Amid Firestorms of Fakery, How to Seek Reality (and Spread that Capacity)

It is still possible to thrive online. Really. But it takes a pause-before-sharing mindset, and a digital village.

Jan 15, 2025

The viral images of a fake burning Hollywood sign are the tip of an iceberg of lies.

A Facebook friend, Judy Berk, offered a smart tactic for pausing and checking before paying attention to, or sharing, something that grabs your attention out of the blizzard of un-verified material on the social web.

This was an issue before Zuckerberg’s and Musk’s “free speech” moves at Meta and Twitter > X, and before AI began generating nonstop streams of fake photography, art and video. (Even in the days of Walter Cronkite’s “that’s the way it is” nightly news signoffs, there was fake news.) But of course it’s worse than ever.

Here’s what Judy posted. Please contribute tactics or examples you’ve seen or use in the open comment thread. I’ll add some as well.

From Judy Berk:

Please stop and think and check before posting. So many of my Facebook friends - well-meaning, intelligent well-educated people - are copying and pasting this false info. If you have already posted something that you later find is false, hover over the three dots and tap on “delete,” so others do not copy and share. That’s the best way to keep crap info from going around. We need to be our own fact checkers, really. One way to fact check is by typing or copying a succinct description of the post plus the word “snopes” into a browser (safari, Chrome, Duckduckgo, whatever). It will bring up a page that shows info like this.

Global realtime connectedness is a gift as well as a threat and we all have to do some of the work to make it work. Explore my Thriving Online video series for more tips, but I’m way overdue to dive back in now that AI is flooding the zone.

Also see this CBC Kids video by Ainara Alleyne and Marielle Torrefranca. It’s good to check in with digital natives when trying to navigate new media!

CBC Kids also had an October post worth reading: Spotting fake images online: Tips from experts and why it’s important.

Try a backtrack journal

Finally, you might find value in tactics I taught in my Pace University Blogging a Better Planet course. One was a weekly assignment called a “backtrack journal.”

It was a standing assignment:

Each week, determine the path one bit of information took to get to you. If it was a powerful photo of a drowned refugee child, did it come via Facebook? Twitter? If so, was it forwarded by a friend from some other friend or feed? Who created the content? Try to trace how information MOVES.

Call bullshit

Speaking of school, do find time to explore the free online version of the amazing University of Washington course called Calling Bullshit.

Two professors at the University of Washington, Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin West, developed a course called Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data. The syllabus and readings are fantastic. Here are the lecture themes:

Lectures