 Yeah Okay, so Thank you all for making it to the crowd sourcing crowd sourcing skepticism workshop It's good to see so many people here because I do think that this workshops covering some of the most important stuff in skepticism specifically I mean skeptic activism I think Activism is one of the most important things we do in the skeptical movement because we can all be skeptical at home Don't need anyone else to do that to be part of the movement. It's about doing something making a difference and skeptical activism is Just there to help other people be skeptical to to help other people not make bad decisions And to help other people avoid misinformation and deception So I think this activism is incredibly important because when people in our society act on bad information We all pay a price. So for example When people believe that vaccination causes autism then we end up getting outbreaks of preventable diseases When people believe that delaying recommended treatments for nine months for alternative treatments Can cost them their lives and that costs all of us something or When researchers for example, you know genuine scientific researchers spend their time trying to find find out where the homeopathy works for the thousandth time ignoring the other thousandth of thousands of Papers and studies that have been done on the subject that have shown no discernible difference from placebo or And based on no scientific basis whatsoever Then they are real researchers that are spending their research hours that could be spent finding real medicines and real drugs You know, there's so much work to be done in medicine and When people believe things which aren't true they waste their time and waste the potential of society So I went twice didn't it? I just want to make the point that while I just gave examples that I think everyone in this room agrees with The other side, you know, other people would say other things other people would think that vaccines cause harm And if you believe that vaccines are safe, then you'll get harmed The big farm is the problem and you put your trust in them then that will harm you I put these slides up just to make the point that at the end of the day What the point that I'm trying to make is that false beliefs cause the harm Our goal is not to try and Push one conclusion or the other our goal is to find out what is reality? What is the truth? so we need to have processes to get us there and so trying to Close that gap between the beliefs that we have and the beliefs that everyone in society has and get them as close To reality as possible is the ultimate goal because when you believe something Let's say if you believe that a particular share price is going to go up tomorrow And you believe it enough that you put your money in it if your belief is wrong It will cost you money if you believe you can take a corner 80 miles per hour, but you can't that could cost you your life When your belief is out of line with reality that costs you something and cost society something So for me my skepticism is simply a war on false beliefs. I Believe it's our duty to try and destroy all beliefs that are wrong Because that pushes that helps us progress in society if we can kill all these false beliefs We stop wasting time stop wasting people's health. We stop wasting people's lives and we can work on what matters so I So I say let us end false beliefs. That's the first point that I wanted to make in this workshop that Fighting false beliefs is what it's all about trying to destroy them The second point that I want to quickly make in this little introductory talk that I'm giving to didn't lead into very well Is that the internet has changed everything in? the war and false beliefs The internet is not yet the number one source of information, but it will be you can be pretty sure of that It's growing rapidly World population 2005 what we got? Using internet we've gone from sixteen percent to thirty nine percent over the last seven years and it's just going to keep growing So not only is the number of people using internet growing the number of content on the internet is growing the Amount of time we spend on the internet the accessibility we have that internet is growing It's Google Glass so we can wear the internet everywhere we go This is a contact lens with a computer in it not yet reality, but Reasonably likely that this is where computer internet technology is going we're going to be permanently on the internet Permanently accessing all of this information Basically for the rest of human civilization we're going to get more and more invert immersed into the internet So the internet has changed everything Because Bring it back to the false belief thing If we are all permanently immersed in this information source and and the Percentage of the world population is coming more and more that have this access You're all probably aware that there's no editorial oversight on what goes on the internet. There's no screening process There's no quality control. It is just A free range of information and that's part of what makes it great Because that has led to the world's largest ever Gladiatorial arena of memes to fight it out amongst themselves Vying for belief in the human mind. So yeah, this is what comes up when you search Google for memetic gladiatorial arena It's just a silly pic, but so What is so amazing about the internet is that it is a level playing field all Ideas have to float or sink on their own merits, but unfortunately