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A Reminder That 'Fake News' Is An Information Literacy Problem - Not A Technology Problem

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Beneath the spread of all “fake news,” misinformation, disinformation, digital falsehoods and foreign influence lies society’s failure to teach its citizenry information literacy: how to think critically about the deluge of information that confronts them in our modern digital age. Instead, society has prioritized speed over accuracy, sharing over reading, commenting over understanding. Children are taught to regurgitate what others tell them and to rely on digital assistants to curate the world rather than learn to navigate the informational landscape on their own. Schools no longer teach source triangulation, conflict arbitration, separating fact from opinion, citation chaining, conducting research or even the basic concept of verification and validation. In short, we’ve stopped teaching society how to think about information, leaving our citizenry adrift in the digital wilderness increasingly saturated with falsehoods without so much as a compass or map to help them find their way to safety. The solution is to teach the world's citizenry the basics of information literacy.

It is the accepted truth of Silicon Valley that every problem has a technological solution.

Most importantly, in the eyes of the Valley, every problem can be solved exclusively through technology without requiring society to do anything on its own. A few algorithmic tweaks, a few extra lines of code and all the world’s problems can be simply coded out of existence.

Sadly for the Valley’s technological determinists, this is far from the truth.

Unfortunately, this mindset has survived to drive today’s “fake news” efforts.

Rather than invest in information literacy, the Valley has doubled down on technological solutions to combating digital falsehoods, focusing on harnessing legions of “fact checkers” and turning to Website and content blacklists, algorithmic tweaks and other quick fixes that have done little to turn the tide.

The problem is that technology can only mitigate the symptoms, it cannot address the underlying cause of digital falsehoods: our susceptibility to blindly believing what we read on the Web and our failure to verify and validate information before we share or act upon it.

Why is it that a teenager in their parent’s basement halfway across the world can anonymously post a statement to social media falsely attributed to a head of state and have that commentary go viral, spread to the mainstream press and even influence international political debate without anyone stopping to ask whether there is a shred of truth to what they are reading?

How is it possible that the nation’s most prestigious scholars and scientists at preeminent research institutions and universities could all suspend their disbelief and blindly believe that an anonymous Twitter account claiming to be a secret society “resisting” their government was everything it claimed to be without the slightest bit of verification? For all our societal chuckling about those who fall for “Nigerian prince” email scams, all it took was a couple of anonymous Twitter accounts claiming to be fellow researchers to start freely fundraising from the nation’s most respected researchers who never stopped to ask whether any of this seemed in the slightest bit suspicious.

In the early days of the Web societies taught their citizenry not to believe everything they read online, to treat every statement as suspect and not to act upon or share information without verifying it. Today those same societies place enormous pressure on their citizens to believe everything they see on the Web at face value and to share it as widely as they can as quickly as they can, rejecting any contradictory information they might stumble across in the process.

The old adage “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet” has become “Believe everything on the Web and share it widely.”

Even digital natives who have grown up in the information-saturated online world do no better at discerning the credibility of information or even understanding the most basic concepts of separating paid advertising from objective journalistic reporting.

Suggestions like requiring programming and data science courses in school would certainly create more technically-literate citizens, but this is not the same as data literacy and the kind of critical thinking it requires. The ability to write computer code does not magically make someone more resistant to digital falsehoods just as learning a new human language does little to teach someone how to perform digital triangulation.

Technical literacy is a powerful and important skill in our increasingly technology-driven society but is not the same as information literacy and will not help in the war against “fake news.”

Algorithms can help citizens sort through the deluge of information around them, identifying contested narratives and disputed facts, but technology alone is not a panacea. There is no magical algorithm that can eliminate all false and misleading information online.

To truly solve the issue of “fake news” we must blend technological assistance with teaching our citizens to be literate consumers of the world around them.

Societies must teach their children from a young age how to perform research, understand sourcing, triangulate information, triage contested narratives and recognize the importance of where information comes from, not just what it says.

In short, we must teach all of our citizens how to be researchers and scientists when it comes to consuming information.

Most importantly, we must emphasize verification and validation over virality and velocity.

Unfortunately, all of these concepts are directly antithetical to our modern social media world in which speed and virality grant fame and fortune, while due diligence and verification yield either silence or a deluge of hate speech from those who false narratives are countered.

Putting this all together, solving the epidemic of digital falsehoods cannot be done through technology alone. No magical algorithm will rid the Web of its false and misleading narratives nor will teaching the public to program have any impact on their ability to discern truth from fiction.

Instead, today’s grand challenge of combating “fake news,” misinformation, disinformation, digital falsehoods and foreign influence requires a very human solution. It requires teaching society’s citizenry the basics of information literacy and how to think about the information they consume.

Most importantly, it will require navigating the existential contradictions of today’s social media platforms obsessed with velocity and virality against the verification and validation that form the basis of information literacy.

A more information literate society would likely bring with it considerable economic harm to today’s viral-obsessed social platforms that thrive on digital falsehoods, meaning there will be considerable resistance from Silicon Valley to a more information literate society.

In the end, the only way to truly begin to combat the spread of digital falsehoods is to understand that they represent a societal rather than a technological issue and to return to the early days of the Web when we taught society to question what they read online.