6.1: What’s Credible Anymore? Fake News and Evaluating the Information You Encounter During Your Research

Fake News, Information Bubbles, and Filter Bubbles

Whether the agenda is to sway public opinion, to affect the outcome of an election, or simply to make money, the proliferation of fake news creators and distributors has complicated our already complex information environment. Perhaps as bad, “fake news” has become an easy way to dismiss stories and information we don’t like without addressing the actual content of such stories.

When you get your news primarily from one source or from one partisan perspective, you are operating in an information bubble. You encounter stories that confirm your view of the world and avoid stories that challenge those views. Information bubbles have a natural appeal—they provide us with stories and perspectives that reinforce what we already believe about the world.

Information bubbles happen naturally when we seek out news and news sources that align with our world views. This isn’t limited to politics and current events either. They can happen within professions and within organizations too. Social media can also create information bubbles, as like-minded friends share articles they haven’t verified but that conform to some preconceived idea of the world. And once a story has been shared enough times, “fake news” can take on an unearned mantle of authority.

Worse, “filter bubbles” are making it more difficult to step outside of those information bubbles. Social media and search engines use algorithms to rank what appears in your feeds and search results. These algorithms look at your previous engagement with social media posts and search results in order to provide you with content that aligns with your interests. These sorts of tailored experiences online--whatever their virtues--limit our information gathering in ways we can’t anticipate. The algorithms are always changing and usually closely guarded by the companies that create and implement them.

Until we apply skepticism and critical thought to the information that aligns with our world views just as we would for information that challenges us, we set ourselves up to be fooled by fake news. Until we expand our information bubbles to include more perspectives and coverage from a more diverse community of scholars and reporters, we limit what we can know and learn about our world.

Evaluating Information

Being able to critically evaluate the information we encounter on the web is a hugely valuable research skill. Why?

Because so much information can be found online, and not everything we read is true. Sometimes information can be narrowly accurate, yet still be so biased, selective, or leading as to make the information essentially useless for research purposes. Some information may have once been accurate, but is now simply be too out-of-date to be useful. Sometimes the authors of an article are not experts on what they are writing about. And sometimes the problem is not the accuracy of the information, it’s the lack of research-quality detail and substance.

Being a critical consumer of information is helpful not only in school, but also in our daily lives. Just as we need the information in our college papers to be based on reliable, quality sources, we also want the health advice, product reviews, and other kinds of information we personally use to be reliable.