“Truth in Media”
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By Scott Hamilton
I have written several times in the past about the misinformation on the Internet, especially on social media platforms like Facebook and X. Sadly the information on the internet as a whole is not really that trustworthy, including information coming from mainstream television and newspaper sources. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming the reporters or even the news media outlets themselves, as a majority of them are getting their information from the same sources that we read daily. They trust what they see on the social media accounts of government officials, and international news outlets. The problem is, with the advanced AI capabilities generating news stories, we can no longer trust what we see or what we read without knowing a firsthand witness to the event.
I understand the need for entertainment and I find the fake news outlets that release satirical news stories for different areas very entertaining; the problem is that an AI does not understand satire and as a result, sometimes these fake news items make it into the news feeds on Google, Facebook and X, looking like real news. I have even seen a few make it to sites like the New York Times as true stories before anyone catches on and issues a statement. So for a long time I have wondered, how do we prepare ourselves and our children to recognize the truth in the onslaught of fake news.
I read today about how Finland is handling fake news in its department of education and I really liked their ideas, so I thought I would share them here, so maybe we can learn how to discern the truth from the stories. In our country, we do at least attempt to teach media literacy in some aspects, but it usually boils down to adding a class in “critical thinking” into the class schedule so our students learn to recognize the classic logical fallacies that make it easy to identify “fake” news and especially content that is enforcing a certain agenda.
In Finland they do this quite differently; rather than just having a critical thinking class in the schedule, they weave the concepts of critical thinking throughout their curriculum. For example, in Math, students learn how statistics can be manipulated to mislead. In art, they study how images can be altered to change the narrative. In history they analyze propaganda from previous and current political campaigns to gain an understanding of the mechanics of influence.
You might think, how young is too young to start introducing these concepts? Well for the Finnish children, it starts as early as preschool. As they are learning to read, they are also learning to question what they read. They are taught that they should always act as detectives, looking for the answers to some very simple but powerful questions. I suggest you do the same for anything you read. You should ask yourself: “Who wrote it?” “Why did they write it?” “Where is the evidence?”
When you look into the history of Finland, you learn that they have faced centuries of disinformation coming across their shared border with Russia. They learned early on in the relationship with Russia that if they wanted to keep a strong democracy, they must have citizenship of people who cannot be easily fooled. It makes me wonder if we have our focus wrong when it comes to information in this country.
You see we all know how important freedom of the press and freedom of speech is to our democracy, and we have focused a lot on making sure our platforms for information sharing are fair in their distribution policies. We worry about their algorithms, their moderation policies, and often blame the tech giants for allowing the disinformation to pass through. The problem is that we are trying to solve a human problem with technology. I think Finland may have the right idea, as they are teaching their population that the most important filter is the mind.
Are we teaching ourselves and our children to think for themselves, research the facts and verify the sources, or are we expecting the tech giants to provide the filter so we can trust what we read? I really hope we are learning to think for ourselves and not trust technology. As I said earlier, an AI cannot understand satire, so how can we trust it to filter our content? We must teach ourselves and our children to be the filter, as we cannot trust technology to solve this problem. Until next week stay safe and learn something new.
Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to shamilton@techshepherd.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.
