The fact-checking toolkit to navigating misinformation

As we've heard throughout the season , it's an increasingly difficult task to figure out what's true and what isn't . Algorithms like when you're scared or angry . They want you to click and argue with a bot , to feel panicked , like you're not safe , and some powerful people like it that way .

So learning to find and recognize reliable information is even more essential than ever .

I'm your host , takara Small , and the podcast is brought to you by CIRA , the Canadian Internet Registration Authority , the nonprofit building a trusted internet for Canadians . So to help us break the fake , let's talk to an expert in this field . To help us break the fake , let's talk to an expert in this field . Matthew Johnson is our guy .

He works for MediaSmarts , which is Canada's centre for digital and media literacy .

When we seek out information today , the internet is where we find it . Seek out information today , the internet is where we find it , and more and more , that is even how governments , scientific authorities , public health agencies , medical associations . This is how good information is shared .

Not being or choosing not to use the internet is simply not a strategy that can work today .

So , on an individual level , when we need information whether that is information about things like health , whether that's information about things like nutrition or news or things relating to politics and elections we need to have the skills and the knowledge to be able to discern good sources of information from bad ones .

At the collective level , there's also the worry that we are losing a sense of shared reality , that we are losing our ability to have meaningful debate , because people are operating in completely different information worlds , and there's a lot of evidence that shows that that increasingly and it's not as bad yet in Canada as it is in some other places , but

increasingly people are operating in what is sometimes called a curation bubble , which is a mixture of the choices that we make about what sources of information to engage with and the ways that those sources then filter .

What we're seeing , and what that means again , is that we may be operating in completely different media and information environments , and that means that it becomes almost impossible to have a meaningful , reasoned debate about anything of any significance emphasize the ways that apply to the average person , someone who doesn't inhabit the media space .

We teach a program called break the fake , which teaches what we call companion reading . It's sometimes called lateral reading as well , and the idea of it is to take four quick steps , and usually you won't need to take four of them .

Most of the time , one or two of them will do the job , and each one generally is only going to take you anywhere between 30 seconds and a couple of minutes , and the purpose of these is to find out whether a source is worth your attention , whether it's worth engaging with at all , and to get the general consensus on a topic .

Essentially , if you're seeing a news story , for instance , you want to know did it really happen and are you getting basically the facts ? So the first of those four steps is using fact checking tools , because there are a lot of professional fact checkers out there . Snopes is the most well-known of them , but there are dozens .

Some of them focus on different topics on different places , they operate in different languages and we can use these to find out if someone has already either verified or debunked a story .

We actually made that even easier by creating a custom search engine that searches more than 20 of these fact checkers , all members of the International fact-checking Network or signatories to its code of principles . It searches them all at once and nothing else .

So that's a really good first step , because if something's already been verified or debunked by a professional fact checker , you can find out using that tool in 30 seconds .

If that doesn't work , or if you have reason to think that it's maybe something that isn't going to be that easily fact checked , if it's not a simple factual claim , we recommend finding where something originally came from , because we know that today most people don't go to news sources .

They get news through social media , through websites like reddit , other places like that , but news typically today comes to us , and we know that young people in particular operate with the assumption that any important news story will find its way to them through their social media feeds .

So the really important thing is to find out where a story originally came from and , generally speaking , there's not much point in trying to verify a source until you've found where it originally came from , because the source is probably just sharing something that they got elsewhere .

Once you find where it originally came from , because the source is probably just sharing something that they got elsewhere Once you find where something originally came from whether it is a claim , an image , a video , a news story then you can verify it if it's one you don't already recognize .

So if you're able to follow links or do a search and track it back to a source you already know is reliable , like Globe and Mail , the New York Times , then at that point you know enough to assume that it's probably basically true .

If you don't , then you need to do a little bit of work to verify that source , because there are a lot of legitimate news sources that you've probably never heard of , news sources that you've probably never heard of .

Every good-sized city around the world has at least one typically more than one news source , often a newspaper and a TV station that maybe has their own news website , and no one will have heard of all of these .

But that also provides an opportunity for people who spread disinformation , because it's very easy to make a website that looks like a real newspaper website or looks like the website of a real news organization . So you need to do a little bit of searching .

Ideally it'll have an entry in Wikipedia , which is again a great way of finding out the general consensus whether or not something really exists , whether or not something is generally seen as basically reliable .

If you can't do that , you can do a search for it and exclude its own web address with the minus operator , so you put in the name of the website and then put in minus sign and then , without any spaces , its own web address , and that'll show you every reference to it online outside of its own website , and that gives you a good idea of what other people

say about it . And , generally speaking , that'll get you to the point where you know whether it's reliable or not . And our fourth step which sometimes is going to be the first one , because it works really well for things like news stories is to check other sources , to check against sources that you know are reliable .

An easy way to do that is to use the news tab on Google instead of the main search . So if you see a claim or a news story , do a search on Google or another search engine and then click on the news tab .

