment that this "misleading" claim was being made by Brexit campaigners but this ticking-off still did not get the bus repainted.

Make the number look big (but not too big)

Why did the Leave campaign frame the amount of money as "£350m per week", rather than the equivalent "£19bn a year"? They probably realised that, once numbers get large, say above 10m, they all start seeming the same - all those extra zeros have diminishing emotional impact. Billions, schmillions, it's just a Big Number.

Of course they could have gone the other way and said "£50m a day", but then people might have realised that this is equivalent to around a packet of crisps each, which does not sound so impressive.

George Osborne, on the other hand, preferred to quote the Treasury's projection of the potential cost of leaving the EU as £4,300 per household per year, rather than as the equivalent £120bn for the whole country. Presumably he was trying to make the numbers seem relevant, but perhaps he would have been better off framing the projected cost as "£2.5bn a week" so as to provide a direct comparison with the Leave campaign's £350m. It probably would not have made any difference: the weighty 200-page Treasury report is on course to become a classic example of ignored statistics.

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Recent studies confirmed higher death rates at weekends, but showed no relationship to weekend staffing levels. Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA

Casually imply causation from correlation

In July 2015 Jeremy Hunt said: " Around 6,000 people lose their lives every year because we do not have a proper seven-day service in hospitals.... " and by February 2016 this had increased to "11,000 excess deaths because we do not staff our hospitals properly at weekends". These categorical claims that weekend staffing was responsible for increased weekend death rates were widely criticised at the time, particularly by the people who had done the actual research. Recent studies have confirmed higher death rates at weekends, but these showed no relationship to weekend staffing levels.

Choose your definitions carefully

On 17 December 2014, Tom Blenkinsop MP said, "Today, there are 2,500 fewer nurses in our NHS than in May 2010", while on the same day David Cameron claimed "Today, actually, there are new figures out on the NHS... there are 3,000 more nurses under this government." Surely one must be wrong?

But Mr Blenkinsop compared the number of people working as nurses between September 2010 and September 2014, while Cameron used the full-time-equivalent number of nurses, health visitors and midwives between the start of the government in May 2010 and September 2014. So they were both, in their own particular way, right.

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'Indicator hopper': Health secretary Jeremy Hunt. Photograph: PA

Use total numbers rather than proportions (or whichever way suits your argument)

In the final three months of 2014, less than 93% of attendances at Accident and Emergency units were seen within four hours, the lowest proportion for 10 years. And yet Jeremy Hunt managed to tweet that "More patients than ever being seen in less than four hours". Which, strictly speaking, was correct, but only because more people were attending A&E than ever before. Similarly, when it comes to employment, an increasing population means that the number of employed can go up even when the employment rate goes down. Full Fact has shown how the political parties play "indicator hop", picking whichever measure currently supports their argument.

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uk unemployment and employment statistics

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Our nine-point guide to spotting a dodgy statistic

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I love numbers. They allow us to get a sense of magnitude, to measure change, to put claims in context. But despite their bold and confident exterior, numbers are delicate things and that's why it upsets me when they are abused.

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UK fact checker

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Politics is back, and so's our politics blog, with rolling coverage of and commentary on what we're fact checking in Westminster and beyond.

Read our snap analysis of claims plus updates on the impact of our fact checking, as politicians gear up for the next general election.

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Full Fact - Full Fact is the UK's independent fact checking organisation

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Full Fact is the UK's independent fact checking organisation

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Power Point to go with Unit

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US Fact checking

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A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

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Organizations struggle today not only to take advantage of vast amounts of to innovate and transform their business, but also to decide who to put in charge of all that data. Many CEOs recognize the importance of data, but their CIOs or CTOs are already over-taxed with infrastructure initiatives. This is why a new role is rapidly emerging in the market -- the Chief Data Officer (CDO).

The CDO's job, put simply by TD Ameritrade's CDO Derek Strauss is to provide the three "A's," or data that is "Actionable, Accurate and Accessible . To accomplish this, they work closely with line of business leaders as well as IT. They are the bridge between what a department wants to accomplish and how to get it done. This puts them in high demand.

In fact, 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies will have a CDO by next year, according to executive recruiting firm Russell Reynolds, a firm specializing in the placement of Chief Data Officers. Gartner estimates there are currently more than 100 Chief Data Officers , mainly in financial services and government.

CEOs who are considering adding a CDO to their C-Suite or already have one are taking the initial steps needed to elevate the role of data in their company to help gain competitive advantage. They are taking the necessary measures needed to derive value from their data through . Chief Data Officers have the ability to focus on simplifying data architecture and access to reduce risk, increase compliance, and improve data quality, usage and value. The CDO is the new authority to drive data transformation.

The first step is to identify the need for a CDO, what you wish that person to achieve as a member of your C-Suite, and to understand how it can and will transform your business. Second, identify the right person for the position of Chief Data Officer, someone who has tangible authority within the IT and business domains. Third, establish a data management program driven by the CDO. And most importantly, drive a cultural change that can break down data silos across businesses.

Big Data will continue to grow. In fact, with 2.5 billion gigabytes created each day, there's no getting away from it. With a volume that massive, a vast sea of information, you need someone to steer the ship, to drive the business, transform the data and enable it to become the basis of your competitive advantage. A Chief Data Officer can do just that.

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As Big Data Grows, a New Role Emerges: the Chief Data Officer

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Organizations struggle today not only to take advantage of vast amounts of to innovate and transform their business, but also to decide who to put in charge of all that data. Many CEOs recognize the importance of data, but their CIOs or CTOs are already over-taxed with infrastructure initiatives.

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Fake News, Real Consequences | Full Frontal with Samantha Bee | TBS

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This is a very real segment about very fake news. Follow Mike on Twitter: https://twitter.com/michaelsrubens Watch Full Frontal with Samantha Bee all new Mondays at 10:30/ 9:30c on TBS!

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Helping Students Identify Fake News with the Five C's of Critical Consuming

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View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-false-news-can-spread-noah-tavlin In previous decades, most news with global reach came from several major newspapers and networks with the resources to gather information directly. The speed with which information spreads now, however, has created the ideal conditions for something called circular reporting. Noah Tavlin sheds light on this phenomenon.

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Photographs of the National Mall in Washington DC and public transport figures for the city flatly contradict Sean Spicer's angry insistence that Donald Trump drew "the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe".

In his blistering debut as White House press secretary on Saturday, Spicer accused journalists of reporting inaccurate crowd numbers and using misrepresentative photographs "to minimise the enormous support" that he claimed the new president enjoyed at his swearing-in.

"No one had numbers because the National Park Service, which controls the National Mall, does not put any out," he said, before going ahead anyway to declare that Trump had attracted "the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration" in person and in the world.

"These attempts to lessen the enthusiasm for the inauguration are shameful and wrong."

Crowd estimates can be fraught with difficulty and there is indeed no official figure. But images of the National Mall on Friday contradicted Spicer's assertions - particularly when compared with pictures from Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009 and the turnout for the Women's March on Saturday.

A timelapse video produced by PBS indicates that the National Mall was never full at any stage on Friday:

Meanwhile, photographs show the National Mall packed with crowds just before Obama's inauguration in 2009 - but much more sparsely covered with people just before Trump's ceremony.

Interactive slider showing Obama's inauguration crowd with Trump's. By: David Constable for the Guardian

The New York Times estimated that Trump had drawn a crowd of about one-third the size of Obama's, which was thought to be a record turnout of 1.8 million.

According to figures shared by the Metro Washington subway system on Twitter, 193,000 trips had been taken by 11am on Donald Trump's inauguration day, compared with 513,000 during the same period on 20 January 2009 when Barack Obama took office.

"Ridership" as of 11am on Saturday stood at 275,000: more than eight times a normal Saturday and "even busier than most weekdays", the Metro tweeted.

Metro (@wmata)
Metro Ridership: As of 11am, 193k trips taken so far today. (11am 1/20/13 = 317k, 11am 1/20/09 = 513k, 11am 1/20/05 = 197k) #wmata
January 20, 2017

Spicer attempted to bolster his argument by giving whole-day ridership figures for the Metro of 420,000 on Trump's inaugural day. However, for comparison he used a figure of 317,000 which was the ridership figure only up to 11am on the inaugural day of 2013 - when Barack Obama had already been in office four years and attendance was, perhaps unsurprisingly, lower than for his first inauguration.

Before the inauguration itself, a video posted to Twitter by NBC's Katy Tur showed "entire stands empty" along the parade route.

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Parade route from Capital to WH. Entire stands empty. Crowd thin. pic.twitter.com/7AcpJkBO8O
January 20, 2017

Photos of the vice-president, Mike Pence, making the trip from the Capitol to the White House also suggested sparse crowds.

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when camera angles matter pic.twitter.com/PaHFyKPGyE
January 21, 2017

It is worth noting that Trump drew just 4.1% of the vote in Washington DC and lost the surrounding states of Maryland and Virginia.

His inauguration also occurred on a Friday - a fact that does not go any way towards mitigating the comparisons with Obama's 2009 inauguration, which fell on a Tuesday, but does contextualise the strong turnout for the Women's March on Saturday.

CNN tweeted a photograph of the National Mall taken from the National Park Service's EarthCam on the Washington Monument when the swearing-in began, just after noon ET on Friday. Compared with the same view at the same time on Saturday during the Women's March, there is a clear difference in crowds.

CNN (@CNN)
Photos taken at 12:15 p.m. ET each day show Trump's inauguration crowd vs. the #WomensMarch https://t.co/syj3kEAr2t pic.twitter.com/OG61rjQdqd
January 21, 2017

The Associated Press reported that at least 500,000 women had turned out for the Women's March on National Mall at 9.40am - more than double the initial predictions. There were also sizeable protests against Trump in other cities around the world.

Judd Legum (@JuddLegum)
Oh wow. pic.twitter.com/S9HHT0UBlG
January 21, 2017

It is uncertain if there are more concrete figures to come: according to the Associated Press, the National Park Service stopped releasing official estimates for events at the National Mall following a dispute over the Million Man March in 1995.

The US Armed Forces Joint Task Force-National Capital Region and the Joint Congressional Committee, which organise inaugural proceedings, would not be releasing estimates either.

Politifact reported that crowds at inaugurations varied widely, with Obama raising an estimated 1 million in 2013, down from 1.8 million in 2009; George W Bush drawing 400,000 in 2005 after 300,000 in 2001; and Bill Clinton 800,000 in 1993 then 250,000 in 1997.

Before Spicer's briefing room tirade on Saturday, Trump had told an audience at CIA headquarters that he had given his inauguration address to a "massive field of people ... packed", he estimated, with between 1 million and 1.5 million people.

To his eye, Trump said, the crowd stretched "the 20-block area, all the way back to the Washington Monument" - but a television network he didn't name had broadcast a shot of "an empty field" and put the crowd at 250,000.

He went on to say that God had stopped rain from falling during his speech, before adding that he had "caught" the news network in a lie: "We caught them in a beauty.

"And I think they're going to pay a big price."

But the evidence certainly seems to challenge Trump's assertion that he had drawn a crowd of as many as 1.5 million people.

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Trump's inauguration crowd: Sean Spicer's claims versus the evidence

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Photographs of the National Mall in Washington DC and public transport figures for the city flatly contradict Sean Spicer's angry insistence that Donald Trump drew "the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe".

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Veles Macedonian Source of Fake News

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Fake News: How This Teenager in Macedonia Is Striking It Rich

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Exclusive: The 18-year-old, who lives in the small Eastern European town of Veles, says he made at least $60,000 in the past six months by mainly appealing to Donald Trump supporters.

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NBC story on Fake News creation

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VELES, Macedonia - Dimitri points to a picture on his Instagram showing a bar table decked with expensive champagne and sparklers.

It's from his 18th birthday just four months ago - a lavish party in his east European hometown that he says wouldn't have been possible without President-elect Donald Trump.

