Top Tips: Spot a conspiracy theory before you spread it
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In News Decoder’s Top Tips, we share advice for young people from experts in journalism, media literacy and education. In this week’s Top Tip, News Decoder Educational News Director Marcy Burstiner discusses the danger of spreading conspiracy theories and offers some tips on how to spot them. Top Tips are part of our open access learning resources. You can find more of our learning resources here. And learn how you can incorporate our resources and services into your classroom or educational program or by forming a News Decoder Club in your school.
Conspiracy theories can be quite convincing. I once came close to believing in a government coverup of the so-called real reason the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001. I even found myself wondering after an amazingly detailed argument whether the Earth is flat.
Many conspiracy theories are laughable. But what’s not funny is the harm they can do. Reporter Jurriaan van Eerten took us to Valencia in an article for News Decoder on recent floods there and found that disinformation was undermining government efforts to help people.
Conspiracy theories about the government poisoning people through vaccines has led to a rise in measles — a disease that can be deadly for children — and likely caused the deaths of many people who refused the Covid-19 vaccine during the height of the pandemic.
Journalists are always on the hunt for a good story. Often tips come in the way of rumors and ideas people have and sometimes it is difficult to tell a good idea from a whacko theory.
Thomas Sparrow, an international correspondent based in Germany, is an expert on disinformation. He finds it helpful to look at the European Commission’s definition of conspiracy theories: beliefs that powerful forces are secretly manipulating events.
“People who believe in these theories divide the world into good and bad,” Sparrow said in a video for Mobile Stories, as part of a joint project with News Decoder. “They say that nothing happens by accident. They argue that there are no coincidences. They often use specific groups or individuals as scapegoats.”
Be wary of controversies.
Sparrow said to avoid repeating or relying on conspiracy theories, consider whether the story is about something that’s highly emotional and controversial. Then consider who is the source of the information. Often, with conspiracy theories, it is difficult to trace the posts or conversation back to a source. In fact-based reporting by a credible news agency you should be able to trace back the information to some identifiable source.
Then consider who is sharing the information. In Valencia, van Eerten found that many of the social media posts that questioned the role of police and government seemed to be shared by Russian accounts and channels that had shared disinformation surrounding the Ukraine war.
Sparrow said you should be skeptical if information is presented as indisputable truth. Ethical journalists often hedge because what seems true now, might be disproven later and things are often more complicated than they seem.
So when considering shocking or sensational claims, be skeptical when things are presented simplistically as black-and-white or good versus bad.
Ask too, whether there is evidence to back up the claim. One way conspiracy theories seem convincing is that they seem complicated. The people who almost convinced me about the conspiracy around September 11th were able to offer all kinds of details that seemed like facts. It seemed complicated. But when I broke it down, the “facts” were just layers of suppositions around a simplistic idea: The government was behind it all.
Evaluate expertise.
Sparrow said that conspiracy theory spreaders often present as evidence testimony from experts, such as professors or doctors. “Take a look at their credentials,” he said. “What organizations are these people or experts linked to? What else have they published and where? And have they been cited by reputable institutions?”
Just as you should be skeptical of posts when it is difficult to trace them to their source, you should be skeptical of experts that are difficult to find. People who work for universities or government agencies or research institutions or valid NGOs should be easy to find.
So when someone tells you something that makes you go “Wow!”, take a deep breath. Ask your source or ask yourself this: What do we really know and how do we know it? How much of what someone thinks is true is based on a desire for it to be true?
Content retrieved from: https://news-decoder.com/top-tips-spot-a-conspiracy-theory-before-you-spread-it/.
