Pod Insights The Vergecast How to fight lies, tricks, and chaos online About this episode Verge reporter Adi Robertson talks to Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel about how to spot lies, false information, and trolling online and how to handle it as a user on the internet. Adi just published a guide on The Verge that details a system for slowing down and thinking about information — whether that information is true, false, or something in between.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:57 Nilay Patel? Hey, everybody. It's Tiana from The Vergecast. Back after a little bit of a holiday break. I hope you had a good Thanksgiving. On this week's interview episode, we have senior reporter Addie Robertson from The Verge. She just wrote a great piece for us, "How to Fight Lies, Tricks, and Chaos Online." There's an instruction manual for evaluating the information you see on the internet. We're entering the 2020 election cycle. There's going to be a lot of chaos, a lot of yelling, a lot of fighting, a lot of Russian misinformation and propaganda. And we really wanted to put something together that you can share with your friends or family. You can read it yourself. It just gives you a basic outline of how to evaluate a headline, a meme, a video, a photo, and just come to a better determination of whether that is real or fake. So Addie came on the show. We walked through a checklist.
1:41 Nilay Patel? We walked through the shape of the news ecosystem right now. And we talked about basically how to look at something shared on social media. And before you share it, or retweet it, or like it, or dunk on it, how to just take a beat and figure out what's true and what's not. It was a really interesting conversation. This is Addie Robertson, senior reporter at The Verge.
2:02 Nilay Patel? Addie Robertson, how are you doing?
2:03 Speaker 03 Hey, good.
2:04 Nilay Patel? So you have published a piece today on theverge.com called "How to Fight Lies, Tricks, and Chaos Online."
2:10 Speaker 03 I have.
2:10 Nilay Patel? Which is very ambitious, but it is like an instruction manual for how to how to look at stuff online and figure out whether, basically whether it's real, whether it's true, whether you can trust it.
2:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, and to sort of figure out whether it does the thing that emotionally you think it does, which is a sort of surprisingly broad category, like if a thing is old, does it still like provoke the emotion that you are feeling when you click on a thing? Like, should it provoke that emotion? So it's a big weird thing.
2:38 Nilay Patel? So why publish this now?
2:40 Speaker 03 In part because 2020, like, the election is coming up and we are about to kick into a giant cycle of, first of all, fake news happening, second of all, people freaking out about fake news happening, third of all, then people freaking out about people freaking out about it. So we're about to just go into this hypercharged news cycle, and I wanted to lay down a lot of the things that I've spent a lot of years figuring out as an actual tech blogger.
3:04 Nilay Patel? All right, so you are just an average person, you're scrolling through your feeds, the algorithms are algorithm-ing, is that a verb? You see something. How do you begin to evaluate all the things you're seeing?
3:16 Speaker 03 So the first step is just figuring out when you should actually evaluate something because there is an infinite amount of information on the internet. And so it's sort of a kind of mindfulness that you want to figure out when something's grabbing your attention and you should look closer. So when something's provoking a really strong reaction, or it's perfectly confirming a belief, it's the first step is just stopping and identifying the fact that that's happening. And that's often a sign that you should look closer, either because maybe something's made up, maybe something's bad, or maybe it's that you are sort of training yourself to learn more about things you're interested in and to use these things as a jumping off point.
3:53 Nilay Patel? So you see the headline, the one we always use at The Verge to talk about breaking news, "Apple Buys Google." We'll just use that one as our frame. So you see the headline, "Al-Wise Google," and your finger immediately goes to retweet it, and you're saying, "Stop there."
4:10 Speaker 03 Yes.
4:11 Nilay Patel? "Don't do that yet."
4:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, but also even for lower stakes things. Like, one of the examples that Russell, the editor, and I were talking about is those viral maps that are like everybody's favorite candy by state. And the reason that you are supposed to retweet them or click on them is that you look at a state and you're like, "Oh, the thing perfectly confirms what I think of as a state." Like, what a state would like.