Dimitri - who asked NBC News not to use his real name - is one of dozens of teenagers in the Macedonian town of Veles who got rich during the U.S. presidential election producing fake news for millions on social media.

The articles, sensationalist and often baseless, were posted to Facebook, drawing in armies of readers and earning fake-news writers money from penny-per-click advertising.

Dimitri says he's earned at least $60,000 in the past six months - far outstripping his parents' income and transforming his prospects in a town where the average annual wage is $4,800. He is one of the more successful fake news pushers in the area.

His main source of cash? Supporters of America's president-elect.

"Nothing can beat Trump's supporters when it comes to social media engagement," he says. "So that's why we stick with Trump."

Even with the presidential contest over and Google and Facebook's plans to crack down on fake news makers, money continues to pour in.

Posts about Hillary Clinton are also a hit - but only negative ones.

"I have mostly written about her emails, what is contained in her emails, the Benghazi tragedy, maybe her illness that she had," Dimitri adds, but now he's moved on to headlines like: "Trey Gowdy Revealed His EPIC Plan To Imprison Hillary Now That Election's Over, SHE IS DONE!"

Dimitri's sole aim is to make his stories go viral.

His most popular headlines during the election included: "JUST IN: Obama Illegally Transferred DOJ Money To Clinton Campaign!" and "BREAKING: Obama Confirms Refusal To Leave White House, He Will Stay In Power!"

The teenager is unrepentant about any influence his stories may have had on swaying public opinion.

"I didn't force anyone to give me money," he says. "People sell cigarettes, they sell alcohol. That's not illegal, why is my business illegal? If you sell cigarettes, cigarettes kill people. I didn't kill anyone."

The same weekend that NBC spent with Dimitri, a gunman opened fire in a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. The shooter told police he was motivated by a fake news story. The pizzeria, Comet Ping Pong, was accused online of hosting a pedophile ring run by Democratic leaders.

Asked about the incident this week, Dimitri claimed he wasn't familiar with the story nor the people who had spread it online.

The small, rust-belt town of Veles has found itself in the international spotlight after investigations by BuzzFeed and the Guardian traced more than 100 fake news domain names here.

The fake news bonanza couldn't have come against a more jarring backdrop.

Once part of communist Yugoslavia, the Republic of Macedonia has a population of 2.1 million in a landlocked area about the size Vermont. Blanketed by rugged mountains, parts of the country have enjoyed a tourism surge in recent years.

But vacationers won't find Veles in many travel guides. The town of 50,000 is almost an hour's drive down a lonely, crumbling highway from the capital, Skopje.

Visitors are greeted by a distressed mosaic of red-roofed buildings, densely stacked onto a steep mountainside. Industrial smokestacks add to a wintry fog settling over the valley - though even their output has diminished after several recent factory closures.

Almost a quarter of Macedonians are currently unemployed - a rate around five times higher than in the U.S.

But the burdens that weigh on Veles might also explain why it's become a global hotbed for fake news.

High unemployment and a close-knit community meant that when Dimitri and others started making money, word quickly spread and everyone wanted a piece of the action.

Most teens here speak fluent English, allowing them to quickly navigate through reams of Western news sites and pinpoint potentially viral content.

Dimitri estimates there are now 300 locals dabbling in fake news, with at least 50 making "decent money," and around a dozen making "a lot." He says he's not quite at the top of the pecking order, but not far off.

But he is no scrappy teenager. Dimitri is bright, with an obvious aptitude for business.

He won't show NBC News his profile on Google AdSense, an online advertising service that allows websites to make money, to protect five other teenagers who asked him not to reveal aspects of their shared interests. He's also wary of revealing his full income, worried it will make him a target for thieves, or worse.

However, he does show NBC News a digital receipt from Google showing he earned more than $8,000 from the web giant in September. He says this was just one of several advertising accounts, and claims his most successful streak - in the run-up to the election - saw him rake in $27,000 in just one month.

When asked for comment about the persistence of fake news even after the election, Facebook directed NBC News to a post from CEO Mark Zuckerberg last month in which he laid out the company's plan to tackle the phenomenon.

In an interview with TODAY on Thursday, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg acknowledged "there's a lot more to do."

Google outlined steps last month that it said would restrict advertising on websites that "misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information." The company did not respond to NBC News' requests for comment on this apparently still-flourishing industry.

Dimitri says even after the election, while business is less brisk, his fake news is still highly profitable. Like any business, he's aware of the need to adapt.

"This business updates every hour, every ten minutes, every minute," he says. "There are always news ideas, new types of generating new visitors and that's the thing we all want."

So while newspapers across the globe are losing advertising revenue, Dimitri's empire of lies is thriving.

He says he now employs three 15-year-olds, paying them the equivalent of $10 per day. As well as buying new laptops and paying cash to boost his posts on social media, he has also invested some of his earnings into real estate - a joint venture with his parents, who are more than happy with his success.

As with many regular journalists, Dimitri starts his day by trawling the web looking for trending topics that he can harness to drive traffic to his websites.

He copies his posts from other fake news websites, including many in the U.S., or takes content from mainstream media organizations before peppering them with invented details. He also posts provocative online polls such as: "Should Trump Deport All Refugees?" and: "Do you consider Donald Trump, the Jesus of America?"

Most of this content is published on websites Dimitri has built to look like NBC News, Fox News, the Huffington Post and others.

To the untrained eye, fake headlines such as: "BREAKING: Obama Confirms Refusal To Leave White House, He Will Stay In Power!" look genuine. The only giveaway is the imitation URL.

From then on, it's a case of throwing as much mud at the wall and seeing what sticks.

"The most-read news articles are usually the ones containing the click-bait words," Dimitri says. "The click bait words, as you know, are, 'Oh my god, breaking news, wow,' and usually something that has never been aired before. Because if the title just says, 'Today this happened, today that happened,' no one will open that."

He and his collaborators post these stories to their Facebook pages dozens of times a day. Again, he would only show NBC News a Facebook page that he runs on his own, which has an impressive 86,000 likes. But he said the six pages run by his collective have amassed more than 3 million likes between them.

"Say you produce ten lies a day, [the audience] is not going to believe ten lies, they are going to believe probably one or maximum two," he says. "Usually the lies about [Clinton's] emails and the lies about Hillary. The anti-Hillary posts were really good."

Dimitri says he has set up more than 50 domain names in six months, all in a bid to please Facebook's algorithm and get the maximum number of eyeballs on his posts. He claims in that time his posts have achieved some 40 million page views.

"We stay up late and we don't sleep that much - I haven't slept good for a couple of months now," he says. "I have to go to school and then at night I have to work."

He and his colleagues see the process as an art. At first they worked on a basis of trial-and-error. Now it comes naturally.

"You see what people like and you just give it to them," he explains. "You see they like water, you give water, they like wine, you give wine. It's really simple."

The challenge of engaging readers on social media is one familiar to most journalists. They have a formidable opponent in Dimitri and his peers; analysis by BuzzFeed after the election showed that fake news websites actually performed better than conventional press and television.

Dimitri is unequivocal about why the mainstream couldn't compete: "They're not allowed to lie."

The influx of money has created a thriving party culture in Veles.

On Saturday, one local nightclub was barely keeping up with demand, as dozens of teens and young adults ordered ice buckets filled with large $35 bottles of vodka.

In this new era, the purveyors of fake news are the coolest kids in the schoolyard.

"Since fake news started, girls are more interested in geeks than macho guys," says one 17-year-old girl standing at the bar.

The most successful fake-news publishers have "bought themselves houses, apartments, maybe invested in some real estate or in some businesses," according to Dimitri. "They have bought themselves cars, they have bought ... their girlfriends better cars, better places to live," he says.

Keen to feed off this gold rush, the nightclub even plans to organize a club night on the same day that Google pays out its advertising money.

Following Google and Facebook's vow to clamp down on fake news, Dimitri says he knows people have lost tens of thousands after their accounts were shuttered.

"When they started to shut down webpages, business went down," says 20-year-old Kiko, a bartender at the nightclub.

The impact appears to have been short lived, however, judging by the healthy flow of local currency, the Macedonian denar, being shoved into the club's cash registers.

Most people are cagey about admitting any direct involvement in fake news. But Tony, a 40-year-old taxi driver, says that every young person he knows - including his own son - is in on the act.

"I've been doing this job for 18 years and I know everyone in the city," he says. "I know kids who are minors, 16 or 17 years old, and they bought BMWs after running these websites."

Is he worried about his son making money from selling hoaxes online? "It's better to do this job than to go into the drug business," he says.

Also unperturbed is Veles' mayor, Slavcho Chadiev.

"Is it criminal activity? Not according to the law of Macedonia," he says during an interview in his office. "All that money went through the state system and everyone paid their taxes."

He isn't bothered by accusations that Veles' teens swayed the U.S. election. In fact, he welcomes the idea.

"Not as a mayor, but as a man and as a citizen, I'm glad if Veles contributed to the Republicans' victory and Trump's victory," he says.

Like many Macedonians, he blames recent Democratic administrations in Washington for not doing more to help their country's attempts to join the European Union and NATO. (Greece has blocked these efforts in a dispute over Macedonia's name - the country's official title at the United Nations is the cumbersome Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.)

On the flip side, the mayor still remembers fondly when Republican President George W. Bush recognized his country's new title in 2004.

What would he do if he encountered one of these fake news tycoons?

"I would ask him, 'Are you looking for a job?' Because I have a lack of IT guys," he says, before admitting that the salary of less than $400 might not be attractive.

Dimitri says his goal is to earn $1 million, and it's no surprise the young entrepreneur sees Trump as "a small role model."

There's only one question that sees doubt creep into Dimitri's cocksure demeanor. When he copies posts from other fake news websites, does he worry he's being used as a pawn to spread propaganda?

"When you buy a certain product, you don't know who created it," he says. "You don't know who creates your shoes, and there are rumors that small children in Africa create them."

He adds: "Maybe I don't want to find out, because if I find out maybe I'm going to feel bad. Right now I'm feeling OK."

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How Macedonian teens earn - and spend - thousands from fake news

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Fake news ran wild during the presidential election - and even though the contest is over, the gold rush continues for dozens of enterprising teens in a remote Macedonian town. Their main cash cow: president-elect Donald Trump.

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Canadian fact checker

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Featured Fact Checks Don Davies: "One in four Canadians skips necessary medicine because of the cost." Misrepresents the data. Justin Trudeau: "Women entrepreneurs tend to make better choices than others." Misinterpreted the data. Marc Garneau: "We have the best system in the world" for air passenger rights. Rules not yet public.

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Problems with Social Media include Fake News

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It wasn't supposed to end up like this.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram were designed to help us keep up with friends and share photos, to unite diverse people with distinct ideas, and democratize the way we discover new information. Instead, they've fostered the rampant spread of propaganda and untruths, enabled cyber bullying, and amplified social divisions.

While these ubiquitous platforms have fundamentally changed the way billions of people around the globe connect and communicate, it's arguable that this change hasn't necessarily been for the better. And as the repercussions resonate with users the world around, it could signal the beginning of the end for the social media giants.

A decade ago, the expectations of what social media could do were utopian and idealistic. According to Buzzfeed News Media Editor Craig Silverman, the hopes were that they would usher a new age of more human communication and bring about transformational change in every aspect of society. "Social media was supposed to be the layer on top of the internet that truly enabled people to connect globally, to democratize news and information, and to also unleash new ways of doing business."

And at first it worked "miraculously well," says Elena Yunusov, the founder of digital marketing firm Communicable.

In the early days of Twitter, she explains, the platform brought people together from across traditional barriers. Users had long conversations with people they might never have had the opportunity to engage with otherwise, discovering discussions through hashtags designed to make a given topic searchable and inclusive.