And what's different about the news tab is that all of the sources in it are real news sources that really exist and also , because you're probably going to have multiple results , you can quickly compare them to see if everyone is giving basically the same story . In some cases , there are going to be as well best sources you can turn to .

So if you see a claim , for instance , about the electoral process , you can go to Elections Canada , or , if it's a provincial or municipal election , the elections authority in your own province or territory . To get that answer .

And that is a really important bit of skill and knowledge is knowing what are the places you can turn to , what are the best sources of information on different topics ?

The web address is mediasmartsca forward slash fact dash checker , and really anyone who has a Google account can make a custom search engine that simply searches only the websites that you're having to do research about a particular topic , maybe a health topic that's affecting someone in your family , maybe it's a hobby , maybe , if you're a student , it's a research

topic that you're looking into for school . You can build your own custom search engine that only includes the kinds of sources that you already know are reliable , and that means you're not going to get a lot of irrelevant and possibly unreliable results .

So how do you incite people

to do the work without becoming overwhelmed ?

Most of the time we don't need to read a whole article for bias and point of view and everything like that . Sometimes we are going to do that kind of close reading when it's a source that we already know is reliable is worth our attention , but most of the time we just want to find out are the basic details of the story true ?

So an example that I just did earlier this morning was I saw a claim on social media that every Tesla Cybertruck had been recalled . I followed the link and it was a source that I didn't recognize . I did a quick search on that source didn't have a Wikipedia entry , did a search for the source , with its website excluded .

Couldn't really find any references to it , anybody talking about it . So then I did a news search and I saw the same story was being covered by CNN . It was being covered by a number of other sources that I knew were reliable .

So at this point I could completely ignore that original claim and take a look at them , because I'm going to trust them more to give me full and accurate details . Now I described , I think , four steps there there , but all of that took me about 45 seconds , because I knew those steps to take , I have practiced them and I knew when to stop .

And that probably is the most important part of the message when it comes to dealing with source fatigue , as you say , is knowing that you're allowed to stop , that once you know enough , once you've reached a source that you know is basically reliable , or once a fact checker that you can count on has confirmed or debunked it , you're allowed to stop .

So if you want to know what the consensus view is of something like who built the pyramids , if you want to know the consensus on whether or not a particular news source or a particular Institute or whatever is reliable , whether they're objective , wikipedia is a great place to go for those , but it often falls down on some of the details .

Similarly , search engines are a great place to go if you want to answer a specific question , but they don't do a very good job of giving you the high level consensus view .

So I would say that , in that respect , ai tools are a lot more like Wikipedia that , if you learn how to phrase your question effectively , if you are clear that you're asking them for the general consensus , if you're clear to them that you want them to only consider reliable sources , that you want them to only consider reliable sources , and if you are clear to

them that you want them to identify how far in or out of the mainstream competing theories may be , they actually can be really useful .

The other thing that I would recommend is to always either use an AI tool like perplexity , which gives you automatically all its sources , or instruct the AI when you're giving it the prompt to give you sources , and then , just as you should when you're using Wikipedia , make sure you check up on those sources , make sure that the sources it's using are genuinely

reliable and that they are telling you that they actually do say what the ai summary says they are . So , just like wikipedia , we want to use those ai tools as a starting point and to get a broad sense of consensus , rather than getting you your whole answer .

So for some time , in the early days of deep fakes , people were told to look closely at them , to look for inconsistencies , to look for errors , in the same way that in the early days of verifying information online , people were told to look closely at a source .

But we already know that again , that not only doesn't work , it actually frequently backfires , because when you look closely at a source , what you're looking at is what the source is telling you about itself , rather than whether it's generally considered to be reliable .

And similarly with deepfakes , that advice about looking closely at them was only useful for a couple of years . But at this point , we can't count on the kinds of things that we used to see in deepfakes .

We can't count on there being extra fingers or weird things and , as well , it's very easy to misidentify things as deepfakes , because you often do get weird artifacts . Because of issues with focus , because of issues with file compression , you will often get real videos or photos that look like deepfakes .

There are a surprising number of people in the world who actually have six fingers , so what you need to do instead is find out where it came from , because the one thing that a deep fake does not have is provenance . When we're trying to verify a photo or a video , we're tracking it back to where it came from originally .

That's why , with photos or other images , reverse image search is such an important tool to learn or other images , reverse image search is such an important tool to learn , um . But we can also use the other strategies that we teach around finding the original source of something .

If it came from somewhere uh , if it came from a news organization , if it came from a government authority , if it came from someone that you can confirm is real and had reason to be somewhere or you have good evidence that they were an eyewitness to something you'll find evidence of that . If it's a deep fake , it's not going to have any provenance .

That trail is going to run cold or you're just going to wind up at someone's instagram account .

Or sometimes , as in the case of the famous uh fake of the Pope in the Puffer Code , you'll actually find that it was originally identified as a deep fake that was made by someone who was demonstrating how convincing deep fake photography had become , but that when it got shared , it lost that context .

