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New website will help you debunk the misinformation you see posted on social media

Your conspiracy-loving uncle is going to hate this.

via Actual Size/Twitter

RumorGuard by The News Literacy Project.

The 2016 election was a watershed moment when misinformation online became a serious problem and had enormous consequences. Even though social media sites have tried to slow the spread of misleading information, it doesn’t show any signs of letting up.

A NewsGuard report from 2020 found that engagement with unreliable sites between 2019 and 2020 doubled over that time period. But we don’t need studies to show that misinformation is a huge problem. The fact that COVID-19 misinformation was such a hindrance to stopping the virus and one-third of American voters believe that the 2020 election was stolen is proof enough.

What’s worse is that according to Pew Research, only 26% of American adults are able to distinguish between fact and opinion.

To help teach Americans how to discern real news from fake news, The News Literacy Project has created a new website called RumorGuard that debunks questionable news stories and teaches people how to become more news literate.

“Misinformation is a real threat to our democracy, our health and our environment. But too many people are not sure how to verify the news they come across and are convinced there is no useful action they can take to protect themselves and others from being fooled,” Charles Salter, NLP’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “We can confront these challenges by making sure more people have news literacy skills and the ability to collectively push back against the spread of false, misleading and harmful content.”

The site regularly posts debunked news stories to push back against the lies that spread online. The great thing is that the stories explain why the information shouldn’t be trusted.

Each post explains how to use five major factors of credibility to judge whether a claim is legitimate and walks the reader through the debunking process. The five criteria are a great thing to consider any time someone is reading a news article.

Source: Has the information been posted by a credible source?

Evidence: Is there any evidence that proves the claim is true?

Context: Is the provided context accurate?

Reasoning: Is the claim based on sound reasoning?

Authenticity: Is the information authentic, or has it been edited, changed, or completely made up?

The site also provides lessons to teach people how to identify misinformation so they don’t fall for it in the future. Studies show that the best way to combat misinformation is by inoculating people against it by teaching them how to spot the deceptive tactics used by illegitimate news sites.

A recent study highlighted by Upworthy from researchers from universities of Cambridge and Bristol found that “pre-bunking” was one of the most effective ways to stop the spread of misinformation.

“Across seven high-powered preregistered studies including a field experiment on YouTube, with a total of nearly 30,000 participants, we find that watching short inoculation videos improves people’s ability to identify manipulation techniques commonly used in online misinformation, both in a laboratory setting and in a real-world environment where exposure to misinformation is common,” the recently published findings note.

Over the past six years, there have been numerous attempts by social media platforms and fact-checking organizations to try to stop the spread of false information online as it slowly erodes our democracy. RumorGuard seems to be following the lessons we’ve learned over the past few years by providing fact-checks to big news stories in real time and by helping to inoculate people against fake news in the future.

Let’s hope we can stop the spread of misinformation while we still have a democracy to protect.

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Heroes

An ER nurse describes patients denying they have COVID—even while they're dying from it

New Day/Twitter, Jodi Doering/Twitter

Eight months into the coronavirus pandemic and it feels like disinformation and denial have spread as quickly as the virus itself. Unfortunately, disinformation and denial during a pandemic is deadly. Literally. People who refuse to accept the reality we're living in, who go about daily life as if nothing unusual were happening, who won't wear a mask or keep their distance from people, are preventing communities from being able to keep the pandemic under control—with very real consequences.

An ER nurse in South Dakota shared her experience treating COVID patients—some of whom refuse to believe they have COVID—and it's really shocking. One might think that the virus would become real to people if they were directly affected by it, but apparently that's just not true for some. As Jodi Doering wrote on Twitter:

"I have a night off from the hospital. As I'm on my couch with my dog I can't help but think of the Covid patients the last few days. The ones that stick out are those who still don't believe the virus is real. The ones who scream at you for a magic medicine and that Joe Biden is going to ruin the USA. All while gasping for breath on 100% Vapotherm. They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that 'stuff' because they don't have COViD because it's not real. Yes. This really happens. And I can't stop thinking about it. These people really think this isn't going to happen to them. And then they stop yelling at you when they get intubated. It's like a fucking horror movie that never ends. There's no credits that roll. You just go back and do it all over again."


Doering's Twitter post went viral, and CNN's New Day invited her to come on the show. Her interview is stunning and sad, as she explains how patients who should be spending their final hours talking with their loved ones spend them ranting about how the virus is all a hoax.

"I think the hardest thing to watch," she said, "is that people are still looking for something else and they want a magic answer and they don't want to believe COVID is real. And the reason I tweeted what I did was it wasn't one particular patient, it's just a culmination of so many people. And their last dying words are 'This can't be happening. It's not real." And when they should be spending time Facetiming their families, they're filled with anger and hatred, and it just made me really sad the other night. I just can't believe that those are going to be their last thoughts and words."

Doering explained that nurses can handle people lashing out at them in anger (bless you, nurses) but when they ask patients if they want to Facetime their families when they are clearly not likely to recover and they refuse, it's just sad.

