The amount of junk news is overwhelming. I spend a lot of time trying to sort out the truth from fiction on Twitter.
A good example was yesterday when this faked up tweet from Donald Trump was circulated.
A lot of normally good sources were caught out. The perpetrator meant the "tweet" as a joke and in a long stream of mea culpas tried to rescue his reputation.
I twigged almost immediately because it was over the character limits for Twittering in 2015 but my first reaction was to be fooled too. Snopes was quick off the mark and quickly spread the word
Which bring us to the current news reports about the videos posted by Senator Molan. He is reported to have said he has no regrets about reposting some videos from a Brit Right-wing group. One purports to show young Muslim men attacking a woman.
I immediately hit Snopes and it quickly pointed out that atleast one of the videos had falsely been described as an attack on the woman for not covering herself properly. It wasn't. See here. Note that Molan says on his Twitter page that "Retweets do not indicate approval". Problem is the video story is presented as fact.
This is where the world is really changing. Until only a few years ago, we didn't have to fact check to hard. Gross distortion was relatively easy to spot. For example the crude and cruel Nazi WW2 conspiracy theory poster...obvious to us with 20/20 hindsight but not for Herman Schmidt in 1943 Germany.
We armour ourselves daily. Sorting out the good and bad sources, doing our own research and detective work, finding sound factchecker sites such as Polifact on US politics and the careful articles or The Conversation and finding the journalists and commentators who have not succumbed to complete partisanship to the point where they bend or make up facts. And then there is the effort we must make to work out what images represent reality.
Will it be enough? this excellent NY Times article on how hackable our future may be is not hopeful. But I am, we are getting better at sorting.
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