How You Can Combat Misinformation on the Internet

Several events over the last couple of years have drawn serious attention to the problem of misinformation or fake news on the internet. Notable among these events is the Coronavirus pandemic which saw an upsurge in suggestions from various people around the world about how the virus spread or how it could be cured.

It goes without saying that many of these suggestions from random people were just assumptions, half-truths, or outrightly wrong information. However, this spread of misinformation was not limited to random sources as even notable figures, like the then US president Donald Trump, was found complicit after he promoted unproven hydroxychloroquine treatments as a cure for the virus.

Other unverified news also spread all over the internet about how the virus was deliberately grown in the lab, Africans were immune to the virus, 5G was used in spreading the virus, etc. All this misinformation just contributed to helping the virus spread and cause more deaths.

Another notable group of events that highlighted the worsening state of misinformation online is the rise of celebrity-promoted crypto scams. These crypto scams just resulted in people losing a lot of money.

Hence, the great dangers of misinformation on the internet are well established. With this knowledge, it becomes imperative that users of the internet should be aware of the prevalence of fake news online in recent times and learn how to identify them and avoid falling prey to such news.

A lot of blame has been placed on social media companies, news agencies, and the government for failing to tackle the fake news menace but a key player in the process is often overlooked. By this, I mean the general users of the internet who often participate in spreading misinformation to all nooks and crannies of the internet. It is very important that users learn to actively combat fake news because fake news anywhere on the internet at any time is a danger to everyone.

Actions that you need to take on the web

1. Use anti-misinformation tools:

   With the upsurge of misinformation/fake news, a number of software tools have been developed to help combat this problem. But no matter how sophisticated they are, they won’t be of much use if users do not widely adopt them.

   Some of the tools you can use to combat misinformation online include;

   • Exorde:

   Exorde is a web 3 data management network developed to tackle online misinformation through the use of decentralization from blockchain technology and artificial intelligence. It is a decentralized information management tool for collecting and analyzing publicly available information on the web (i.e., social networks, news, and websites). At its core, Exorde runs a pipeline for processing information. This pipeline continuously gathers the stream of the most recent online data (tweets, articles, blog posts, etc.) and processes it (translation, aggregation, curation, clustering) to provide trustworthy, pertinent, and high-quality metadata.

   Exorde is also applied in sentiment extraction, predicting market trends and web analytics.

   • Captain Fact:

   CaptainFact facilitates collaborative verification of internet material. It includes a browser plugin that adds contextual information and sources overlay to web videos. Also, the addon shows icons that represent the video's legitimacy according to user votes. CaptainFact is developing a tool akin to its video-focused capabilities for articles as well. The site also offers a discussion forum where users can debate particular topics relating to the content being verified.

   • Botometer:

   Botometer is a web-based tool developed by researchers at Indiana University and the University of Southern California to identify Twitter accounts that are likely to be bots. In order to evaluate whether a Twitter account is likely to be run by a human or an automated system, the application employs a machine learning algorithm to analyze over 1,000 different elements of the account, including friends, network structure, temporal activity, language, and sentiment. Each Twitter account is given a number by Botometer, ranging from 0 to 5, with higher ratings suggesting a higher possibility that the account is a bot. It can be a helpful resource for academics, writers, and other people who want to comprehend how bots operate on social networking sites like Twitter.

2. Understand how the internet works:

   This might sound pretty obvious and unnecessary but the truth is that a lot of people on the internet are just tech-savvy enough to use it but do not really understand how information arrives on the internet. Hence, several people take any information on websites or social media as valid since it is on the internet.

   Understand that the internet is an open network of computers where anyone from anywhere around the world can put information with any intent. This knowledge alone should make you skeptical about the information there.

   Also, understand how to differentiate reputable news sources on the internet from less trustworthy ones. The websites and social media platforms of established news media agencies should be given the most trust in getting valid information and not bloggers or social media influencers.

   Furthermore, learn to read entire articles or watch full videos before concluding on the news they are trying to convey, as media agents are not above using catchy headlines or video snippets as clickbait, which may not present the complete news that is being conveyed. Hence, the audience can receive out-of-context information through this and it can result in the spread of misinformation.

3. Watch out for the news feed bubble effect:

   Online information platforms (especially social media sites) generally use algorithms that feed users with only a related set or sources of information based on their activity. This means that if you show interest in sports news, you may only receive notifications about sports and if you watch videos on a crime for example, you may only receive more crime-related videos on your feed.

   While this appears innocent enough at face value, it becomes problematic when applied to religious or political information. For example, in a two-party state like America, a liberal who naturally shows interest in news about liberal successes and democratic failures at a given time may get trapped in a bubble of news feeds that only show liberal successes and democratic failures. This could make the viewer develop a lopsided ideology that liberal leaders only succeed and democratic just keep failing which could radicalize them against democrats.

   Another example could be a young person on social media who watches a video about radical Islamists or poor Africans at some point and continues to receive only that type of video on the feed. This could make them develop a one-sided view of the people being portrayed in the video.

   While this algorithmic bubble effect doesn’t spread false news per se, it actually spreads an unbalanced stream of information which could promote bias in the audience. News seekers on the internet should use a variety of diverse news sources to nullify this bubble effect.

4. Do not share any piece of information that you have not verified:

   This is a very important one. The truth is that other users of the internet are at times even contributing more to the spread of misinformation on the web than the source.

   Information spreads very fast on the internet because people keep forwarding them and if just one person could try to verify whether the information is valid before sharing, at least one link through which the false information could have spread to many others will be cut short. This will even be more effective if users report any news they discover to be false to the source of the news or to the platform on which the news is spreading (e.g. Facebook, Tiktok, etc.). The piece of false information could then be taken down entirely and the source of the information could also be penalized so as not to post misinformation again.

   Hence, as a user of the internet, you should try to verify the validity of any piece of information and the trustworthiness of the source before sharing it.

Conclusion

Misinformation on the internet is a global issue, thus it requires a global approach to tackling it. Everyone has a role to play, especially the end users of the web who are often at the receiving end of the consequences of misinformation. Users should follow these steps and more to combat misinformation.