4:31 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
4:31 Speaker 03 Or, "Oh, that's completely ridiculous. Why would you do that?" Like, that you want to identify reactions like that and to just make it sort of part of your news consumption.
4:39 Nilay Patel? So you're saying so much stuff now is made to scare you or annoy you, or say, "Yep, this is exactly right." And before you take action on that impulse, you gotta, like, stop.
4:51 Speaker 03 Yeah.
4:51 Nilay Patel? What do you do after you stop?
4:52 Speaker 03 So after that, you identify sort of some basic procedural elements of the story. Maybe first among them is, "This story new? This is obviously something we look at in the newsroom constantly. Somebody publishes something, it's actually several years old. Apple buys Google, but actually that's some story that was published on April Fools three years ago."
5:14 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
5:14 Speaker 03 So you check that. You check and see if it's a social media story, if the source lines up, like, if it's a verified account, or if it's somebody impersonating someone. And then beyond that, you just sort of are trying to find out where the information is coming from. Like, whether that's a press release that people are linking to, are people linking to, like, the "Apple buys Google" press release? Is somebody quoting an insider talking about how this thing's going to happen? Is it somebody, like, posting a leaked document? It's just trying to get the pieces of the story.
5:50 Nilay Patel? So for us, that's pretty normal. I mean, this is how we vet almost every link that comes through our newsroom. But what are the actual stuff? I mean, pull this apart a little bit. Like, beyond looking at a Dateline or checking the news sources, something that you trust, how do you actually find those other little bits of context when you see a link like this that's... I don't know. One of your things is stop if you're going to spend money because of it. Stop and dig deeper, right? If it's a political ad or a candidate tweeting something. How do you actually go and say, I think I understand the primary source of this? What are some good methods you can use?
6:24 Speaker 03 So for crowdfunding, there, we have a section on it, but a lot of it is checking to see whether there's any kind of trail of credibility. If these people have produced something before, if so, did they deliver it? Are there satisfied customers? Is there a reason that based on other things that you've seen from this source that you should trust them? If they're a, say, a financial guru, when you search through their name, does it bring up like them actually being prosecuted for something? Does it bring up scientific papers being retracted? If it's something about your health? A lot of it is just looking up other information around this thing, like using keywords to
7:06 Speaker 03 sort of run a lot of Google searches in some, in a lot of cases.
7:10 Nilay Patel? Aren't you, I mean, I guess, are we asking people to do, is, this is one of the big problems with social media, right? People show you a lot of things. There's not a lot of easy ways to get the associated contacts or the associated verification outside of badges. Is there any faster way to do this? Or is it really just, hey, something made me feel something that I know they're trying to get me to share it. I need to stop, take a minute and do some research. Is that really the first step?
7:35 Speaker 03 I think that in some cases, the first step is identifying the stakes, like identifying how much is it going to hurt if this, like, what's going to happen if I'm wrong here? And then identifying just basic aspects of what's this thing coming from. Like, when I look at a source, like, when I look at the Twitter account that's posting this thing, what else are they posting? Can I discern that there's some kind of clear, if it's a fake news site like an agenda? Is there a site that's posting a bunch of weird conspiracy theories and then this one thing that I'm looking at? Just like clicking through and looking at the other things that the news, your site you're looking at, or the account that you're looking at is posting, can be a really helpful tool and it is extremely easy to do. But it's something that gets really atomized on social media.
8:20 Nilay Patel? So I think this is pretty interesting and easy to do with text. You can search for a quote and see if other people are citing the quote. You can click onto a website and see what the other stories are. But videos and photos obviously travel a lot faster than quotes and text.
8:34 Speaker 03 Right.
8:34 Nilay Patel? At least that's what we've found. How do you balance the "I'm seeing it everywhere, so it must be true" instinct with the "I know this is designed to provoke a reaction, so I'd better take a beat and verify it," like imperative that we're sort of suggesting here?
