I'd like to resuscitate a hashtag proposed back in 2017 by disinformation expert Sara-Jayne Terp: #
ICheckedThisQuote from her article:
"...We’re entering a time where misinformation and double-talk are likely to dominate our feeds, and even people we trust are panic-sharing false information. It’s not enough to pick a media outlet or news site or friend to trust, because they’ve been fooled recently too.... As a first step, we should separate out our belief in a source from our belief in a piece of information from them, and factor in our knowledge about their potential motivations in that. ...
We want to believe stuff? We need to do the leg-work of cross-checking that the source is real..., finding alternate sources, getting someone to physically go look at something and send photos.... We want to do this without so much work every time? We need to share that load; help each other out with #icheckedthis tags, pause and think before we hit the “share” button. ..."
We've advanced a bit since 2017. This year, thanks to the miracle of AI, it will become vastly easier to flood the Internet with plausible-sounding nonsense. And search engines will start presenting AI answers to your queries, so that you needn't even bother looking at the source of the information.
So I'm going to start using #
ICheckedThis if I put some actual effort into checking out a story that I'm sharing.
Original post below [note: "IW" is "Information Warfare"]...
Sara-Jayne Terp, 2017-02-22:
The internet is made of beliefs