"Facebook was interesting too," says Yunusov. While Twitter was great for getting to know new interesting people, Facebook was "really was about keeping in touch with friends and family. Social networks thrived on creating connections and communities, and while it's hard to imagine now, they didn't push notifications, didn't serve ads every other second, didn't spam users."

But now, she says, "we see more research come out on the adverse effects on people's mental health, memory, attention spans, and ultimately, productivity and human connection and basic ability to communicate with each other."

'Stark misuse of social media platforms'

And that psychological toll is just the tip of the iceberg. As Nick Bilton wrote in Vanity Fair, we're now seeing mounting evidence social media platforms are "tearing society apart, being used as terrorist recruitment tools, facilitating bullying, driving up anxiety, and undermining our elections."

From election meddling to fake news to racist algorithms, the harm done by these seemingly innocuous social tools is profound and far reaching.

"We have seen stark misuse of social media platforms for the spreading of deliberate and targeted disinformation," says Katina Michael, a professor in the faculty of engineering and information sciences at the University of Wollongong and Editor in Chief of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine. "We have also witnessed consumer exploitation and calculated economic manipulation based on an individual's documented traits and characteristics on social media."

According to Michael, the algorithms being used to profile you based on what you post, comment on and share online are then used to sway your sentiment "and have purportedly been responsible for the Brexit vote, led to President Trump's election victory, led to an increase in the polarization of people's beliefs to extremes, and contributed to instability and citizen anxieties about the now and future."

For example, last year, the firm Cambridge Analytica, hired by the Trump campaign, used people's Facebook data to build psychological profiles of them. Using data scraped from the social network, such as age, location, occupation and hobbies, as well as religion, income and voting history, the company claims to have been able to match specific voters with targeted campaign messages. That's all thanks to how those people used Facebook.

So how did things go so far astray from their idealistic origins?

Scale plays a big part in how things veered off course. The bigger these companies grow, the harder it is to manage the vast number of people that use their sites, and the even larger amount of content that people create and share. As a result, software has become the arbiter of what is right and wrong as automated systems make decisions about what is and isn't allowed on the platforms.

Without human oversight or intervention, these platforms have been manipulated and abused by the people and organizations on them, says Silverman, who adds that "platforms like Facebook operate at a scale that is unheard of in human history, and so we are only now beginning to see the good and bad of what that means."

But while that unprecedented growth has been the cause of many of these platforms' negative consequences, some claim the dark side of social media can be traced to its very origins.

Anatoliy Gruzd, an associate professor at Ryerson University and director of research for the university's Social Media Lab concurs, saying that "the roots of the current issues with social media can be traced back to the mid-90s, to when the first pop-up ads appeared on the internet. By choosing advertising as the vehicle to fund the growth of the web, we set the stage for the current issues."

'Major changes are on the way'

Facebook co-founder Sean Parker even admitted recently that the platform was designed to exploit a vulnerability in human psychology, and "consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible."

Roger McNamee, another Facebook investor, recently said: "Facebook has the largest margins of any company of similar size in the American economy. They're functioning like a drug company without doing clinical trials."

While Gruzd says that more still needs to be done, he notes that "major changes are on the way."

"In the wake of the on-going election manipulation scandal, Facebook has already come out in support of some limited changes to the current political advertising laws," says Gruzd. "Twitter, in the wake of all their abuse, trolling and ISIS propaganda problems, has slowly come around to making major changes to their platform."

According to a comment filed with the Federal Election Commission, Facebook has said that it supports measures to promote transparency in online campaign advertising, including requiring political advertisers to disclose who is paying for the advertisements.

Twitter also announced that they will "clearly label" political ads, and regularly updates its terms of service to try to mitigate the platform's rampant abuse and harassment. In their updated rules, Twitter claims that "everyone should have the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers," a statement that echoes the early ideals of social media, despite how it has veered off course in recent years.

So is this the beginning of the end for the likes of Facebook and Twitter? Certainly, there's more chatter these days about social media burnout and "digital detox" than there is buzz about people clamouring to join.

Faced with ugly truths ranging from election manipulation to the spread of misinformation, Grudz says these companies "will have to shoulder much of the responsibility to ensure that their platforms are safe for users and advertisers," which is a far cry from the hopeful origins of the social media platforms.

So while the current crop of social media platforms may not be going the way of Myspace just yet, this could be a moment of reckoning, as they are forced to acknowledge that the tools they have grown into are not the idealistic ones they were first intended to be.

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institute of electrical and electronics engineers

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Bullying, propaganda and health effects of social media platforms put their future at risk

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Social media was designed to help us keep up with friends and share photos, to unite diverse people with distinct ideas and democratize the way we discover information. Instead, they've fostered the rampant spread of propaganda and untruths, enabled cyber bullying, and amplified social divisions.

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Nudge theory is supposed to be good what if it turns bad?

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I recently reviewed the excellent Factfulness ( UK) ( US) by the late Hans Rosling, his son Ola and his daughter-in-law Anna. It's an absolutely terrific, inspiring, and wise book, which among many other things is likely to make you feel better about the world. This is not because everything is rosy, but because most people's perceptions of the world are badly skewed by a mixture of outdated ideas, dramatic media stories, and our own instincts to spot the worst and most frightening facts about the world. Hence "Factfulness" is a relaxing condition.

Bravo - everyone should read this book. But there are some others to look out for.

Charles Kenny, in Getting Better ( UK) ( US), also points to dramatic progress in achieving some (not all) of the goals that really matter, and in showing the connections between economic growth and progress on health, education, freedom and happiness. He also explores what else needs to be done to get the most out of development aid and to make development work for everyone; this is a nice complement to Factfulness, which is more focused on helping people understand the world.

One of the best and most thought-provoking books I've ever read - although sadly it did not make me feel as good about the world as the others - is David Mackay's Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air ( UK) ( US). David, who died far too young, goes step by step through the way we consume and produce energy, teaching us how to make estimates, what really matters, and what the most promising sustainable energy sources might be. Spoiler alert: sustainable energy will probably involve some very hard choices. Utterly brilliant book and it is available online as a free resource.

I suppose I should mention my own Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy ( UK) ( US)- although I don't see the book as making an argument for progress as such, it's impossible to ponder the list of ideas and inventions, from the contraceptive pill to the cold chain, the S-bend to the light bulb, without feeling grateful for those who went before us. It's true that barbed wire was a bit of a mixed blessing and leaded petrol was an unmitigated disaster - but still, where would we be without paper, or beautiful beautiful concrete? A French journalist told me that the book put me squarely in the category of optimistic Anglo-Saxons, so there.

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I recently reviewed the excellent Factfulness ( UK) ( US) by the late Hans Rosling, his son Ola and his daughter-in-law Anna. It's an absolutely terrific, inspiring, and wise book, which among many other things is likely to make you feel better about the world.

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For more than just Fake News

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Sarah McGrew, Teresa Ortega, Joel Breakstone, Sam Wineburg

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The Challenge That’s Bigger Than Fake News

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Since the November 2016 presidential election, coverage of “fake news” has been everywhere. It’s hard to turn on the TV without hearing the term. Google and Facebook have pitched plans for fighting the menace.1 State legislators have even introduced bills to mandate K–12 instruction on the topic.2

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In the era of Trump, journalists more apt to blend opinion with facts

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U.S. cable networks have never shied away from polarizing opinions or blustery bombast. Some would argue it's their bread and butter. But traditionally those opinions came largely from guests or program hosts who identify themselves as commentators, not journalists. Think Fox TV's Sean Hannity, for example.

But something seems to have changed since the election of U.S. President Donald Trump. Now, even those who describe themselves as objective journalists are frequently injecting opinion into their news programs.

'I think unusual times call for unusual approaches.' - Brian Stelter, CNN media correspondent

"I think unusual times call for unusual approaches, and we see journalists trying many different approaches covering this president," says Brian Stelter, CNN's media correspondent.

Stelter doesn't see the injection of opinion as problematic, casting it as an important way to help viewers understand what's really happening.

"You might say opinion; I'd say we're seeing more analysis, we're seeing more context provided in the coverage," Stelter said in an interview this week in Toronto for The Investigators.

Watch the full interview with Brian Stelter on The Investigators, Saturday at 9:30 p.m. ET and Sunday at 5:30 p.m. ET on CBC News Network.

Context is indisputably useful in helping an audience understand why a particular document or comment can have a pivotal effect on a story, given the complexity of issues like tax reform or immigration.

But recently, some cable news anchors are going much further than that.

Ashleigh Banfield, who works on CNN's headline news network HLN, recently spoke directly into the camera and aimed an angry lecture at the woman who levelled sexual assault accusations against actor Aziz Ansari.

"What you have done, in my opinion, is appalling," she told the woman, clearly framing her words as something more than context.

Coverage 'more adversarial'

And in this new environment of pointed opinions, most have been directed at Trump.

Such as those expressed by CNN evening news anchor Don Lemon, who's frequently taken to starting his nightly program with critical, sometimes personal appeals to the president to change his behaviour.

"The president is ignorant of history. He does not know context. He should be ashamed of himself," Lemon argued at the start of his August 16 news program before turning to his guests to discuss Trump's comments about a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Stelter suggests the kind of aggressive, personalized commentary we're now seeing comes from "the daily dishonesty from the president and his aides."

"That's a big part of the reason why there has been this more adversarial approach in the coverage in the past year," he said.

But Stelter also says he believes the tone is a reflection of personal style, not a directive from media bosses. He points to how various anchors at CNN recently handled the president's use of the words "shithole countries" in describing some African nations.

"I think the day the s-hole comments were published by the Washington Post you saw different anchors take different approaches. For example, Wolf Blitzer didn't say the word; other anchors did. Some anchors said it was a racist remark. Don Lemon went further and said the president is racist. I think there is room in cable news, in television news, for a variety of approaches."

Even at a time when journalists everywhere are trying to win back the trust of audiences who've become increasingly sceptical about truth in journalism, Stelter says he doesn't think the blend of opinion and fact makes that task more difficult.

"We need to educate our audience why we do what we do, and how we do what we do every day, in order to gain their trust," he said, adding, "If I'm on the air and I'm saying that President Trump is wrong - or any other politician, for that matter, is wrong about something - I need to back it up and I need to show it.

"Sometimes we [in the news media] have done a bad job at telling the audience how we do our jobs."

Also this week on The Investigators, Toronto freelance journalist Justin Ling tells Diana Swain why he suspected a serial killer was at work in the city long before police did. And The Fifth Estate's Bob McKeown and Harvey Cashore talk about the challenges of covering the murder investigation into the deaths of billionaires Barry and Honey Sherman.

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In the era of Trump, journalists more apt to blend opinion with facts

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U.S. cable networks have never shied away from polarizing opinions or blustery bombast. Some would argue it's their bread and butter. But traditionally those opinions came largely from guests or program hosts who identify themselves as commentators, not journalists. Think Fox TV's Sean Hannity, for example.

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Why facts are not enough

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The Problem With Facts

1.

Just before Christmas 1953, the bosses of America's leading tobacco companies met John Hill, the founder and chief executive of one of America's leading public relations firms, Hill & Knowlton. Despite the impressive surroundings - the Plaza Hotel, overlooking Central Park in New York - the mood was one of crisis.

Scientists were publishing solid evidence of a link between smoking and cancer. From the viewpoint of Big Tobacco, more worrying was that the world's most read publication, The Reader's Digest, had already reported on this evidence in a 1952 article, "Cancer by the Carton". The journalist Alistair Cooke, writing in 1954, predicted that the publication of the next big scientific study into smoking and cancer might finish off the industry.

It did not. PR guru John Hill had a plan - and the plan, with hindsight, proved tremendously effective. Despite the fact that its product was addictive and deadly, the tobacco industry was able to fend off regulation, litigation and the idea in the minds of many smokers that its products were fatal for decades.