8:49 Speaker 03 This is the point where it gets sort of difficult and frustrating because a lot of it boils down to what ends up sounding like an appeal to authority, which is that there are places that do a lot of research around this. And there are places that are going to do news coverage that's credible about whether this picture actually shows the thing that the picture is supposed to be showing. And so after a point, that's where these guides kind of break down because what you're going to have to do is go look for coverage from somebody whose job this is and for someone who can lay all of this out for you. And there are a lot of news outlets that are doing this. And this is, I think, really frustrating if you're trying to do really primary research
9:31 Speaker 03 and if your idea is, "I should be skeptical of absolutely everything." But it's also kind of the important bridge to, between, things that you can reasonably do as a news consumer and things that you should be expecting people who do this professionally to do for you.
9:46 Nilay Patel? So you cover a lot of speech issues online. And I, you were like not happy about saying "appeal to authority" there. But is this a place where you think that platforms have a greater responsibility to gatekeep and maybe show things that are verified or true more than just chaos?
10:05 Speaker 03 I think that one of the approaches I would like to see platforms do is not so much to prevent fake information from showing up, but to create a space where people can reasonably think that something has been vetted by someone that's not them. Even whether that's because it's an expert who is perfectly trained in doing it, or because it's just somebody who's going to take these steps I'm writing about, and they're going to do that all the time, and they're going to make sure that what you're seeing is reasonably credible. And this is, as I've discussed in the guide, this isn't going to be perfect. People are always going to make mistakes. But I would love for there to be somewhere on social media where you can go and have a reasonable expectation that the things you're seeing there are accurate.
10:48 Nilay Patel? Do you think the platforms are getting better at that, neutral or worse over time?
10:52 Speaker 03 I think that Facebook is trying to do that with its new news program. It seems slightly debatable how well it's vetting these organizations. But I think there is an understanding that you can have a kind of multi-tiered system of things where you aren't necessarily suppressing speech, you aren't trying to like control everything on there, but that there's a class of things that are sort of semi-professional.
11:17 Nilay Patel? YouTube's trying to do this as well, right? Do you think that their system of like, we'll show you the Wikipedia article underneath the video, is effective?
11:25 Speaker 03 That's the other difficult thing, is that if people, this runs into the problem that there are a lot of situations where people probably instinctively distrust authority. And there's been a lot of research on whether or not trying to show people these authoritative sources is actually going to be helpful, or whether it's going to just be sort of reflexively ignored. And I think this is something that I can't really give an intuitive answer to, because it really depends on what people are actually doing. And anything that I think is right is, could very easily be wrong, which is really frustrating.
12:04 Nilay Patel? But if somebody listening to this, sort of average consumer of the news, or they're talking to their friends and family about how to get smarter as the chaos of the election heats up. Is it worthwhile to say, hey, the platforms are starting to put information around almost everything that seems on the border, that it's worthwhile to look at that additional context? Or is it, do it on your own, you'll trust yourself more than whatever Wikipedia link, YouTube that is algorithmically put underneath this video?
12:32 Speaker 03 I think that if YouTube is putting something up, I think that it is something that people should look at, definitely. I think part of the question is, what kind of audience is actually going to be seeing these things? Because that's the other important thing about this guide, is that it's not a thing that's intended to stop absolutely everyone who's seeing a thing. Like, if you know someone who's a conspiracy theorist and they're deeply devoted to a conspiracy, the problem isn't that they're reading the news wrong, the problem is that they are extremely invested in a thing that's incorrect. Or if there's someone who is sharing things just to prove a point and they know it's ridiculous, this might not necessarily help. So, my main worry with this is that I'm being too idealistic about it, but I'm really hoping
13:13 Speaker 03 there are people whose issue is just that they want to be reminded of this and to have better tools to look for things that are accurate and things that are true.
