Thursday, June 18, 2020

Says Who? So What?

There’s tons of information about COVID-19 and the pandemic out there, especially on social media. Unfortunately, not all of it is accurate. Here’s how to make sense of it all

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By André van Heerden, Communications Director

My father was a high school teacher for many years. He was known as a disciplinarian and said that he learned a valuable lesson by listening to some of his tougher students.

When he would tell them that they shouldn’t be doing something, they would often shoot back with, “Says who?” And after informing them of a particular rule, or hierarchy of authority, they’d reply, “So what?”

While this sort of challenge might have been frustrating, my dad began to encourage his history and world religions students to ask those same two exact questions: “Says who?” and “So what?” He wanted to encourage his students to not just accept what they were being told as fact, and to determine why something might—or might not be—important.

Much has been written about fake news and media bias, and some of it could be improved by the media asking those two basic questions as well. Often, inaccurate stories originate because someone reports something as news when their source isn’t a first-hand account, or the initial report isn’t complete, or the information is more of a commentary than a reporting of facts.

Asking “Says who?” would help determine if the person being quoted should actually be trusted as an accurate source. And asking “So what?” would help determine bias and relevance.

But while those bold questions might seem like they’re entirely outward facing, they also hold a great deal of value when pointed inward.

Journalist and author Shane Snow writes that “much of our basis for how we see the world and operate in it is built on things that we’ve already taken at face value. We navigate our lives based on a whole lot of assumptions. And the longer we operate with assumptions, the harder it is to let go of them.”

If we can stop ourselves from immediately accepting and passing on news, and look deeper at the source, and why it’s making us feel angry or righteous, we should be better able to objectively determine if we should be giving this news life or not.

This might feel like just a self-help exercise, but it can have a positive impact on society as well.

In 2018, the journal Science published a huge study that looked at the spread of information through Twitter. Incredibly, it found that false information spreads much quicker than true information.

The study concluded that “falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information.” This is especially alarming when a lot of society looks to social media for their news.

Some might want to point their fingers at propaganda websites, or devious foreign powers, as the culprits, but that wouldn’t be accurate. The Science study noted that it’s not influential Twitter accounts with millions of followers, or foreign bots designed to automatically spread misinformation. It’s ordinary Twitter users.

Regular people, with small followings, just passing on false news to their friends, who in turn do the same thing. That’s what’s driving most of the spread of false information.

There are some good ways to verify if what you’re seeing should be trusted or not. There are tricks to how statistics and data are displayed, and therefore how to be read, and there are ways to check sources and links and weigh evidence.

But it should first begin with us not just repeating and passing on what we hear. Stop and think like your angry, teenage self and ask, “Says who?” and “So what?”

Says Who? So What?

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