So successful was Big Tobacco in postponing that day of reckoning that their tactics have been widely imitated ever since. They have also inspired a thriving corner of academia exploring how the trick was achieved. In 1995, Robert Proctor, a historian at Stanford University who has studied the tobacco case closely, coined the word "agnotology". This is the study of how ignorance is deliberately produced; the entire field was started by Proctor's observation of the tobacco industry. The facts about smoking - indisputable facts, from unquestionable sources - did not carry the day. The indisputable facts were disputed. The unquestionable sources were questioned. Facts, it turns out, are important, but facts are not enough to win this kind of argument.

2.

Agnotology has never been more important. "We live in a golden age of ignorance," says Proctor today. "And Trump and Brexit are part of that."

In the UK's EU referendum, the Leave side pushed the false claim that the UK sent £350m a week to the EU. It is hard to think of a previous example in modern western politics of a campaign leading with a transparent untruth, maintaining it when refuted by independent experts, and going on to triumph anyway. That performance was soon to be eclipsed by Donald Trump, who offered wave upon shameless wave of demonstrable falsehood, only to be rewarded with the presidency. The Oxford Dictionaries declared "post-truth" the word of 2016. Facts just didn't seem to matter any more.

The instinctive reaction from those of us who still care about the truth - journalists, academics and many ordinary citizens - has been to double down on the facts. Fact-checking organisations, such as Full Fact in the UK and PolitiFact in the US, evaluate prominent claims by politicians and journalists. I should confess a personal bias: I have served as a fact checker myself on the BBC radio programme More or Less, and I often rely on fact-checking websites. They judge what's true rather than faithfully reporting both sides as a traditional journalist would. Public, transparent fact checking has become such a feature of today's political reporting that it's easy to forget it's barely a decade old.

Mainstream journalists, too, are starting to embrace the idea that lies or errors should be prominently identified. Consider a story on the NPR website about Donald Trump's speech to the CIA in January: "He falsely denied that he had ever criticised the agency, falsely inflated the crowd size at his inauguration on Friday . . . -" It's a bracing departure from the norms of American journalism, but then President Trump has been a bracing departure from the norms of American politics.

Facebook has also drafted in the fact checkers, announcing a crackdown on the "fake news" stories that had become prominent on the network after the election. Facebook now allows users to report hoaxes. The site will send questionable headlines to independent fact checkers, flag discredited stories as "disputed", and perhaps downgrade them in the algorithm that decides what each user sees when visiting the site.

We need some agreement about facts or the situation is hopeless. And yet: will this sudden focus on facts actually lead to a more informed electorate, better decisions, a renewed respect for the truth? The history of tobacco suggests not. The link between cigarettes and cancer was supported by the world's leading medical scientists and, in 1964, the US surgeon general himself. The story was covered by well-trained journalists committed to the values of objectivity. Yet the tobacco lobbyists ran rings round them.

In the 1950s and 1960s, journalists had an excuse for their stumbles: the tobacco industry's tactics were clever, complex and new. First, the industry appeared to engage, promising high-quality research into the issue. The public were assured that the best people were on the case. The second stage was to complicate the question and sow doubt: lung cancer might have any number of causes, after all. And wasn't lung cancer, not cigarettes, what really mattered? Stage three was to undermine serious research and expertise. Autopsy reports would be dismissed as anecdotal, epidemiological work as merely statistical, and animal studies as irrelevant. Finally came normalisation: the industry would point out that the tobacco-cancer story was stale news. Couldn't journalists find something new and interesting to say?

Such tactics are now well documented - and researchers have carefully examined the psychological tendencies they exploited. So we should be able to spot their re-emergence on the political battlefield.

"It's as if the president's team were using the tobacco industry's playbook," says Jon Christensen, a journalist turned professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wrote a notable study in 2008 of the way the tobacco industry tugged on the strings of journalistic tradition.

One infamous internal memo from the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, typed up in the summer of 1969, sets out the thinking very clearly: "Doubt is our product." Why? Because doubt "is the best means of competing with the 'body of fact' that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy." Big Tobacco's mantra: keep the controversy alive.

Doubt is usually not hard to produce, and facts alone aren't enough to dispel it. We should have learnt this lesson already; now we're going to have to learn it all over again.

3.

Tempting as it is to fight lies with facts, there are three problems with that strategy. The first is that a simple untruth can beat off a complicated set of facts simply by being easier to understand and remember. When doubt prevails, people will often end up believing whatever sticks in the mind. In 1994, psychologists Hollyn Johnson and Colleen Seifert conducted an experiment in which people read an account of an explosive warehouse fire. The account mentioned petrol cans and paint but later explained that petrol and paint hadn't been present at the scene after all. The experimental subjects, tested on their comprehension, recalled that paint wasn't actually there. But when asked to explain facts about the fire ("why so much smoke?"), they would mention the paint. Lacking an alternative explanation, they fell back on a claim they had already acknowledged was wrong. Once we've heard an untrue claim, we can't simply unhear it.

This should warn us not to let lie-and-rebuttal take over the news cycle. Several studies have shown that repeating a false claim, even in the context of debunking that claim, can make it stick. The myth-busting seems to work but then our memories fade and we remember only the myth. The myth, after all, was the thing that kept being repeated. In trying to dispel the falsehood, the endless rebuttals simply make the enchantment stronger.

With this in mind, consider the Leave campaign's infamous bus-mounted claim: "We send the EU £350m a week." Simple. Memorable. False. But how to rebut it? A typical effort from The Guardian newspaper was headlined, "Why Vote Leave's £350m weekly EU cost claim is wrong", repeating the claim before devoting hundreds of words to gnarly details and the dictionary definition of the word "send". This sort of fact-checking article is invaluable to a fellow journalist who needs the issues set out and hyperlinked. But for an ordinary voter, the likely message would be: "You can't trust politicians but we do seem to send a lot of money to the EU." Doubt suited the Leave campaign just fine.

This is an inbuilt vulnerability of the fact-checking trade. Fact checkers are right to be particular, to cover all the details and to show their working out. But that's why the fact-checking job can only be a part of ensuring that the truth is heard.

Andrew Lilico, a thoughtful proponent of leaving the EU, told me during the campaign that he wished the bus had displayed a more defensible figure, such as £240m. But Lilico now acknowledges that the false claim was the more effective one. "In cynical campaigning terms, the use of the £350m figure was perfect," he says. "It created a trap that Remain campaigners kept insisting on jumping into again and again and again."

Quite so. But not just Remain campaigners - fact-checking journalists too, myself included. The false claim was vastly more powerful than a true one would have been, not because it was bigger, but because everybody kept talking about it.

Proctor, the tobacco industry historian turned agnotologist, warns of a similar effect in the US: "Fact checkers can become Trump's poodle, running around like an errand boy checking someone else's facts. If all your time is [spent] checking someone else's facts, then what are you doing?"

4.

There's a second reason why facts don't seem to have the traction that one might hope. Facts can be boring. The world is full of things to pay attention to, from reality TV to your argumentative children, from a friend's Instagram to a tax bill. Why bother with anything so tedious as facts?

Last year, three researchers - Seth Flaxman, Sharad Goel and Justin Rao - published a study of how people read news online. The study was, on the face of it, an inquiry into the polarisation of news sources. The researchers began with data from 1.2 million internet users but ended up examining only 50,000. Why? Because only 4 per cent of the sample read enough serious news to be worth including in such a study. (The hurdle was 10 articles and two opinion pieces over three months.) Many commentators worry that we're segregating ourselves in ideological bubbles, exposed only to the views of those who think the same way we do. There's something in that concern. But for 96 per cent of these web surfers the bubble that mattered wasn't liberal or conservative, it was: "Don't bother with the news."

In the war of ideas, boredom and distraction are powerful weapons. A recent study of Chinese propaganda examined the tactics of the paid pro-government hacks (known as the "50 cent army", after the amount contributors were alleged to be paid per post) who put comments on social media. The researchers, Gary King, Jennifer Pan and Margaret Roberts, conclude: "Almost none of the Chinese government's 50c party posts engage in debate or argument of any kind . . . they seem to avoid controversial issues entirely . . . the strategic objective of the regime is to distract and redirect public attention."

Trump, a reality TV star, knows the value of an entertaining distraction: simply pick a fight with Megyn Kelly, The New York Times or even Arnold Schwarzenegger. Isn't that more eye-catching than a discussion of healthcare reform?

The tobacco industry also understood this point, although it took a more highbrow approach to generating distractions. "Do you know about Stanley Prusiner?" asks Proctor.

Prusiner is a neurologist. In 1972, he was a young researcher who'd just encountered a patient suffering from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It was a dreadful degenerative condition then thought to be caused by a slow-acting virus. After many years of study, Prusiner concluded that the disease was caused instead, unprecedentedly, by a kind of rogue protein. The idea seemed absurd to most experts at the time, and Prusiner's career began to founder. Promotions and research grants dried up. But Prusiner received a source of private-sector funding that enabled him to continue his work. He was eventually vindicated in the most spectacular way possible: with a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1997. In his autobiographical essay on the Nobel Prize website, Prusiner thanked his private-sector benefactors for their "crucial" support: RJ Reynolds, maker of Camel cigarettes.

The tobacco industry was a generous source of research funds, and Prusiner wasn't the only scientist to receive both tobacco funding and a Nobel Prize. Proctor reckons at least 10 Nobel laureates are in that position. To be clear, this wasn't an attempt at bribery. In Proctor's view, it was far more subtle. "The tobacco industry was the leading funder of research into genetics, viruses, immunology, air pollution," says Proctor. Almost anything, in short, except tobacco. "It was a massive 'distraction research' project." The funding helped position Big Tobacco as a public-spirited industry but Proctor considers its main purpose was to produce interesting new speculative science. Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease may be rare, but it was exciting news. Smoking-related diseases such as lung cancer and heart disease aren't news at all.

The endgame of these distractions is that matters of vital importance become too boring to bother reporting. Proctor describes it as "the opposite of terrorism: trivialism". Terrorism provokes a huge media reaction; smoking does not. Yet, according to the US Centers for Disease Control, smoking kills 480,000 Americans a year. This is more than 50 deaths an hour. Terrorists have rarely managed to kill that many Americans in an entire year. But the terrorists succeed in grabbing the headlines; the trivialists succeed in avoiding them.

Tobacco industry lobbyists became well-practised at persuading the media to withhold or downplay stories about the dangers of cigarettes. "That record is scratched," they'd say. Hadn't we heard such things before?

Experienced tobacco watchers now worry that Trump may achieve the same effect. In the end, will people simply start to yawn at the spectacle? Jon Christensen, at UCLA, says: "I think it's the most frightening prospect."

On the other hand, says Christensen, there is one saving grace. It is almost impossible for the US president not to be news. The tobacco lobby, like the Chinese government, proved highly adept at pointing the spotlight elsewhere. There are reasons to believe that will be difficult for Trump.

5.

There's a final problem with trying to persuade people by giving them facts: the truth can feel threatening, and threatening people tends to backfire. "People respond in the opposite direction," says Jason Reifler, a political scientist at Exeter University. This "backfire effect" is now the focus of several researchers, including Reifler and his colleague Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth.

In one study, conducted in 2011, Nyhan, Reifler and others ran a randomised trial in which parents with young children were either shown or not shown scientific information debunking an imaginary but widely feared link between vaccines and autism. At first glance, the facts were persuasive: parents who saw the myth-busting science were less likely to believe that the vaccine could cause autism. But parents who were already wary of vaccines were actually less likely to say they'd vaccinate their children after being exposed to the facts - despite apparently believing those facts.

What's going on? "People accept the corrective information but then resist in other ways," says Reifler. A person who feels anxious about vaccination will subconsciously push back by summoning to mind all the other reasons why they feel vaccination is a bad idea. The fear of autism might recede, but all the other fears are stronger than before.