13:22 Nilay Patel? Or just a process that they can, they can build on. One thing I hear a lot of is, hey, you know, on social media, you should follow a bunch of people on, on one side and a bunch of people on the other side, and you'll see all the spin and you'll be able to make up your mind in the middle. Do you think that's effective?
13:37 Speaker 03 I think that it can be really helpful to see what people are saying around an issue, that if somebody is putting a really dramatically different spin on a story, or if there's a story that's really only getting picked up by one certain segment of the population, that's super useful to know. I think that it's been bad that that is translated into, and the thing that's most accurate is the average of those points. That the thing that you're seeing the most commonly, or the thing that is kind of the mean between all these opinions, is not necessarily the true thing. And the reason that surrounding yourself with different viewpoints is helpful is because it can help you get to the point of the thing that's true, not because it will automatically give you the truth.
14:19 Nilay Patel? Now, the weighted average of all viewpoints is...
14:21 Speaker 03 Yeah.
14:22 Nilay Patel? Is the, is the true one. So you've got two questions here that I think are really interesting. One is, what's the scale of the story? What do you mean by that?
14:30 Speaker 03 So, the most obvious example is internet protests, like, somebody is outraged on the internet, where if you look for someone being really freaked out about a particular movie, or a... Starbucks Cup that you will find somebody because it's the internet. And so if everyone is outraged or there's a massive protest movement, you want to look and make sure there's actually something there and not just 60 people signing a petition. But it can also be sort of more general stakes of a story. Like, one of the things that I mention is maximum sentencing, where this is a more traditional news outlet thing, that people will just sort of add up all of the potential years of a sentence and you will get these absolutely eye popping, this person is facing
15:13 Speaker 03 200 years in jail thing. And the actual numbers tend to be much lower and they're based on a different rubric. But just really, anything that kind of hyperbolizes is worth being, is worth scrutinizing. And sometimes there actually is something really dramatic and eye popping and you want to know when that is the case.
15:34 Nilay Patel? How do you know when that is?
15:35 Speaker 03 If you follow through and you look up and see that, say, a company is actually, say, charging someone this X exorbitant amount, or that there are these extremely influential people who are protesting something, or that there is a mass movement, that you can identify huge numbers of people behind doing things, say, in the physical world about a thing they're upset about.
15:58 Nilay Patel? So this leads right into the next question that I thought was really interesting, which is, if there's an outrage, are people actually upset? How do you determine whether people are actually upset?
16:07 Speaker 03 This is obviously somewhat subjective, but I think that a lot of things get flattened into outrage. I think that if somebody is making a joke about something, or just sort of expressing mild annoyance at a thing, that can often get translated into this supposed trend of everyone freaking out about and being offended by something. And then that in turn translates into people seeing that and thinking, oh, well, that thing isn't that offensive. It's ridiculous that people are outraged about that. And then they create this counter outrage and then it just cycles into this massive... Finger pointing match of people thinking that other people are outraged about something when actually they're just expressing a mild opinion about something online that may be
16:51 Speaker 03 approving or disapproving, or they're putting forward a critique.
16:54 Nilay Patel? It's kind of the lesson here, like, don't tweet. Like, don't participate unless you know the facts, or you know whether or not something is satire, or if it's just a mild critique of something, or if it blew up and the person was never expecting it to blow up. Like, a lot of this is just like, choose to use the weapon of social media a little bit more carefully, it seems like.
17:17 Speaker 03 It is, but I think it also kind of, like, never tweet oversells a little bit how easy a lot of this stuff often is. Like, a lot of this is not some kind of really, really difficult sleuthing that you have to carry out. A lot of it is just clicking through, looking at something, running the title through Google to see if somebody else has debunked it, or if this thing has been an issue for 10 years and was posted and resolved ages ago, and then tweeting.
17:43 Nilay Patel? And then tweeting. There should be like a timer on the Twitter interface.
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18:53 Nilay Patel? So much of the problem, particularly with fake news, is that you have Facebook incense articles, and you have Google AMP, and you have Squarespace templates, and so much of the web looks the same, and like, looks credible just by default. I think Kyle J. actually wrote a piece about this for us.
19:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, makes lies look as pretty as truth.
19:12 Nilay Patel? Which is true. Is that harder for people to parse through if you click on something and the news site looks legit because it's in some very basic Google AMP template? How do you, how do you teach people to see beyond that?
19:24 Speaker 03 I agree that it is super tricky, and I think URLs and links can also be super tricky, that it's become very easy to get something that sounds very official and makes you sound like a reputable organization. Again, I think a lot of this is just read the account, that you look at the Facebook page, you look at the website, you see the last two days worth of posts. Does this thing seem like a place that actually attempts to publish news, or is it like a wild conspiracy site? Or is it something that is clearly just copying and pasting things from around the internet? And you will obviously have edge cases where it's really difficult, say, to draw a line
20:08 Speaker 03 between a reputable blog and a non-reputable one. But again, a lot of this is really easy. A lot of the time, you will click through a satire site. It might look official, but all the headlines will be ridiculous. Or you will click on something and you'll see that it's clearly just an aggregator that pulls in random headlines.
20:26 Nilay Patel? So I guess one edge case that I'm always really curious about is like the person on Twitter who tells some tall tale that seems true but isn't, and then it turns out later it's like a comedian just riffing, or a paid ad for cat food, or whatever it is. And this happens, I think, more often than people want to admit that it happens to them, where it's like a 40-tweet chain of some rollicking story, and at the end it's like definitely made up. How do you, how should people start to look at those? Should you just, should your default posture be this is definitely fake?
20:57 Speaker 03 I think that your default posture should be this is not definitely real. And I think at that point, I would be really cautious about sharing the thing is the issue. That I think there is, people are very capable of reading a thing and thinking, I can't necessarily prove whether this is real or not. I'm going to provisionally evaluate whether or not, okay, I'll take it with a grain of salt. I think it becomes a lot more difficult to actually broadcast that thing and convey that same level of doubt. And I think that's where things get really difficult. If you want to share the tall tale, then I'm not honestly sure how you do it in a way that is not, at some level, giving a stamp of approval to it.
21:35 Nilay Patel? And then that just builds and builds and builds. What about, I don't know, paid influencers, right? Like our social platforms are particularly YouTube and Instagram, full of people who are right on the boundary of that FTC regulation about disclosing their sponsorships. How should you evaluate that world where everything is supposed to seem authentic, but maybe there's a commercial element that's just beyond your view?
21:58 Speaker 03 I think that a lot of it, again, would be context. If you are reading a blog and, or you're reading, looking at an Instagram account and this person clearly is very knowledgeable about a subject that they're posting about and they think that a particular thing is good, then that is more trustworthy than someone who is just out of the blue posting about a thing they like suddenly. I think, again, this is where the difficulty of evaluating this stuff as an individual kind of comes through, though, that these FTC rules exist for a reason, that advertising rules outside the internet exist for a reason, and it would be great if people could trust those rules more.
22:37 Nilay Patel? But there are cases where it's less direct than an ad, right? It's an influencer who's doing a brand campaign with some big company and the campaign is over, but now they're not going to issue any criticism of that company because they want to get the next one. And I think I see this like very often in our space. I think it's also very true in other big influencer markets. I think it's very true in like the beauty influencer market. Is there a way to see it? Is there a way to say like, oh, that person has done this much work for McDonald's in the past? They're never going to say the Burger King burger is better because they're trying to get the McDonald's check again? Or is it just?
23:17 Nilay Patel? Over time, all of us are going to learn how to deal with influencer information.
23:21 Speaker 03 It's weird now that I'm talking to you, how much of my advice boils down to read a bunch more stuff created by the person that you're looking at a piece of content from. Because that is how you would evaluate that. You would know over time, oh, is this the person who just constantly talks about how much they love Apple? Obviously, they're going to trash Android.
