Is It Real or Fake News? Seven Ways to Figure It Out
For voters, elections can be noisy and overwhelming. But it doesn’t help that we’re living in a time of the unreal and surreal. That is, we are witnessing actions, events and individuals that we could never have imagined or thought possible. Add to that the growing use of methods, such as artificial intelligence, to manipulate sounds and images.
It’s enough to make anyone completely doubt reality and become skeptical of everything around them. Here are a few tips to help sharpen your eyes, ears and brains to separate facts from fakes.
Watch Yourself. Your gut is good at letting you know when you’re being manipulated. You’ve seen it happen when a restaurant or grocery story ad made you hungry. Political ads and events work the same way. They are designed to make you want something and to believe that the candidate can be, do or cause that something. After you see, hear or read political ads and speeches, pay attention to what you, the voter, are ‘hungry’ for and how the ad did or did not make you feel the candidate could ‘feed’ you.
Notice words, especially verbs. In political ads, verbs are a subtle and simple way to show how they want voters to feel about the candidate. The politician might have controlled the budget while in office. But they could also have reorganized, gotten control of, or managed the budget. In this example, ‘reorganized’ might appeal to voters who value order, structure and routine. ‘Controlled’ could appeal to voters who value power. The word ‘managed’ is for people who value professionalism. But in every case, the word chosen doesn’t at all help voters understand exactly what the candidate did with or to the budget.
Read the fine print. A candidate’s ad rolls up in your feed or on TV. You can discover more about them by learning who paid for the ad, and who made it. Some answers are along the screen edges, the bottom edge usually. And it’s in tiny, light colored, thin letters. Enlarge and read it. First, find out who posted it. Consider how they benefit from the video. Follow the money.
Compare notes and quotes. Inconsistency is a big clue in evaluating claims, accusations, threats or other compelling quotes allegedly coming from candidates. Put that weird quote in a search engine, add quotation marks around it and search. If they really said it, it’s likely more than one site would report that they did. Long established news outlets fact-check information. They generally won’t use what they can’t verify and will tell you when they can’t. A good rule is to check for at least two.
Artificial intelligence has nothing on the human mind. AI-generated material isn’t as hard to spot as many think. Look over photos for blurry spots or parts of the photo where the clarity doesn’t match. In videos with people speaking, AI is to blame for mouth movements that don’t match spoken works. On video and audio, AI-generated speech is stiffly perfect, but it also mispronounces names or words that aren’t widely familiar, like ‘lee-vair-NWAH’ for Livernois. AI humans often have too-flawless skin, hair and clothes. But they might also have extra fingers, other body parts that aren’t in quite the right shape, size or position. AI videos also feature objects that teleport to a different spot or vanish into thin air for no reason. Test yourself with quizzes like Britannica Education’s Real or AI: Can you tell the difference?
Think before you click. Scrolling along Facebook or Instagram, you come across a news story. “Fans will miss this beloved singer,” appears as a headline above a photo of your favorite entertainer, whom you thought was very much alive. You click and get unrelated articles and ads constantly appearing. Clickbait compels you to click on it quickly without thinking. It often has vague-but-shocking headlines over a misleading photo to make you feel sad, excited or angry as well as curious. The more clicks, the more money the site makes from ads and videos. So don’t automatically click everything that immediately startles, outrages or shocks you. Read the url of the link it asks you to click. Look for the words appearing between ‘http:’ and the suffix (.com, .net, .edu, etc.). You’ll see that the site is probably not one that you know well or trust.
Trust your instincts; they work. Only you know what you think, feel and value. Maybe you’ve watched video of a known political candidate, who says something that strikes you as surprising and a little odd. Or you saw a political ad and felt like something doesn’t look quite right. You’re probably on to something. So get closer and find out what it is.