It's easy to see how this might play out in a political campaign. Say you're worried that the UK will soon be swamped by Turkish immigrants because a Brexit campaigner has told you (falsely) that Turkey will soon join the EU. A fact checker can explain that no Turkish entry is likely in the foreseeable future. Reifler's research suggests that you'll accept the narrow fact that Turkey is not about to join the EU. But you'll also summon to mind all sorts of other anxieties: immigration, loss of control, the proximity of Turkey to Syria's war and to Isis, terrorism and so on. The original lie has been disproved, yet its seductive magic lingers.

The problem here is that while we like to think of ourselves as rational beings, our rationality didn't just evolve to solve practical problems, such as building an elephant trap, but to navigate social situations. We need to keep others on our side. Practical reasoning is often less about figuring out what's true, and more about staying in the right tribe.

An early indicator of how tribal our logic can be was a study conducted in 1954 by Albert Hastorf, a psychologist at Dartmouth, and Hadley Cantril, his counterpart at Princeton. Hastorf and Cantril screened footage of a game of American football between the two college teams. It had been a rough game. One quarterback had suffered a broken leg. Hastorf and Cantril asked their students to tot up the fouls and assess their severity. The Dartmouth students tended to overlook Dartmouth fouls but were quick to pick up on the sins of the Princeton players. The Princeton students had the opposite inclination. They concluded that, despite being shown the same footage, the Dartmouth and Princeton students didn't really see the same events. Each student had his own perception, closely shaped by his tribal loyalties. The title of the research paper was "They Saw a Game".

A more recent study revisited the same idea in the context of political tribes. The researchers showed students footage of a demonstration and spun a yarn about what it was about. Some students were told it was a protest by gay-rights protesters outside an army recruitment office against the military's (then) policy of "don't ask, don't tell". Others were told that it was an anti-abortion protest in front of an abortion clinic.

Despite looking at exactly the same footage, the experimental subjects had sharply different views of what was happening - views that were shaped by their political loyalties. Liberal students were relaxed about the behaviour of people they thought were gay-rights protesters but worried about what the pro-life protesters were doing; conservative students took the opposite view. As with "They Saw a Game", this disagreement was not about the general principles but about specifics: did the protesters scream at bystanders? Did they block access to the building? We see what we want to see - and we reject the facts that threaten our sense of who we are.

When we reach the conclusion that we want to reach, we're engaging in "motivated reasoning". Motivated reasoning was a powerful ally of the tobacco industry. If you're addicted to a product, and many scientists tell you it's deadly, but the tobacco lobby tells you that more research is needed, what would you like to believe? Christensen's study of the tobacco public relations campaign revealed that the industry often got a sympathetic hearing in the press because many journalists were smokers. These journalists desperately wanted to believe their habit was benign, making them ideal messengers for the industry.

Even in a debate polluted by motivated reasoning, one might expect that facts will help. Not necessarily: when we hear facts that challenge us, we selectively amplify what suits us, ignore what does not, and reinterpret whatever we can. More facts mean more grist to the motivated reasoning mill. The French dramatist Molière once wrote: "A learned fool is more foolish than an ignorant one." Modern social science agrees.

On a politically charged issue such as climate change, it feels as though providing accurate information about the science should bring people together. The opposite is true, says Dan Kahan, a law and psychology professor at Yale and one of the researchers on the study into perceptions of a political protest. Kahan writes: "Groups with opposing values often become more polarised, not less, when exposed to scientifically sound information."

When people are seeking the truth, facts help. But when people are selectively reasoning about their political identity, the facts can backfire.

6.

All this adds up to a depressing picture for those of us who aren't ready to live in a post-truth world. Facts, it seems, are toothless. Trying to refute a bold, memorable lie with a fiddly set of facts can often serve to reinforce the myth. Important truths are often stale and dull, and it is easy to manufacture new, more engaging claims. And giving people more facts can backfire, as those facts provoke a defensive reaction in someone who badly wants to stick to their existing world view. "This is dark stuff," says Reifler. "We're in a pretty scary and dark time."

Is there an answer? Perhaps there is.

We know that scientific literacy can actually widen the gap between different political tribes on issues such as climate change - that is, well-informed liberals and well-informed conservatives are further apart in their views than liberals and conservatives who know little about the science. But a new research paper from Dan Kahan, Asheley Landrum, Katie Carpenter, Laura Helft and Kathleen Hall Jamieson explores the role not of scientific literacy but of scientific curiosity.

The researchers measured scientific curiosity by asking their experimental subjects a variety of questions about their hobbies and interests. The subjects were offered a choice of websites to read for a comprehension test. Some went for ESPN, some for Yahoo Finance, but those who chose Science were demonstrating scientific curiosity. Scientifically curious people were also happier to watch science documentaries than celebrity gossip TV shows. As one might expect, there's a correlation between scientific knowledge and scientific curiosity, but the two measures are distinct.

What Kahan and his colleagues found, to their surprise, was that while politically motivated reasoning trumps scientific knowledge, "politically motivated reasoning . . . appears to be negated by science curiosity". Scientifically literate people, remember, were more likely to be polarised in their answers to politically charged scientific questions. But scientifically curious people were not. Curiosity brought people together in a way that mere facts did not. The researchers muse that curious people have an extra reason to seek out the facts: "To experience the pleasure of contemplating surprising insights into how the world works."

So how can we encourage curiosity? It's hard to make banking reform or the reversibility of Article 50 more engaging than football, Game of Thrones or baking cakes. But it does seem to be what's called for. "We need to bring people into the story, into the human narratives of science, to show people how science works," says Christensen.

We journalists and policy wonks can't force anyone to pay attention to the facts. We have to find a way to make people want to seek them out. Curiosity is the seed from which sensible democratic decisions can grow. It seems to be one of the only cures for politically motivated reasoning but it's also, into the bargain, the cure for a society where most people just don't pay attention to the news because they find it boring or confusing.

What we need is a Carl Sagan or David Attenborough of social science - somebody who can create a sense of wonder and fascination not just at the structure of the solar system or struggles of life in a tropical rainforest, but at the workings of our own civilisation: health, migration, finance, education and diplomacy.

One candidate would have been Swedish doctor and statistician Hans Rosling, who died in February. He reached an astonishingly wide audience with what were, at their heart, simply presentations of official data from the likes of the World Bank.

He characterised his task as telling people the facts - "to describe the world". But the facts need a champion. Facts rarely stand up for themselves - they need someone to make us care about them, to make us curious. That's what Rosling did. And faced with the apocalyptic possibility of a world where the facts don't matter, that is the example we must follow.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times. My book "Messy" is available online in the US and UK or in good bookshops everywhere.

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1. Just before Christmas 1953, the bosses of America's leading tobacco companies met John Hill, the founder and chief executive of one of America's leading public relations firms, Hill & Knowlton. Despite the impressive surroundings - the Plaza Hotel, overlooking Central Park in New York - the mood was one of crisis.

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How the Russian bots work

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russian interference in 2016 us elections and ties to trump associates

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How do bots and trolls work to infiltrate social media platforms and influence U.S. elections? We take a closer look at these insidious online pests to explain how they work.

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Propaganda Tools and the 2016 US election

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Thirteen Russian nationals have been charged with illegally trying to disrupt the American political process, according to an indictment filed by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Here are the tools the Russians used:

According to the indictment, the defendants and their co-conspirators created hundreds of social media accounts impersonating real and fictitious Americans - and they paid for ads promoting their posts.

The Russians in the indictment acted as an organization, and employees who ran the accounts were directed to create "political intensity through supporting radical groups" and to criticize Hillary Clinton, but not Donald J. Trump or Bernie Sanders.

The accounts focused on issues like immigration, the Black Lives Matter movement and religion. Some were used to encourage minority groups not to vote or to promote accusations that the Democratic Party engaged in voter fraud.

In an email written to a family member, a Russian defendant, Irina Viktorovna Kaverzina, explained: "I created all these pictures and posts, and the Americans believed that it was written by their people."

Political Rallies

The indictment says that the organization staged several political rallies across the country from June to November 2016. Members of the group promoted the events through their social media channels and used accounts registered under false American personas to recruit volunteers.
2016 rallies planned and promoted by the organization:

June 25: March for Trump New York

July 9: Support Hillary. Save American Muslims Washington, D.C.

July 23: Down with Hillary New York

Aug. 20: Florida Goes Trump several Florida cities

Oct. 2: Miners for Trump several Pennsylvania cities

Nov. 12: Show your support for President-Elect Donald Trump New York

Nov. 12: Trump is NOT my President New York

Nov. 19: Charlotte Against Trump Charlotte, N.C.

The social media accounts were sometimes used to contact and coordinate with local Trump campaign staff members. In June 2016, a volunteer for the Trump campaign agreed to provide signs for a "March For Trump" rally staged by the organization. The indictment does not allege that any Americans knowingly conspired with the group.

In some cases, the organization offered money to rally attendees for expenses. For one of several "Florida Goes Trump" rallies held in August 2016, the organization paid an individual to portray Mrs. Clinton in a prison uniform in a cage built on a flatbed truck.

The group also purchased advertisements to promote the rallies. The indictment said that Facebook ads for the Florida rallies reached more than 59,000 users and were clicked on by more than 8,300.

Multiple tweets from Florida rallies on Aug. 20, 2016 mentioned the group's March for Trump account.

In addition to the pro-Trump rallies it staged before and after the election, the group also organized anti-Trump rallies, including "Charlotte Against Trump" in Charlotte, N.C., and "Trump is NOT my President" in New York after the election.

Online Political Advertisements

The indictment says that from April to November 2016, the group paid for advertisements on social media and elsewhere that expressly advocated for Mr. Trump or opposed Mrs. Clinton.

The defendants did not file those expenditures with the Federal Election Commission, although as foreign nationals, they would have been prohibited from making them in the first place.

The document also notes that the defendants did not register as foreign agents with the Justice Department, which is required "so that the U.S. government and the people of the United States are informed of the source of information and the identity of persons attempting to influence U.S. public opinion, policy, and law."

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russian interference in 2016 us elections and ties to trump associates

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The Propaganda Tools Used by Russians to Influence the 2016 Election

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Thirteen Russian nationals have been charged with illegally trying to disrupt the American political process, according to an indictment filed by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election.

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Cdn Gov looking at Fake News issue.

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In the aftermath of the 2016 American presidential election, Western democracies awoke to an uncontrolled and potentially dangerous world of political disinformation, targeted ads, bots and foreign interference.

How Justin Trudeau's government intends to respond to this new reality before the 2019 federal election should become clearer this spring.

"My hope is that over the course of the spring that we have some more in-depth conversations with social media companies. We'll have to see where those go and how we think they're progressing," Karina Gould, the minister of democratic institutions, told CBC News in a recent interview.

"Are we going to see something more robust in the next six months? If we don't see something more robust in the next six months, then we need to take action."

Her words echo a warning Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reportedly delivered to Facebook's chief operating officer last fall: fix the fake news problem or face more intrusive federal regulation.

The United States is still coming to terms with what happened to its democracy in 2016. Last week, the U.S. special counsel investigating Russian interference in the election, former FBI chief Robert Mueller, indicted 13 Russians over their alleged role in a scheme to "sow discord in the U.S. political system" through online platforms and messages.

It's not too early to have a discussion about what could go wrong in Canada in 2019. In fact, that conversation might be overdue.

'Everyone's trying to wrap their heads around this'

In November, Gould travelled to Germany and the United Kingdom, where she sat down with a succession of leaders and thinkers to talk about safeguarding Canada against foreign election interference.

"One thing I came away with was that everyone's trying to kind of wrap their heads around this issue and that nobody actually has a real answer to it," she said. "But everyone is trying to do different things."

Germany passed a law that compels online platforms to remove hate speech in a timely manner or face fines. Gould said she doesn't think that such regulation of speech would be acceptable in Canada.