"I think people look for anything," she said, when asked what people think is wrong with them if they don't believe it's COVID. "People want it to be influenza, they want it to be pneumonia...we've even had people say 'Well I think it might be lung cancer.' I mean, something so far fetched, and the reality is, since day one when COVID started in this area in March, you've kind of been able to say if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it's a duck...even after positive results come back, some people don't believe it."

Doering made it clear that not all patients are living—and dying—in such denial. But the deniers are memorable. "It's just a movie where the credits never roll," she said. "You just do it all over again. And it's hard and sad because every hospital, every nurse, every doctor in this state is seeing the same things. These people get sick in the same way, you treat them the same way, they die in the same way, and then you do it over again."

The medical community has learned a lot about how to treat the virus, and Doering says they are managing their patient load fairly well. But the numbers keep climbing. South Dakota has a 50% positivity rate, which is astronomical. (The CDC guidance on school reopenings recommended that schools should only consider opening when positivity rates are below 3%, for a frame of reference.)

The virus is real, the pandemic is real, the illnesses and hospitalizations are real, and the deaths are real. We've got to figure out a way to pull deniers back to reality for everyone's sake, including their own.

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Democracy

Philadelphia's Republican city commissioner has no time for Trump's tsunami of fraud lies

60 Minutes/Twitter, Diana O & Larry McM/Twitter

As President Trump continues to beat the drum of fraud and cheating with no solid evidence to back it up, and as many Republicans seem hell bent on sticking with Trump to the bitter end, there are some Republicans who are putting country—and reality—before party.

One of those Republicans is Philadelphia city commissioner Al Schmidt. He and his office are in charge of the vote count for the city, which has come under a huge microscope with Pennsylvania being the state that pushed Biden over the threshold of 270 electoral votes. Trump's team has been pushing hard to try to make Pennsylvania out to be a hotbed of corruption and illegal voting, but Schmidt says the allegations being made against Philadelphia's ballot counting have no basis in reality.


Schmidt was interviewed by 60 Minutes over the weekend, where he described the "crazy" things he's heard and how his office has been receiving death threats over it.

"From the inside looking out, it feels all very deranged," he said. "At the end of the day, we are counting eligible votes cast by voters. The controversy surrounding it is something I don't understand. It's people making accusations that we wouldn't count those votes, or people are adding fraudulent votes...just coming up with all sorts of crazy stuff."

Schmidt said they're getting "calls to our offices reminding us this is what the second amendment is for. People like us...for counting votes...in a democracy."

Despite the tsunami of misinformation floating around social media, including from the president of the United States, Schmidt is holding firm. Regardless of party or personal loyalty, truth comes first.

When CNN asked what evidence of any widespread fraud Schmidt had seen in the count in Philadelphia, he replied, "I have not. If evidence of widespread fraud—or evidence of any fraud at all—is brought to our attention, we take a look at it and we refer it to law enforcement, as we always do in every election."

"I have seen the most fantastical things on social media," Schmidt continued. "making completely ridiculous allegations that have no basis in fact at all, and see them spread. And I realize a lot of people are happy about this election, and a lot of people are unhappy about this election. One thing I can't comprehend is how hungry people are to consume lies and to consume information that is not true."

The CNN host asked him to clarify what information was not true, to which Schmidt replied, "Just the other day I saw something that had a long list of people that they said were dead voters who voted in Philadelphia. So when we took a break between everything else that we're doing, we looked it up, each one of them, to see what their vote history was. Not a single one of them voted in Philadelphia after they died. It's one of these things that kind of bounces around out there, that echoes around, that people say from one to another they heard something, or they heard from someone who saw something that they think might have been x, y, or z. And it's really impossible to keep up with those."

Schmidt is not alone.

The international delegation of election watchers Trump invited to witness our electoral process released a preliminary report saying that they were impressed by the conduct of our elections and chastised Trump for his baseless accusations of systemic fraud. The New York Times called election officials in all 50 states to find out what evidence they had seen of widespread fraud, and guess what. All the officials they spoke to, from both parties, said that no fraud or irregularities had played a role in the outcome of the election.

Irregularities do occur in every election, and there are systems in place for catching and remedying them. And every investigation into voter fraud—including Trump's own administration's Voter Fraud Commission—has found that no evidence of widespread fraud. Any individual instances of fraud that have been found amount to a miniscule fraction of a fraction of a percent of total legitimate votes. The case for fraud just isn't there.

And the accusation isn't benign. Right now, we have a president who is not just contesting the election results, but behaving as if it's a foregone conclusion that he's going to remain in power. He's vetting appointees for a second term. He's making sweeping changes in Pentagon leadership. He's undermining Americans' faith in our electoral system, which puts the safety and stability of our nation directly in harm's way.