23:38 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
23:39 Speaker 03 I think that maybe is a peculiarly modern internet phenomenon where you are not really reading outlets or looking at people anymore. You're getting this kind of conglomerate of different things from different sources. And so it makes it really difficult to evaluate people's credibility in the way that you could if you are just reading that person or like looking at their pictures day after day. I think that you don't get that familiarity with an outlet that you could probably get otherwise, that would tell you, even if you didn't trust that person 100% of the time, what you should trust them for. And when you're getting close to something that is a point where they're clearly biased, or where you should take what they're saying with a grain of salt, or they're maybe not in authority.
24:22 Nilay Patel? So this is like a huge paradigm shift, though, right? I mean, you're talking about the disaggregation of media, the sort of unbundling of all things. Now, everything is an atom of content and endless feeds. If you're listening to this and, you know, you're about to go home for the holidays, encountering your relatives, how do you begin to explain that kind of paradigm? Like, I struggle with it, where I'm like, just stop, stop looking at the feed as a canonical news source and look at the individual atoms more closely. Like, how do you, how do you begin to help people start to take these, these second steps beyond just looking at stuff?
24:55 Speaker 03 I think that maybe a really simple answer is just trying to get people interested in the accounts and the sites and the channels that produce the thing that they're reading. If you see something that's interesting, who is putting it out? Can you find more things from that same creator or that same site? What do they actually say? Do they seem like someone who you can trust? This is obviously opening up a whole other can of worms, because this is how you radicalize people into conspiracy theories. But-
25:27 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I feel like con artists are like notoriously persuasive.
25:32 Speaker 03 Yeah.
25:33 Nilay Patel? And making you trust them.
25:34 Speaker 03 That's part of the problem with this guide is that there's absolutely nothing that will be a perfect solution to everything. But I think in a lot of cases, so much of this really does just boil down to mindfulness that just, look, just take a few extra minutes, look at the really basic context around the thing that you're reading or watching. Is that thing current? Is it from an account that is very, very clearly not real? Is it from a satire site? And just hitting that point, I think, goes a really, really long way.
26:08 Nilay Patel? So that's the basics, but we're talking about 2020. Obviously, in our last election, there was a massive amount of Russian misinformation, election interference. I would wager that it will happen again. Is there a way to identify that stuff?
26:24 Speaker 03 I obviously don't know exactly how 2020 is going to go down, but it seems like one of the things that is a perennial problem is quotes. I think that if you just told everybody to Google a quote every time they were about to share some kind of macro about someone saying something really, really horrible or trying to find the source, there's famously this Trump quote that he supposedly gave to People Magazine or something, saying Republicans are the dumbest group of voters. And you can look at the articles there and you cannot find that. Like, if you just try to find the source of a quote, that would go so far.
26:59 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I mean, finding the, well, the first instruction we give to all our reporters is to show us the primary source, right?
27:05 Speaker 03 Yeah. And this is one of the easier things to do. A quote is a direct series of words that you can put into a search engine. If it's a tweet or if it's another social media post, you can go to someone's feed and look that up. You can, maybe it's been deleted, but often it won't have been. Like, these things are really surprisingly easy to check. The issue is just caring enough to check them.
27:25 Nilay Patel? I feel like a screenshot of a tweet or a Facebook post is, your reaction to that should always be, this is probably fake.
27:31 Speaker 03 Yes.
27:31 Nilay Patel? That's my instinctive reaction to any screenshot of a tweet is like, this is almost certainly fake unless I go check it.
27:37 Speaker 03 Yes. Well, there are specific cases where someone has deleted a tweet, someone has deleted a Facebook post. These things happen, but so much of the time, they're going to be fake.
27:46 Nilay Patel? So if you're listening to this, you're about to go home. Give people just like an easy, hey, you're gonna, you're gonna talk to somebody in your family who isn't as extremely online as you. Just do these three things, just as a baseline start.