French President Emmanuel Macron is promising to ban outright the publication of "fake news." Gould said she is "very uneasy with a government telling people what's good and bad news."

The German example might still be instructive, she added - if only because it suggests social media companies will act if they're put under the right kind of pressure.

"Germany's law is interesting because they had been talking to social media companies for two years, but until they actually put a law into place, nothing changed," Gould said.

"I think that's something that we need to be thinking about here. What is it that we want social media platforms to do? Will they do that voluntarily? How can we check if something has changed? And then, what are the other levers that we would use to actually see the change that we want to?"

The new world of targeted ads

Last fall, Facebook launched in Canada what it called an "election integrity initiative." It included a civic literacy campaign meant to educate users about the threat of fake news and a new feature that allows users to see all the ads that a political party or group is running on Facebook.

"We stand with the lawmakers around the world, including in Canada, in their efforts to protect the democratic process," said Kevin Chan, head of public policy for Facebook Canada. "We will continue to work with lawmakers on the right solution - but we aren't waiting for legislation to start getting solutions in place now."

While advertising on television, radio and in print is widely viewed and thus easily accounted for, political activity online can encompass thousands of ads targeted at narrow audiences through the data that platforms draw from their users. The challenge is to get a handle on all that.

In the U.S., where three senators have proposed new regulations for online advertising, Facebook is promising to demand greater documentation to verify the identity of advertisers and tag all ads with notes identifying who paid for them.

Taylor Owen, a professor of digital media at the University of British Columbia, suggested online platforms could be asked to account at the end of each election for all of the paid content that was posted during the campaign period.

Battling the bots

Gould said she's also given a lot of thought to bots - automated accounts that can be used to artificially amplify a political message - but it's not yet clear what the government could do in that area.

"When you have bots re-tweeting, liking, sharing information ... it distorts the public conversation and I don't think that's right," Gould said, citing a recent New York Times investigation of automated accounts.

"What's interesting about this file right now is these are a lot of questions that we've never had to deal with before."

All of this is potentially fertile ground for foreign actors who wish to influence a Canadian election - or merely wreak havoc with the process.

Foreign interference in a Canadian election, Gould pointed out, is already illegal.

"The question is, do you have the tools to do something about it?" Gould said. "I'm not sure we do right now."

When should governments sound the alarm?

But Gould also seems to be struggling with questions of when and how federal agencies should publicly report such activities.

President Barack Obama's administration reportedly wrestled with similar questions in the summer of 2016 - before deciding not to report what U.S. intelligence agencies were learning about Russian attempts to influence the presidential election.

"As a government or as a regulating body, when do you intervene? When do you go public with something?" Gould said. "You have to walk that fine line of not being seen to interfere domestically in the election."

Gould gets to be the first minister to try to answer these questions in the Canadian context. She probably won't be the last.

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Karina Gould wants to save democracy from fake news. How?

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In the aftermath of the 2016 American presidential election, Western democracies awoke to an uncontrolled and potentially dangerous world of political disinformation, targeted ads, bots and foreign interference. How Justin Trudeau's government intends to respond to this new reality before the 2019 federal election should become clearer this spring.

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False news shared on Twitter spreads "significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth," according to a new study from a Twitter-funded research lab - which also found that humans, and not bots, are more likely to spread false news.

The report comes at a crucial time for Twitter, which chief executive Jack Dorsey has admitted needs to do more to curb abuse, harassment and misuse of its platform.

In recent months, the social network has faced withering criticism from U.S. lawmakers for underestimating the extent of foreign influence on its platform.

In a January submission to Congress, Twitter revised a prior disclosure, saying that more than 50,000 thousand Russian-linked bots and 3,800 human operatives were responsible for tweeting content related to the 2016 U.S. election.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) set out to determine how true and false information spread differently across social media, and to what extent human judgment plays a role.

Their findings suggest that Twitter users are more likely to share and amplify false news, because such stories are more novel - and therefore shareable - than factual stories.

They define novelty as information that "is not only surprising, but also more valuable" for making decisions or portraying one's self as an insider who knows things others don't.

"When you're unconstrained by reality, when you're just making stuff up, it's a lot easier to be novel," said Sinan Aral, one of the study's co-authors.

As for the role of automated internet programs, or bots, the researchers are quick to point out that their findings shouldn't be taken to mean bots don't matter, or don't have an effect.

Rather, "contrary to conventional wisdom," they write, bots accelerated the spread of both false news and true news - but did so at about the same rate.

"When you remove them from your analysis, the difference between the spread of false and true news still stands," said Soroush Vosoughi, who also co-authored the study. "So they can't be the sole reason as to why false information seems to be spreading so much faster."

The study was published in the March 9 issue of the scientific journal Science.

'Rumour cascades'

While the spread of false news on social media has always had real world consequences - for example, leading to drops in the stock market - the 2016 U.S. presidential election has emerged as a watershed example of how far and wide that influence can reach.

To study this effect, researchers looked at around 126,000 tweets, or what they term "rumour cascades," shared by Twitter users from 2006 to 2017, and measured how those tweets spread across the social network.

News was not limited to mainstream sources, but broadly defined as any "asserted claim" containing text, photos, or links to information that had been evaluated by one of six independent fact-checking groups. About three million people retweeted the claims sampled by researchers - both true, false, and mixed - more than 4.5 million times.

"Whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1,000 people, the top one per cent of false-news cascades routinely diffused to between 1,000 and 100,000 people," the paper says.

Unsurprisingly, political content was the most popular, and researchers noted spikes in the spread of false political rumours during both the 2012 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

But what might come as a surprise was how the number of followers a person had, or the amount of time they spent on Twitter, wasn't enough on its own to explain the difference in the spread of false news versus accurate news.

"Falsehoods were 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted than the truth," the authors wrote," even when controlling for the account age, activity level and number of followers and followees of the original tweeter."

"The biggest single factor seems to be human nature, human behaviour," said co-author Deb Roy.

More than just 'Russian bots'

The work was a collaboration between researchers at MIT's Media Lab and the school's Laboratory for Social Machines (LSM). The LSM receives funding from Twitter to pursue undirected research, says Roy, who is the LSM's founder, and was also Twitter's chief media scientist until last Fall.

The relationship allowed the MIT researchers something that few academics have: access to Twitter's raw data firehose, a historical archive of every tweet ever made, including those that have been deleted.

Other researchers say that the lack of access to this data - not only from Twitter, but other platforms such as Facebook - is the biggest impediment to doing more of this kind of work.

"It is really challenging to get access to enough data that is comprehensive enough that we can say things conclusively," says Elizabeth Dubois, an assistant professor at the University of Ottawa who has studied the presence of political bots in Canada.

In the same issue of Science, a group of additional researchers echoed this sentiment in an article of their own, arguing that social media platforms have "an ethical and social responsibility" to contribute what data they can.

"Blaming everything on Russian bots isn't going to serve anyone," said Dubois, "because there are a lot more actors than just Russian bots out there."

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Who spreads fake news? On Twitter, humans are more likely culprits than bots, new study suggests

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False news shared on Twitter spreads "significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth," according to a new study from a Twitter-funded research lab - which also found that humans, and not bots, are more likely to spread false news.

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Developing Critical Literacies: What we need to know in a "Fake News" world

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Developing Critical Literacies: What we need to know in a "Fake News" world

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By Alec Couros and Katia Hildebrandt
Those of us who grew up in a pre-Internet world probably remember passing through grocery store checkout aisles lined with copies of the National Enquirer and other tabloids, with outrageous headlines proclaiming "BAT CHILD FOUND IN CAVE," "HILLARY CLINTON ADOPTS ALIEN BABY," or "DOLPHIN GROWS HUMAN ARMS." Even as children, it was easy to distinguish those fake stories from real news, not just because of the sensational claims but also because of the telltale fonts and the obviously manipulated or fabricated images. Looking back, the division between fake news and authentic journalism seemed quite clear.

In today's world, however, the line between real and fake seems increasingly blurred and uncertain. False stories are no longer relegated to tabloid publications but instead have infiltrated more mainstream media sources and social networking services. While the ludicrous claims of tabloid fare were meant mostly to entertain, today's fake news is a more insidious specimen; in many cases, there is a sinister intent to its creation and dissemination. Indeed, the dictionary.com definition of fake news reads: "false news stories, often of a sensational nature, created to be widely shared online for the purpose of generating ad revenue via web traffic or discrediting a public figure, political movement, company, etc " [emphasis added].

For many of us, the rise of fake news has become inextricably linked to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Data now shows that in the lead-up to election day, the top twenty fake news stories outperformed the top twenty mainstream (legitimate) new stories on Facebook, with the former netting about 1.4 million more engagements (shares, reactions, and comments) than the latter. And the creation and spread of the plethora of fake news stories was undeniably intentional; for example, reports emerged after the election about a small town in Macedonia in which a number of teens specialized in creating false, pro-Trump news articles for the purpose of generating ad revenue. Interestingly, the teens were not necessarily Trump supporters but rather had discovered that disseminating these articles was highly lucrative (earning tens of thousands of dollars in a country where the average monthly salary is $371 USD). While the Internet has often been touted as a democratizing force where all voices can be heard, clearly there are both benefits and drawbacks to a world when anyone can publish anything.

Fake News in a Digital World

Why is fake news so much harder to deal with today? One of the major changes is the prevalence of easily accessible digital tools that allow anyone to create realistic but false messages, videos, and voice recordings. For instance, in the last year, a human image synthesis technique called DeepFakes has gained infamy online; the technique uses Deep Learning (artificial intelligence) algorithms to find patterns in facial photographs in order to add someone's face to an unrelated video. While the technique is fairly new, there has been great fear about the potential misuse of the technology for the use of fake political messages or revenge porn.

As well, there are new tools on the horizon that threaten to further complicate our ability to judge what is real and what is fake. For instance, Voco, an experimental tool from Adobe, has been touted as "Photoshop for voice;" if released, the tool would enable the use of existing voice samples to copy anyone's voiceprint in order to create new messages. Additionally, in recent weeks Google demonstrated the Assistant feature at a conference, illustrated how the soon-to-be-introduced technology would allow personal bots to communicate fluently with others over voice using artificial intelligence. It is not difficult to envision myriad ways in which these new technologies could be misused in order to trick or mislead unsuspecting audiences.

Thus, while fake news is certainly not new, and there have long been mechanisms for creating deceptive and misleading artefacts, we are now entering a brave new world where the truth is more and more difficult to uncover. Thanks to sophisticated tools, the deeply ingrained maxim that "seeing is believing" has become a liability; instead, we have entered an era in which fake news has truly become an information validation problem that will require new strategies for discerning what is real. Moreover, this challenge is only exacerbated by the sheer volume of information (both true and false) being circulated. Indeed, Garry Kasparov, the chess Grandmaster and political activist, notes, "The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth."

Why Don't Our Traditional Strategies Work Anymore?

For many years, we have relied on checklists in order to determine the quality of online information. Most of these checklists take the form of an acronym; for instance, three commonly used tools for evaluating information are RADCAP, CRAAP, and CARS. Unfortunately, these tools are no longer adequate for navigating the current media landscape. On a basic level, using a checklist to deal with the sheer abundance of information available is simply not practical; as Mike Caulfield notes, "In reality, most literacies are heavily domain-dependent, and based not on skills." In other words, it's no longer enough to know how to check the date on an article or search for the name of the author; instead, in a world where every piece of information is suspect and potentially falsified, we need to be able to apply web-specific knowledge, such as understanding the implicit biases of various news sites or knowing which fact-checking sites are trustworthy.