The peaceful transfer of power is one of the defining elements of our democracy, a vital tradition that reminds us we have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. When the people have spoken at the ballot box, no matter who wins, the leaders of our government accept the result. In some elections, like Bush/Gore in 2000, results truly are so close that a challenge and recount is warranted. But we all know the legal challenges in this election aren't about a close count. With Biden's commanding lead of more than five million votes in the popular vote and winning key swing states by more than five figures, the result isn't that close.

This refusal to concede is 100% the emotional response of a malignant narcissist who is incapable of admitting defeat of any kind. It's the childish reaction of a man whose dad raised him to believe you're either a fighter or a loser, and it's not acceptable to be a loser. The fact that some prominent Republicans are coddling his delusions, feeding the misinformation machine that has led to millions of Americans not accepting an obvious result and undermining people's faith in our free and fair elections, is baffling and embarrassing, but it doesn't change the reality that Al Schmidt and other election officials keep reiterating.

Joe Biden is president-elect of the United States. And no amount of baseless allegations will change that.

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Democracy

Donald Trump Jr. used real CDC data to draw an absolutely ridiculous conclusion

In the misinformation age, it's important to understand that not all misinformation is fake. Some of it fabricated out of thin air, but more often than not, it includes legitimate data that is either misread, misunderstood, or misrepresented.

Such is the case with Donald Trump Jr.'s ridiculous claim on Fox News that COVID-19 deaths are

"These people are truly morons," Trump Jr. said without a hint of irony, before explaining to Ingraham how we "went through the CDC data" and came to the conclusion that the COVID-19 death number "is almost nothing." He said, "We've gotten control of this thing, we understand how it works, they have the therapeutics to be able to death with this."

"Look at my Instagram," he added. "It's gone to almost nothing."

Anyone who pays any attention at all to daily death tolls from the virus knows that the idea that deaths are "almost nothing" is simply false on its face. We have regularly had between 500 and 1000 deaths per day for months, and those numbers have begun to climb again in recent weeks. In fact we had over 1000 deaths yesterday, the day he tried to make this claim. So what the hell is Jr. talking about?

We could just brush him off as an idiot and move along, but the problem is there are millions of people who will watch, listen, and believe him. He says his numbers are from the CDC, after all. So let's take a look at what he shared on his Instagram.

Looking at the first chart he shared of weekly death numbers, we see that deaths spiked, dropped, went back up in the summer, then have tapered off since—but with a huge drop in the past few weeks.

The second chart puts those weekly death numbers up against the weekly case counts. Judging by this chart, it appears that while cases have gone up (because of more testing, according to Jr., which is only very partially true) deaths have plummeted.

So what's going on here?

The data Jr. is using is the CDC's weekly provisional death count, not the current recorded death count. And that distinction makes his conclusion 100% wrong.

The CDC provisional death count only counts a death once death certificate paperwork is fully processed. That process can take anywhere from one to eight weeks, which is clearly explained on the CDC website that Jr. got the data from. So the most recent weeks in his chart aren't up-to-date at all.

There's even a big blue box at the top of the page that says, "Note: Provisional death counts are based on death certificate data received and coded by the National Center for Health Statistics as of October 30, 2020. Death counts are delayed and may differ from other published sources (see Technical Notes). Counts will be updated periodically."

In fact, if you look at the numbers posted today for the last two months compared to the numbers in his chart, they've all gone up, because more death certificates for those weeks have been processed. That's how this chart works. The data is incomplete, especially in recent weeks.

So yeah, Jr. is using real CDC data, but he's drawing completely the wrong conclusion from it.

Now, perhaps that's a result of not understanding it (which is a problem if you are going on national television as a mouthpiece for the White House during a pandemic). Perhaps it's a result of neglecting to read the whole web page and just pulling numbers from the chart (which is also a problem if you're trying to speak authoritatively while calling other people morons). Or perhaps it's an intentional misrepresentation (which is a problem for obvious reasons, not the least of which is that it could lead to more dead Americans).

While it's tempting to lean toward Don Jr.'s incompetence, there's one detail that makes me wonder if it was purposeful. Donald Trump Jr. shared this information on his Instagram, but not on Facebook (at least not that I could find). The reason that's suspect is that people can't click on links on Instagram. In fact, if they're using the mobile app, which is how the vast majority of people use Instagram, you can't even copy and paste the links, so it's very difficult to get to the website he cites. On Facebook, the CDC links in his share text would have shown up as clickable links, and maybe—just maybe—some of his readers would bother checking his accuracy for themselves.

People using the provisional death count erroneously isn't new. I wrote about it several months ago, when a claim kept going around that the CDC had lowered its death count. It hadn't. People were just confusing the provisional death count numbers with the real-time death count and running with their conspiracy theories.

So when Trump Jr. shares his charts and asks on Instagram, "Why isn't the ACTUAL data from the CDC being discussed?" he needs to know that it is. This data just isn't what he thinks it is.

And when he says, "I guess they can't rule you with fear if they tell you the truth," I just want to bang my head on my desk and then burn down the entire internet so that we don't have to be subjected to the Trump family's misinformation and absurd gaslighting any longer.

Happy voting, everyone.

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