28:01 Speaker 03 Check the date. That is like such a simple sounding thing. It is so incredibly helpful and important.
28:07 Nilay Patel? Okay.
28:08 Speaker 03 Ask where the facts come from, which sounds maybe a little bit conceptual, but if it's a quote, did they give an interview? If there's a study, was it actually published somewhere? If there's like an eyewitness account, who actually talked to the person? Like, just getting to the point where the fact supposedly came from is also really helpful and kind of helps cut through this rumor mill while I heard a thing.
28:31 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And I feel like, I mean, we, we do this too. We aggregate a lot of news, but getting to that primary source is the game. Whenever we do aggregation, we put that link to the primary source like way at the top. Like, the Wall Street Journal has said X. Many sites don't do that, but you can still find it.
28:47 Speaker 03 Yeah. There used to be the convention of putting source colon and then the source at the bottom of the page, which we hopefully
28:55 Nilay Patel? The semantic web
28:56 Speaker 03 Do not have to deal with.
28:57 Nilay Patel? Is something that we tried to help build and it went away.
29:00 Speaker 03 Um, yeah. So I think just trying to get to that source is really, really helpful. And the third thing is really just slow down. A lot of these things are not hard to check. They're, they just take a few minutes to read through an article fully and catch, okay, well, does this thing actually say the thing that the headline says? Does this thing say that the thing that the person who posted the tweet says is this quote being taken out of context? So much of it is just reading through or watching through the full context of a thing that you're gonna tweet about or post on Facebook.
29:34 Nilay Patel? Does this imply a level of sort of just consumption behavior that is a little more neutral than is maybe real? This is something I worry about all the time. People, one thing that the internet and particularly algorithmic feeds have like taught us is people want to feel this way. And so like you will get more content that makes you feel a certain way and you'll push the button and you'll be in this horrible loop. Do people have to change how they perceive like their internet consumption in a way to make this work more broadly? Or is this something that platforms can do? Or is it just a bunch of kids telling their relatives to slow down?
30:11 Speaker 03 I think there are a lot of things that platforms can do and I think that we regularly write about a bunch of them. This is a systemic issue. It's not something that I want to put on individual people. And I think in a lot of cases it is too assuming of good faith probably. And I think there are a lot of people who aren't going to care about this or want to use it. I'm kind of thinking of this basically as assuming that there are some people who are like me. Someone who 10 years ago was really, really invested in social causes and didn't necessarily care that much about how factually accurate things were as long as they kind of felt true. Because I felt like that was important and it was.
30:53 Speaker 03 And then I spent almost a decade learning how to meticulously follow up sources and find the context for everything. And to feel like that was the most important thing I could do was making sure that I actually understood the things that I was passionate about. And I'm just really hoping there are some people who also want to take that journey.
31:13 Nilay Patel? And what's funny is that if you're actually buttoned up and correct, it is far, far more powerful than, remember the phrase truthiness? Like we live in a world of truthiness now where everything feels right, even if it's not. But it turns out if you actually buttoned up, you have far more impact in those causes you care about.
31:31 Speaker 03 And there's a great judo to it too. That if you, there's an out of context quote, you can paste it and make the person look bad. Okay, you've made them look bad. Someone then gets to go and say, oh, well, you just took that out of context. If you go through, you look at the context, you figure out what's happening and you still think it's bad and post it, you have absolutely immunized yourself against this easy way for people to dismiss you. Like if you're right, you are more persuasive and more effective.
31:57 Nilay Patel? Is there an element to this?
31:58 Speaker 03 Maybe.
31:58 Nilay Patel? You and I have spent-
31:59 Speaker 03 Again, this, sorry, I just have to say again that I'm not completely naive. I understand there are limits to this.