Simply put, the checklist models are no match for the sophistication of today's fake news - they were designed with a simpler media landscape in mind. If we take the idea of authorship (also referred to as authority or credibility), for example, we can easily see where these models break down. The checklists would suggest that we can evaluate a piece of media by looking at its origin. However, the authorship of an artefact can easily be falsified; on social networking sites, for instance, we have seen how both bots and paid "trolls" can masquerade as "reliable" sources in order to spread false information and then amplify it through (bot- and troll-generated) shares and retweets. (For a deeper analysis of the shortcomings of checklist models, see Caulfield's site.) As well, in our current political era, legitimate authorship is no guarantee; for example, a checklist model would likely give a U.S. president a pass on credibility, but President Trump is known to have spread falsehood both online and off (so much so that Politifact has compiled a lengthy list of the false statements he has uttered). And in the Canadian context, on the other side of the political spectrum, sites like TrudeauMeter take on a similar, non-partisan function in assessing the Prime Minister's performance related to election promises. Complications around the very concept of authority, and the notion that authority equates to credibility, make it impossible to use un-nuanced checklists in order to assess the truth.

New Strategies and Techniques for Dealing with Fake News

Given the shortcomings of existing tools for evaluating information, we've compiled a few suggestions for dealing with today's fake news.

1. Develop and employ investigative techniques: Rather than relying on a checklist, it's important that we develop the capacity to employ more sophisticated techniques and strategies when assessing information. These techniques include:

Knowing about and using available web tools - There are multiple tools and sites that are available to help deal with false information, and an important part of tackling the issue of fake news is to be aware of these resources. For instance, it's helpful to know about reliable fact checking sites such as Snopes, Politifact, and FactCheck.org. These sites assess news stories and claims that are circulating and then rate each one for accuracy. Another helpful tool is Google's reverse image search, which allows you to search for a picture to determine where the image originally appeared and whether it has been altered. As well, VerificationHandbook.com is an excellent source of information that details how to verify particular types of media including images and video.

Reading like a fact checker: It's also important to understand how professional fact checkers read and evaluate online sources, in order to emulate their strategies. A 2017 study observed 45 individuals (10 PhD historians, 10 professional fact checkers, and 25 Stanford undergraduate students) as they evaluated live websites. The researchers found that both the historians and the students were easily influenced by false elements of websites, including logos and domain names (both of which are easily manipulated). Importantly, these individuals employed the practice of reading "vertically," that is, staying on the same site in order to assess it. On the other hand, the professional fact checkers read "laterally," meaning that instead of evaluating the site itself, they searched outside sources for corroboration. This is a key technique for evaluating sources, especially given the many strategies and tools available for generating a scaffolding of falsified supports around any given fake site or article.

Understanding and identifying biases: Finally, it's important to learn how to read critically in order to assess the biases of particular sources. This is sometimes a matter of knowing which resources are available to help determine biases; for instance, this chart does an excellent job of laying out the media landscape according to political leaning and general reliability of reporting.

2. Use rich examples: When it comes to helping others understand the complexities of fake news and how to deal with this important issues, it can be very helpful to use rich, real-life examples of falsified stories or images. Of course, there are many pre-fabricated examples of fake artefacts, and over the years, we've seen teachers making great use of "fake sites" designed to help students develop information literacies/skills, including DHMO.org, Save the Endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, Feline reactions to bearded men, and BuyDehydratedWater. But while these are still great resources that can be used with some success, given the abundance of fake news and internet scams that inundate our digital society, there are plenty of opportunities to use fresh and authentic examples in class.

For instance, take this image of Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail, purportedly standing next to a woman wearing an "I'm with stupid" t-shirt that points to Clinton. The image circulated on Facebook in July of 2015, with the criticism that Clinton was "too into herself to notice a t-shirt." As an activity, we might try to use the techniques listed above to determine whether the photo is legitimate. In this case, we could use the aforementioned Google reverse image search to find the original photo, which would quickly tell us that earlier versions of the photo included a plain white t-shirt without writing on it. A reverse image search would also lead us to the Snopes page dedicated to the image, which provides additional details about the spread of the hoax. In today's fake news world, similar examples are readily available for use as authentic case studies.

3. Nurture a Critical Disposition: Ernest Hemingway once remarked that "the most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, s*** detector;" in today's fake news world, the ability to detect lies and nonsense is essential not just for writers but for readers as well. For better or for worse, however, we humans often seem inclined to believe what we see, hear, and read. As such, a third key strategy for dealing with fake news is the development of a critical disposition. Essentially, one of the key challenges of the current age is the need to retrain ourselves to look at the world with an attitude that demands that we question everything, not so that we are paralyzed by uncertainty but so that we are liberated, freed from a world of mistruths and able to assess "reality" in order to create a more accurate picture of the world than the one that is being presented.

Alec Couros is a Professor of educational technology and media at the Faculty of Education, University of Regina. He has given hundreds of workshops and presentations, nationally and internationally, on topics such as openness in education, networked learning, social media in education, digital citizenship, and critical media literacy. His graduate and undergraduate courses help current and future educators understand how to use and take advantage of the educational potential offered by the tools of connectivity.

Katia Hildebrandt is a Ph.D. candidate and instructor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Regina. Her doctoral research is in the area of social media and anti-oppressive education. A former middle years and high school educator, Katia now teaches undergraduate and graduate students in the areas of curriculum, pedagogy, and educational technology.

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Developing Critical Literacies: What We Need to Know in a "Fake News" World

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By Alec Couros and Katia Hildebrandt Those of us who grew up in a pre-Internet world probably remember passing through grocery store checkout aisles lined with copies of the National Enquirer and other tabloids, with outrageous headlines proclaiming "BAT CHILD FOUND IN CAVE," "HILLARY CLINTON ADOPTS ALIEN BABY," or "DOLPHIN GROWS HUMAN ARMS." Even as children, it was easy to distinguish those fake stories from real news, not just because of the sensational claims but also because of the telltale fonts and the obviously manipulated or fabricated images.

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Journalists create fake news item to combat fake news

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The Fight Against Fake News: how easily could you be fooled? | CBC News

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French journalists shot a slick conspiracy theory-laden film to to teach students how to identify fake news.

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Narrated Video for Power Point

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KANSAS CITY, KS-As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

Rev. Gabriel Burdett explains Intelligent Falling.

"Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.

Burdett added: "Gravity-which is taught to our children as a law-is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, 'I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.' Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."

Founded in 1987, the ECFR is the world's leading institution of evangelical physics, a branch of physics based on literal interpretation of the Bible.

According to the ECFR paper published simultaneously this week in the International Journal Of Science and the adolescent magazine God's Word For Teens!, there are many phenomena that cannot be explained by secular gravity alone, including such mysteries as how angels fly, how Jesus ascended into Heaven, and how Satan fell when cast out of Paradise.

The ECFR, in conjunction with the Christian Coalition and other Christian conservative action groups, is calling for public-school curriculums to give equal time to the Intelligent Falling theory. They insist they are not asking that the theory of gravity be banned from schools, but only that students be offered both sides of the issue "so they can make an informed decision."

"We just want the best possible education for Kansas' kids," Burdett said.

Proponents of Intelligent Falling assert that the different theories used by secular physicists to explain gravity are not internally consistent. Even critics of Intelligent Falling admit that Einstein's ideas about gravity are mathematically irreconcilable with quantum mechanics. This fact, Intelligent Falling proponents say, proves that gravity is a theory in crisis.

"Let's take a look at the evidence," said ECFR senior fellow Gregory Lunsden."In Matthew 15:14, Jesus says, 'And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.' He says nothing about some gravity making them fall-just that they will fall. Then, in Job 5:7, we read, 'But mankind is born to trouble, as surely as sparks fly upwards.' If gravity is pulling everything down, why do the sparks fly upwards with great surety? This clearly indicates that a conscious intelligence governs all falling."

Critics of Intelligent Falling point out that gravity is a provable law based on empirical observations of natural phenomena. Evangelical physicists, however, insist that there is no conflict between Newton's mathematics and Holy Scripture.

"Closed-minded gravitists cannot find a way to make Einstein's general relativity match up with the subatomic quantum world," said Dr. Ellen Carson, a leading Intelligent Falling expert known for her work with the Kansan Youth Ministry. "They've been trying to do it for the better part of a century now, and despite all their empirical observation and carefully compiled data, they still don't know how."

"Traditional scientists admit that they cannot explain how gravitation is supposed to work," Carson said. "What the gravity-agenda scientists need to realize is that 'gravity waves' and 'gravitons' are just secular words for 'God can do whatever He wants.'"

Some evangelical physicists propose that Intelligent Falling provides an elegant solution to the central problem of modern physics.

"Anti-falling physicists have been theorizing for decades about the 'electromagnetic force,' the 'weak nuclear force,' the 'strong nuclear force,' and so-called 'force of gravity,'" Burdett said. "And they tilt their findings toward trying to unite them into one force. But readers of the Bible have already known for millennia what this one, unified force is: His name is Jesus."

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Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory

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KANSAS CITY, KS-As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

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Canadian Satire

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Native Advertising: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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The line between editorial content and advertising in news media is blurrier and blurrier. That's not bullshit. It's repurposed bovine waste.

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As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there’s a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a “filter bubble” and don’t get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.

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Fact checking US Politics

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The Latest from PolitiFact

Suspend immigration from terror-prone places

Email comments and suggestions for fact-checks to [email protected] or find us on Facebook,and Twitter. (If you send us a comment, we'll assume you don't mind us publishing it unless you tell us otherwise.)

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Fact-checking U.S. politics | PolitiFact

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Email comments and suggestions for fact-checks to [email protected] or find us on Facebook ,and Twitter . (If you send us a comment, we'll assume you don't mind us publishing it unless you tell us otherwise.)

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Harmless viral Facebook post is another reminder how easy it is to make online fakes

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At first glance it looked like your typical viral Facebook post. There was the small boy, posing for what appeared to be his school's photo day - his face contorted in raw anger, directed straight to the camera. A man claiming to be the boy's dad offered some context: He said he ate his son's Pop Tart before the photos were taken, and his furious son swore never to smile again.

It was the sort of mildly funny, saccharine post that's easy catnip on the internet - and by Tuesday morning, it had racked up 300,000 shares on Facebook, three days after it was first posted.

But almost immediately, it became clear that not everything was as it appeared. Commenters turned on the poster, claiming the child wasn't actually his. Elsewhere on Facebook, the boy's actual mom posted a message calling out the viral poster for trying to pass off her son as his own. Unsurprisingly, her post garnered far fewer shares than the one that went viral in the first place.

The whole saga, brief as it was, is a good reminder of how easy it has become online to pass misinformation off as authentic - both how social media platforms continue to help amplify false posts and misinformation, and how the onus has largely shifted, unfairly or not, onto users to sort out what's real and what's not.

Some of this can be blamed on the design of social platforms themselves. Facebook in particular operates on the premise that everyone is playing by the same rules and presenting their most authentic selves. But in practice, this positioning has just made it harder to distinguish the people and pages who are truly authentic versus those just pretending.

Put another way, when something becomes popular on Facebook, the majority of users tend to believe, in good faith, that the person posting it is doing so authentically - because that's what Facebook has taught us to expect. If you've ever wondered why Facebook is so keen on referring to misinformation and foreign influence operations using the clunky phrase "inauthentic behaviour," this is it.

You can see this tension at play elsewhere across Facebook and beyond. There are entire communities of people on Instagram, for example, that pretend to pass off other people's children as their own. What some have called "digital kidnapping" is basically a form of online roleplay. Users pretend to be parents of the children whose photos they've stolen from other accounts, while others pretend to be the children themselves. Were it not for the roleplay-related hashtags identifying the accounts as such, it would be easy, at a glance, not to realize the photos had been taken from somewhere else.

In the bigger picture it's why - for all of the hand-wringing about deep fakes and artificially created images, voices, and videos - real media that has merely been misrepresented or distorted is arguably just as much of a threat - if not a more realistic one. It's why Russian influence operations on Facebook and Twitter have more recently found success by pushing legitimate partisan causes, rather than outright fake news.

