On February 12 2017, on his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver said the following (video):
We all need to commit to defending the reality of facts, but it's going to take work. As we've already seen, protests, calls to legislators and lawsuits are effective ways to try an drag the administration back to reality, but this needs to go down to a personal level as well.
We should make extra effort on social media to try and verify stories before passing them on, especially if they confirm our preexisting biases. Ask questions of yourself, like:
- Is this a source I know and recognize?
- Has anyone fact-checked this?
- Does it link to primary sources, and do those sources match what the story says?
And if you see an outlet repeatedly getting things wrong and never correcting it, maybe stop trusting it, whether that outlet is some idiot's blog or the Whitehouse!
I couldn't agree more with the advice given here. Online news is mired with misinformation and disinformation and we all truly can make a difference by being more rigourous when consuming and sharing information. For me, the annotated web comes immediately to mind as a very useful platform for this kind of endeavor.
Annotation is well suited to fact-checking, comparing sources, highlighting potential biases, all of these things John Oliver mentions and more. I encourage anyone reading this to read about it and give it a try. In particular, I am a big supporter of Open Annotation as a way for citizens to help each other in the huge effort of discerning truth from fiction online.
By the way, I am not associated with Hypothes.is in any way, nor is it the only annotation project out there. I just think they explain the idea best, and they also offer a great free, open, not-for-profit service you can try out. You can also check out this list of similar projects.