Librarian Kate Hinnant was scrolling through Facebook about 10 years ago when she came across an exciting news story. The news seemed like a game changer to Hinnant, and she wanted to share it with her friends and family.
But Hinnant paused before clicking “share” because the story seemed too good to be true. Instead, she went to the web and started searching for corroborating sources.
“As I searched and searched, I realized what they had done was taken one piece of information and blown it completely out of proportion,” Hinnant said. “So, I caught myself before I shared that information with everybody.”
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Hinnant is head of communication at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire’s McIntyre Library. She has led courses about misinformation at the college and in the community.
“It occurred to me that I’m a trained librarian,” Hinnant said. “I almost fell for this. What is a person who hasn’t gone through that training supposed to do to protect themselves from falling for disinformation?”
Hinnant joined host Lee Rayburn on WPR’s “The Larry Meiller Show” to talk about misinformation, disinformation, the difference between the two and what you can do to catch them.
The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Lee Rayburn: What I hear from your story and so many others like it, is a confirmation bias. It seems like we do this because we want to believe in it.
Kate Hinnant: Well, there’s two sides to that. There’s wanting to believe it and wanting not to believe it. And those, I think, are the same confirmation bias but in different directions. Because if you read something that goes against your beliefs, you’re going to be like, “Nah, that can’t be true,” without necessarily checking it.
LR: How do I start consuming information online through a lens that identifies my own bias?
KH: The first step is to check your emotions. Check how you’re reacting to this piece.
Another piece of it is to leave the source, whether it’s a meme, article or video and seeing what other people are saying.
LR: I would imagine that it’d be good to go out and try to verify with secondary and third sources, if we could.
KH: Exactly. There are different techniques. You can look up the title of the source. You could look up the author. You can copy and paste the headline or the main point into Google and see what other people have written about this particular source or what other people have said about the concepts.
LR: How do we figure out which sources to trust, which sources that we know that would present the facts before they would present the speculation?
KH: First of all, there’s a distinction made by some people between misinformation and disinformation. Even reliable sources make mistakes.
Misinformation is when you mistakenly say something that’s false. Disinformation is when you say it on purpose because you’re trying to get a certain effect.
So when you’re reading your trusted sources, know that they also make mistakes. You may want to even verify them.
We’ve got so many sources out there. It’s great in a way, but it is also really daunting to find out whether a source is considered trustworthy. I usually Google the sources. Wikipedia usually has entries on the larger sources. And there are other people who write about the reliability of sources.
LR: When it comes to stopping the spread of disinformation or misinformation, what role do each and every one of us play?
KH: One of the reasons why people are so aware of disinformation now is that it spreads so easily on social media. That said, there’s always been disinformation and there’s always been misinformation. But there hasn’t always been social media that can spread it and amplify it.
I don’t think it’s all up to individuals, either. Think about the ways that social media companies and governments can tackle this problem.
It’s complicated because we believe in free speech, right? I mean, why shouldn’t you be able to lie? But there also is that question of harms, and there is increasingly plenty of evidence that certain types of disinformation cause harm to people.
That’s where stepping in in a thoughtful way that’s not about squashing people’s ability to express themselves or express their political points of view could protect people from the harms that can happen.
LR: What would you like to see the government’s role be in fighting against disinformation and malinformation, which is factual information shared with the intent to cause harm?
KH: They could do more to strengthen the responsibility of online platforms for protecting their users.
The European Union actually spent quite a bit of time and money teaching students [and] adults about disinformation and detecting it.
The European Union also had the idea that one of the reasons why people believe in disinformation is because they don’t trust authorities. So what should the government do? Well, their answer was: “We need to become more transparent.”