It's why it's harder than ever to take the things we see online at face value now (though it's debatable whether we ever should have in the first place). It's also a reminder of how the onus has shifted on consumers to think more critically about what they engage with online - a feat that becomes harder and harder as convincing fakes and misinformation become easier to pull off. As a result, even innocuous viral Facebook posts are a reminder of how easy it has become to game the system, making it harder to know who to trust.

It might not be such a big deal when you're dealing with a harmless meme, but when the same tactics can be applied to foreign-backed misinformation campaigns intent on disrupting democracy and sowing division, the stakes are high.

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Harmless viral Facebook post is another reminder how easy it is to make online fakes | CBC News

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At first glance it looked like your typical viral Facebook post. There was the small boy, posing for what appeared to be his school's photo day - his face contorted in raw anger, directed straight to the camera.

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Canadian video debunking fake online health claims becomes viral hit

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Jonathan Jarry's job is to separate sense from nonsense in science, but he never imagined that creating a fake news video would end up being his most effective tool.

Facebook users may be familiar with his latest video for McGill University's Office for Science and Society (OSS) - it has 10 million views and counting.

The video title screams for a click: "This NATURAL TRICK can CURE YOUR CANCER." The opening graphic offers another too-good-to-be-true promise: "This amazing cure for cancer has been known since the 1800s."

Fake doctor with too-good-to-be-true cure

The video tells the very fake story of Dr. Johan R. Tarjany, who in 1816 discovered a kind of moss that cures cancer, knowledge the video claims has been suppressed by pharmaceutical companies.

The story gets better. Tarjany added the moss to his diet and never got cancer - and great news - even though the Food and Drug Administration has banned the moss, it's available online.

Just as you're reaching for your credit card, celebrating your discovery while simultaneously cursing big pharma, the tale unravels. Thirty-nine seconds into the video, the truth is revealed: The video that you thought promised an easy answer instead is a hard lesson in media literacy and critical thinking.

Dr. Johan R. Tarjany is an anagram of Jonathan Jarry. And those photos in the video, they're of Otto Maass, a former chairman of McGill's Chemistry Department in the early 20th century. To further his point, Jarry even used multiple photos of different people to see if viewers would notice.

Frustrated at bunk science

Jarry said the idea came from a similar video a former coworker had shown him. It had six million views and purported to show a researcher who had discovered radio signals that could kill cancer cells.

"My idea was, OK well, what if we make a video that is a bit of a Trojan horse that kind of looks like one of those viral videos but that actually has a different spin on it," Jarry said.

He said it was frustrating because bunk science videos often reach far wider audiences than those his team puts together. On the McGill OSS YouTube page there a number of videos explaining topics like sloppy food science and personalized genetic testing, but the views rank in the hundreds and thousands, not millions.

"We don't sell these easy solutions to complicated problems," Jarry said. "We sell nuance and criticism and uncertainty, and that doesn't sell as well."

He says he's blown away by the success of this video.

"I am flabbergasted. I was hoping for 10,000 views. I would have been ecstatic at 10,000. It hasn't really sunk in yet. The fact that this has reached so many people."

He created the viral video in about a day and a half using stock footage and upbeat music to recreate the look and feel of a hoax health video. He says it appeals to people's sense that they're being lied to and that easy answers are out there.

"I think the conspiracy mindset is a big one. We're all wired to the thing that there are conspiracies here and there, and some people are more susceptible to this kind of thinking than others."

The video ends with a message to viewers: Be skeptical, ask questions, consult doctors and scientists, and don't fall for conspiracy theories dressed up in pretty packaging.

"Be skeptical because there's so much misinformation out there and be aware of your own biases. Be aware of the fact that you will be easily emotionally manipulated."

He says there's also an important lesson for science communicators about how best to deliver accurate, fact-based information and what the audience wants.

Be aware of the fact that you will be easily emotionally manipulated - Jonathan Jarry, McGill University

"We are wired to respond to stories. We're storytellers at heart. Numbers don't speak to us," he said, adding that means we must be wary.

"So we all always have to be on the lookout for anecdotes, because they don't tell us much."

The video's popularity may only be starting. While the original was posted in English and French, a user has already translated it into Spanish. Jarry's team says they've received and are working on versions in Italian, Croatian, Spanish, even Hungarian.

And while his video has topped the six million views of the hoax video that inspired him, Jarry said there's still a long way to go to counter misinformation online.

"There are so many more of these videos out there that I don't think our video will solve the problem forever. I think we all need to approach this problem constantly and try different things to reach as many people as we can."

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Canadian video debunking fake online health claims becomes viral hit | CBC News

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Jonathan Jarry's job is to separate sense from nonsense in science, but he never imagined that creating a fake news video would end up being his most effective tool. Facebook users may be familiar with his latest video for McGill University's Office for Science and Society (OSS) - it has 10 million views and counting.

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Analysis | Word of the year: misinformation. Here's why.

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The word of the year, according to Dictionary.com, is misinformation. Why? Here's what the website say s: The rampant spread of misinformation poses new challenges for navigating life in 2018. As a dictionary, we believe understanding the concept is vital to identifying misinformation in the wild, and ultimately curbing its impact.

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Imagine scrolling through Facebook when you come across this headline: "Canada Moves to Ban Christians from Demonstrating in Public Under New Anti-Hate Proposal." If you think it reads too shocking and absurd to be true, that's because it is.

But this exact headline appeared atop a story that was shared more than 16,000 times online since it was published in May, according to social media tool CrowdTangle. The federal government and Justin Trudeau, who is pictured in the story, are not seeking to ban Christians from demonstrating. In fact, the bill the story is based on was introduced in the Ontario legislature, by a Conservative MPP, and never made it past a second reading.

Incorrect and misleading content is common on social media, but it's not always obvious where it originates. To learn more, CBC News tracked this particular example back through time on social media to uncover where it came from and how it evolved over time.

March 20: Private member's bill introduced in Ontario

In this case, it all started with a bill. In March, Roman Baber, a freshman member of the Ontario provincial legislature introduced his very first private member's bill. Had he known how badly the bill would be misconstrued online, he might have chosen something else, he later told CBC News.

"I expected that people would understand what prompted the bill, as a proud member of the Jewish community who's been subjected to repeated demonstrations at Queen's Park by certain groups that were clearly promoting hate," said Baber, Progressive Conservative member for York Centre.

The bill was simple. It sought to ban any demonstrations on the grounds of Queen's Park, where Ontario's provincial legislature is located, that promote hate speech or incite violence. Baber said the bill was prompted by previous demonstrations that occurred at the legislature grounds.

"In 2017, we saw a demonstration that called for the shooting of Israelis. We saw a demonstration that called for a bus bombing and murder of innocent civilians," he said.

The bill went through two readings at Queen's Park and was punted to the standing committee on justice, where it's languished since.

March 27: Canadian Jewish News covers story

At first, the bill garnered modest attention online. The Canadian Jewish News ran a straight-forward report on the bill that included an interview with Baber shortly after he first introduced it. It was shared only a handful of times.

But a few weeks after the second reading, the bill drew the attention of LifeSiteNews, a socially-conservative website. The story was shared 212 times, according to CrowdTangle, including to the Yellow Vests Canada Facebook group.

In its story, LifeSiteNews suggested that a bill banning hate speech might be interpreted to include demonstrations like those that opposed updates to the province's sex education curriculum.

Baber said this isn't the case, because hate speech is already defined and interpreted by legal precedent.

"The words 'hate' and 'hate-promoting' have been defined by the courts repeatedly through common law and is enforced in courts routinely," Baber said. "So it would be a mistake to suggest that the bill expands the realm of hate speech."

April 24: The Post Millennial invokes 'free speech' argument

But the idea stuck around. A few weeks later, on April 24, the Post Millennial posted a story labelled as news that argued the bill could infringe on free speech. The story was, however, clear that the bill was only in Ontario and had not yet moved beyond a second reading. It was shared over 200 times and drew nearly 400 interactions - likes, shares, comments and reactions - on social media, according to CrowdTangle.

May 6: Powerful emotions evoke response on social media

On May 6, a socially conservative women's group called Real Women of Canada published a news release on the bill calling it "an attack on free speech." In the release, the group argues that hate speech isn't clearly defined in Canadian law, and draws on unrelated examples to claim that Christian demonstrations, in particular, could be targeted.

For example, the group pointed to the case of British Columbia's Trinity Western University, a Christian post-secondary institution that used to require all students sign a covenant that prohibited sex outside of heterosexual marriage. A legal challenge around the covenant and a potential law school at Trinity Western occurred last year, but it had nothing to do with hate speech.

May 9: LifeSiteNews republishes news release

Though this news release itself was not widely shared, three days later it was republished by LifeSiteNews as an opinion piece. That post did better, drawing 5,500 shares and over 8,000 interactions, according to CrowdTangle It also embellished the release with a dramatic image and sensational headline: "Ontario Bill Threatens to Criminalize Christian Speech as 'Hate.'"

At this point, the nugget of truth has been nearly entirely obscured by several layers of opinion and misrepresentation. For example, the bill doesn't specifically cite Christian speech, but this headline suggests it does.

These tactics are used to elicit a strong response from readers and encourage them to share, according to Samantha Bradshaw, a researcher on the Computational Propaganda project at Oxford University.

"People like to consume this kind of content because it's very emotional, and it gets us feeling certain things: anger, frustration, anxiety, fear," Bradshaw said. "These are all very powerful emotions that get people sharing and consuming content."

May 11: Big League Politics publishes sensational inaccuracies

That framing on LifeSiteNews caught the attention of a major U.S. publication known for spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation: Big League Politics. On May 11, the site published a story that cited the LifeSiteNews story heavily.

The headline and image make it seem like Trudeau's government has introduced legislation that would specifically prohibit Christians from demonstrating anywhere in the country, a far cry from the truth.

While the story provides a few facts, like the fact the bill was introduced in Ontario, much of it is incorrect. For example, in the lead sentence, the writer claimed the bill would "criminalize public displays by Christians deemed hateful to Muslims, the LGBT community and other victim groups designated by the left."

The disinformation and alarmist headline proved successful: the Big League Politics version of the story was shared more than 16,000 times, drew more than 26,000 interactions and continued to circulate online for over two weeks.

This evolution is a common occurrence. Disinformation is often based on a nugget of truth that gets buried under layers of emotionally-charged language and opinion. Here, that nugget of truth was a private member's bill introduced in the Ontario legislature. But that fact was gradually churned through an online network of spin until it was unrecognizable in the final product.

At the end of the day, democracy is really hard work. It's up to us to put in that time and effort to fact check our information, to look at other sources, to look at the other side of the argument and to weigh and debate and discuss. - Samantha Bradshaw, researcher at Oxford University

"That is definitely something that we see often: taking little truths and stretching them, misreporting them or implementing commentary and treating someone's opinion about what happened as news," Bradshaw said. "The incremental changes that we see in these stories and these narratives is something very typical of normal disinformation campaigns."

Bradshaw said even though disinformation is only a small portion of the content online, it can have an outsized impact on our attention. With that in mind, she said it's partly up to readers to think critically about what they're reading and sharing online.

"At the end of the day, democracy is really hard work," Bradshaw said. "It's up to us to put in that time and effort to fact check our information, to look at other sources, to look at the other side of the argument and to weigh and debate and discuss."
Want to learn how to spot deepfakes, altered photos and articles that may look like they're from news sites - but aren't? Try our Facebook Messenger chat bot.

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Canada banning Christian demonstrations? How a private member's bill sprouted fake news | CBC News

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A story with a headline claiming Canada was going to "Ban Christians from Demonstrating in Public," grew from an online ecosystem of spin and scare tactics. CBC News tracked this particular example back through time on social media to uncover where it came from and how it evolved over time.