32:04 Nilay Patel? Well, you and I have talked about, I don't know, trolls online for a long time. They're a part and parcel of the entire internet culture. They have been, I don't know, since the first Usenet boards were ever started, probably even before that. How do you think about, okay, here's this instruction manual to sort of evaluate the stuff you see. But then there are people who are actively trying to subvert your instincts. There are trolls, and some of them are casual, some of them are state-sponsored, some of them are just drive-bys trying to get a reaction. How does that factor into like your experience evaluating this information? Or helping other people figure out how to evaluate everything that they see?
32:45 Speaker 03 I think that this, following this stuff, has made me both appreciate how like much influence they can wield and also just makes it kind of easier to avoid. That if you take as your default position, I'm going to find out where this comes from, then a lot of the problems that trolls create are a little bit diminished. That they are often posting things that would have to be secondhand. Or they're making up stories that you're not going to find anywhere else. Or they're saying things that are clearly disproven. And that holds even if they're not malicious. So many people post those Clickhole tweets of like, Jeff Bezos said what? And they're like, wow, I can't believe he said that. Like Clickhole's not being malicious here.
33:29 Speaker 03 It's just, it's doing a thing that if you slow down a little bit, then it's really easy to avoid spreading and avoid taking seriously.
33:39 Nilay Patel? What do you make of the sort of like widespread animosity towards Snopes from like a particular corner of the internet that says Snopes itself is biased even though it's trying to just fact-check hoaxes? Like, is there a meaning in that? Is that just Snopes trying to be too much of an authority? Is it trust no one? Or is it, hey, this is actually a reasonably decent source of truth? So it's obviously being attacked by bad actors?
34:03 Speaker 03 I think it's probably a combination of all of them. I think there is a certain amount of arrogance, not in people running fact-check sites, but in the way that fact-check sites can get promoted as just go to this one one-stop-shop for all of your truth, that I think people can react to very badly. I think also that if there are groups of people who tend to depend more on lies and half-truths and tricks for things, then yeah, you're going to feel like there's a political bias, that you're going to feel like there is a bias because the thing they're dealing with is biased, like they're dealing with a group that is not acting in good faith. And so I think that it can make people who are loosely affiliated with that point of view feel attacked.
34:46 Speaker 03 And then that also, yeah, there are just a bunch of people who are acting in bad faith, who are attacking fact-checking sites in bad faith.
34:52 Nilay Patel? As there always are. All right. Is there anything else you want to hit?
34:55 Speaker 03 I think I just want to stress again that I don't want this to be a one-stop guide for everyone to use. I want this to be something that is for a group of people who are acting in good faith and I think genuinely care about things, but also want to have a process and a flow to make sure that they are holding up the sort of principles and the ideals that they actually do genuinely believe in. It's not necessarily designed to convince every conspiracy theorist. It's not something that obviously I think is going to convince a bunch of trolls, but I want to believe there are people who will find this helpful.
35:31 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And I would be remiss if I didn't point out that this is part of, your piece is excellent and it's part of sort of a larger set of educational initiatives in the world to help everyone get better at evaluating the news. The one that springs to mind is our old executive editor, Walt Mossberg, is now on the board at the News Literacy Project, which literally goes into schools and gives kids like a web-based curriculum for looking at news.
35:54 Speaker 03 And has a great online quiz for looking, like identifying the parts of a news site.
35:57 Nilay Patel? That's incredible to me. So check that out as well if you're interested. But Addie's piece is online right now, How to Fight Lies, Tricks, and Chaos Online. Thank you so much, Addie, for joining us.
36:06 Speaker 03 Yeah, thank you.
36:08 Nilay Patel? All right. My thanks to Addie Robertson, senior reporter at The Verge. You can read her piece, "How to Fight Lies, Tricks, and Chaos," online at The Verge right now. Please read it. Please share it with friends. Check out the further reading and resources we have at the bottom of that for additional information. Please help us do our part in this world of making everybody a healthier and happier internet and media consumer. I think it's pretty important right now. We'll be back later this week with a chat show, then the interview show, then the chat show. We're back at it to the end of the year. We'll see you soon.
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