So you may find , once you track it to its original source , that it's actually identified as a deepfake .

that information out to everybody . The main pillar of that for us is our Break the Fake workshop , which is about an hour and covers all four of those . We put it on whenever we can . We make it available to other organizations , places like libraries , to put it on . We also have a self-directed version on our website that anyone can click through .

We've also done videos , tip sheets and other ways of communicating that content , but we do know that it's going to be most effective when this material is taught early and consistently , that it's going to be most effective when people learn it early and have more time to learn it .

We are seeing increased interest in learning these skills from organizations that work with seniors , organizations that work with new Canadians , and so some of them are collaborating with us . Some of them have their own programs that they're developing .

It's definitely taking time and that's one of the areas where we would like to see more leadership is in developing a more consistent program , um at the provincial or the uh federal level , or ideally both , to make sure that everyone is learning these essential skills .

So how do we discuss this , how do we deal with it and what are your thoughts on it ?

We did an update that we launched last uh fall at the end of 2024 and one of the things that we added to it was looking specifically at what's called intellectual humility , because intellectual humility is the difference between genuine critical thinking and conspiracy thinking .

As you're probably aware , most people who are conspiracy thinkers describe themselves and , in many cases , genuinely think of themselves as critical thinkers , but what's actually happening in most cases is that they're starting with the conclusion and finding evidence to support it , and so what is really essential is that they're starting with the conclusion and finding

evidence to support it , and so what is really essential is that intellectual humility , that possibility that you might be wrong , that openness to being wrong . So some of that again comes down to simple habits .

So we encourage people to ask themselves three questions before you even start investigating something , and those are what do I already think or believe about this ? So figure out what your starting point is . Why do I want to confirm or debunk this ?

So , if you know ahead of time that it's something you want to be true or something you don't want to be true , that tells you that you should be a little bit more , put a little bit more effort into one side or the other , or verifying or debunking .

And the third one and this really is the one that is the key difference is what would make me change my mind ? So decide ahead of time what kind of evidence would genuinely change your perspective . And if there isn't any , then you're not doing critical thinking .

If there's no circumstance in which you would change your mind , then you're not doing critical thinking . So that's at the individual level . But obviously there are , as you said , pressures . There are social pressures that make it more difficult to do that kind of intellectually humble critical thinking .

Elements just of the structure , not necessarily things that were intended , but consequences of the design of social media that do make us tend to entrench our views rather than reconsidering them .

Um , and of course , social pressures , because we know that , partly as a result of the changes in our media ecosystem , but also just partly because of changes in social values , we have become more polarized . Now we're actually not as polarized as we think we are . People generally overestimate , particularly in Canada , how polarized we genuinely are .

But the fact is that when we're having a conversation with someone . How polarized we actually are doesn't matter .

What matters is how polarized we think we are , and when we are in that situation , when we think that a particular view or a particular idea is associated with our political identity , obviously we're going to be less willing to entertain the possibility that we might be wrong .

It's one of the reasons why , in our educational materials , we generally use quite politically neutral examples , because we want people to learn the skills of authenticating information and critical thinking in an environment where they're not going to be swayed one way or another by their political views .

But I think it is also going to take over time a commitment I think we are going to have to commit as a society to being open to listening to alternate views , and that doesn't mean listening to every alternate view . As the saying goes , you don't want your mind to be so open that your brain falls out .

But that's why part of critical thinking and part of finding and verifying information is learning how to recognize the expert consensus on a topic and understanding how people arrive at consensus , that the scientific consensus on a topic or the consensus in a field like history is not just what everybody agreed to believe it's the weight of evidence and understanding the

process by which consensus changes , which really is not something that we learn , for instance , in science class . we may learn this is what scientists used to think and this is what scientists think now , but very rarely do people actually learn the process by which scientific consensus changes .

And when you understand that process , you're much less likely to fall for arguments that are based on a misunderstanding of that , a sense that , well , everything is provisional .

Withoculation you introduce a weakened version of a claim so that people come to recognize it , and there's some evidence that it can work pretty well , even in cases where people are politically or ideologically inclined to believe a claim .

Um , there are some things about inoculation that can make it challenging , um , so the biggest concern is that , essentially , you have to directly counter the claim that they're going to encounter later , and so that means being very proactive .

It means identifying the most common and the most potentially harmful false claims and coming up with effective counters to them , and it also means getting those counters to people before they encounter that actual information , in the same way that a vaccine doesn't do you really any good after you're sick . So it takes a lot of work . It takes a lot of planning .

I think it can be really effective . I think it's something that can be very effective within certain disciplines .

So I think , for instance , in the school system , there are a lot of things that could be done , for instance , in science class , to pre-bunk common misconceptions and common false claims around things like vaccines or climate change or the way the scientific method works .

As I've mentioned earlier , in history there are things that can be specifically pre-bunked about how hate groups misuse ancient and medieval history , or even about people's views of what life was like in the 1950s , which is often set up as a very idealized time by certain people spreading particular political messages .

Harder it is to pre-bunk specific claims and the harder it is to get those pre-bunking messages to them before they encounter the false claim that you're trying to immunize them against .