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“15 Insane Things That Correlate With Each Other.” Spurious Correlations, www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations.

Turner, John. "Absence of 21st century warming on Antarctic Peninsula ..." Nature.com. Macmillan Publishers Limited, 21 July 2016. Web. 23 Dec. 2016.

NASA. NASA, n.d. Web. 23 Dec. 2016.

@mbfc_news. "The “Post-Truth” Problem: The Causes and the Solution." Media Bias/Fact Checking. N.p., 25 Nov. 2016. Web. 23 Dec. 2016.

Smith, Alexander, and Vladimir Banic. "How Macedonian teens earn - and spend - thousands from fake news." NBCNews.com. NBCUniversal News Group, 08 Dec. 2016. Web. 23 Dec. 2016.

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Lies
What makes a lie?
To make a claim that is not true?
Truths cannot be lies
Truths are claims of certainty
Truths are the denial of ignorance
But the wall of ignorance is impenetrable
You can make progress but never get through
So what are claimed truths
but lies

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Trying to claim Correlation without Causation

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Trying to claim Correlation without Causation

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One problem with authors taking data and trying to analyse it when they aren't experts on the subject, is that they do not necessarily know all of the complex cause and effect relationships between two pieces of data. Often times you will see graphs such as the one below, with claims being made about the seemingly obvious evidence. Someone who was just looking at the graphs bellow without knowing the variables would probably think that the two pieces of data had a relationship in the real world. However, these two pieces of data are not actually even remotely related in the real world; the graphs just happen to be be similar to each other. Even if the pieces of data were somewhat related, there still needs to be a definite cause and effect relationship that would explain why the graphs are so similar to each other. You cannot make a claim based on solely the information on the graphs. This is something that many fake news sites are guilty of doing.

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The article, “Study: West Antarctic – Poster Child of Global Warming – is Getting Colder” is one example of an article that showed numerous examples of fake news.

The article refers to a study conducted by scientists working for “Nature.com” and uses it to try to discredit global warming. They take a quote taken out of context from the article and try to interpret it even though they know nothing on the topic. “‘The annual mean temperature has decreased at a statistically significant rate, with the most rapid cooling during the Austral summer. Temperatures have decreased as a consequence of a greater frequency of cold, east-to-southeasterly winds, resulting from more cyclonic conditions in the northern Weddell Sea associated with a strengthening mid-latitude jet. These circulation changes have also increased the advection of sea ice towards the east coast of the peninsula, amplifying their effects. (Nature.com)’

What all this means, in plain English, is that the climate alarmists have just gone and lost one of their most cherished poster children( James Delingpole).” James Delingpole decided to use this information to imply that global warming was not real. He said this despite the fact that the article that he quoted had concluded that temperatures worldwide are actually rising despite the drop in temperature in that one part of Antarctica. The people who wrote the article were scientists who worked for the British Antarctic Survey Natural Environment Research Council, who actually had knowledge about the field of climate change, unlike James Delingpole. They also cited 40 different sources and included all of their statistics along with their paper, unlike Delingpole who cited nothing.

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How to avoid taking in false or misleading information as fact.

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How to avoid taking in false or misleading information as fact.

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Make sure that the website that you are using has different authors writing each article.

Some fake news sites are created by one author, so all of the sources are written by the same person. This can be particularly dangerous if you only get news from that one source, because you are only taking in one point of view. Websites with many authors contributing to the feed are also more likely to have fact-checkers, because it is likely an organization running the website.

Try to identify bias of article and make sure you read  articles supporting both sides of the Issue.

Reading articles that are all written by one website only provides you with one point of view, and If you only get news from democratic websites, or if you only get news from republican websites then you will never know if the website was skewing the facts with their bias. By looking at both democratic and republican articles, you will have multiple analyses of one topic so that you can more easily find where you stand in the issue. The more articles you read, the more opinions you have heard so that you can decide which one best explains the evidence. Reading more articles also provides you with more evidence so that you can come to your own conclusions.

Make sure that the sources that you are using have relevant citations. It is essential when reading a source that you check the source’s citations. If they do not have citations or their citations do not come from a credible source, then you cannot trust the evidence that they use in their article. Most of the content in articles online is an analysis of evidence that they provide, and if the evidence is not accurate then you should abstain from accepting the information in the article without questioning it.

Try to read articles written by people who have experience in the field that they are discussing.

Authors of articles will often take information and try to analyse it themselves, even though they know nothing on the topic. If the evidence is referring to something really complex such as quantum mechanics, most writers wouldn’t really be able to accurately explain the evidence. They might try to come up with an analysis that makes sense, but unless they are an expert on the topic, they could be getting everything wrong. Many fake news websites are written by anti-intellectuals who think that they know more about a topic than experts on a topic, because they want to prove that their ignorant analysis of the evidence is correct. You have to be able to recognize the ignorance or knowledge of the author of the article, and take that into account when reading their article.

Acknowledge that they are interpreting data and look into the reasoning that explains their evidence; know that the reasoning should not just be accepted as fact. No matter how knowledgeable an author is on a topic, you should still recognize the difference between evidence and reasoning. There are many fields in which the most renowned experts in the world will look at the same evidence, and come up with completely different explanations on that evidence. If you only accept one of these interpretations of the evidence, you could be distancing yourself from the analysis that is actually more accurate. If you leave you mind open to consider all possible explanations of the evidence, then you are admitting your ignorance rather than denying it.

Who is creating these fake news sites?

A Macedonian teen and his friends have created fake news webpages to make money from adverts. He has made $60,000 in the last 6 months. 150 fake news websites have been traced to Veles in Macedonia. Fake news is often more interesting to read than real news because it discusses outlandish events that haven’t actually taken placed. His websites have had 40 million page views in the past 6 months. The only way to tell the difference between some of these fake news sites and the real sites is that the fake ones have a different URL. One of his websites is called huffingtonpolitics.com is a copy of huffington post, except all of its stories are fake. Most of the stories glorify Donald Trump, because people seem to be very interested in him. The stories also claim that veterans are being mistreated in various ways, because many republicans care a lot about veterans; claiming that people are mistreating the veterans creates anger and aggression towards those who are supposedly mistreating the veterans.This is one reason why the fake news sites try to appeal to republicans. The fake news sites use click-bait words such as “wow” and “omg” to try to hook the readers and keep them wanting more. The fake news sites just try to tell people exactly what they want to hear, because people like being right. One of the guys who created a fake news website said, "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." This shows that it is also important how much information you put out there, not just the type.

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What can we do to solve the problem of fake news?

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What can we do to solve the problem of fake news?

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We can try to convince your local school system to inform people on how to be intelligent readers who question what they read, and to prevent them from absorbing all the information and accepting it as fact. Maybe this wouldn't have much of an effect on adults, but it will help to prevent the intake of fake news in the future.