It doesn't seem like truth is the most important criteria in determining what becomes popular popular and what doesn't so Here are a few examples of beliefs which demonstrate this point pretty clearly. I think If truth was the number one criteria of whether people believe things or not then I don't think these would be common beliefs It would be beliefs at all. I checked the Flat Earth Society does exist and they are serious And with dowsing I've actually seen a documentary once of a guy building a house somewhere And he actually hired a dowser to come and find and tell him where to dig his well So people actually do use this stuff and believe it's real But again, I just want to make the point that maybe I'm wrong Maybe all or some of these are actually true. I don't want to talk about You know to pick on certain beliefs I'm trying to make the point that when our beliefs are out of line with reality it costs us money and time So I've put this graph up of the sites major religious groups the world's major religion groups Not all of them can be right only one of them at most can be true They're all contradictory in one way or another so best-case scenario Christianity is correct and 68.5% of the population are holding at least one false belief. I Think of course, it's far more than that that are holding false beliefs But just to put no doubt in your mind that we all have a false beliefs every single one of us and I see our challenge in the skeptical movement is Reducing that to as close to zero as humanly possible. Of course, there's limits on that but yeah, trying to destroy false beliefs and We have this internet Oh, no, I'm gonna hit myself. So we have this Sorry so the internet's allowing people to go on and delve into these beliefs and reinforce them and Get more evidence for them and so forth and there's no editorial oversight providing them with a way of discerning whether these beliefs are good or not and so maybe you know when people are making these decisions about what to believe maybe they are using other criteria like simplicity or You know direct observations being intuitive like the Flat Earth Society There's different criteria than truth determining whether they believe something or not Maybe it's the comfort or how entertaining the belief is so now we have this internet where everyone's going to get this information and This Wild West of information is just letting people wander in and pick and choose for themselves without any System of education or how to assess the information responsibility And I don't think this is this is not good So can you imagine what it's going to be like when in 20 or 30 years? We have an entire population of the planet plugged into the internet permanently and They can just get whatever information they want without any critical reflection on what it means or whether it's reliable Whether it's true, and we're just gonna keep reinforcing false beliefs over and over and over again and Creating groups of people believing different things and then working with their own groups So I don't think we can let that happen. I think this is our job as a skeptics To make sure that there is a system in place Which is going to inform the entire planet for the next 50 or 100 years perhaps the rest of human civilization if the internet Sticks around for that long We need to make sure it isn't going to keep us as misinformed as we are today We need some sort of a memetic immune system The internet and is I didn't define the memetics before or memes these days Memes often mean to a lot of people just little cartoons on the internet for those that don't know Richard Dawkins Wasn't actually the first according to Robata We have someone do that um The Richard Dawkins popularized the term meme as sort of the idea the currency of ideas the smallest unit of an idea Which spreads from one person to another so it copies itself from one brain to another brain And so the internet is a way of storing ideas and spreading them very widely So we need an immune system to stop bad ideas bad information Misinformation lies we need to stop it in its track Either destroying it or just stopping it from spreading like a virus. We need to if it's a bad it needs to be killed Actually, we're probably gonna need a couple of defense systems It's like that um But here's the really cool bit is that they're being developed and experimented on right now You see I think everyone has this illusion that the internet is finished somehow But we are so at the beginning of the internet. We're developing the technology We're developing the websites the ideas the culture of the internet right now It is still a baby and we are influencing its future so I think the internet that you see today is Going to look just as tacky and outdated and ridiculous in 10 years from now as the internet of 20 years ago looks to us today That's IMDB on the top left. I think that's the best example of this so as the internet grows from today and Changes and evolves we have this brief window of opportunity to Leave an impact on it We can do our best to make sure the future has these systems in place Which don't let people expose themselves to deceitful misinformation Without some sort of a cautionary response some sort of a medic immune system So yeah, we can do that leave a permanent mark on it a little bit of skeptical activism in the right Internet-based tool or project can impact potentially millions or even billions of people over the next five twenty or a hundred years So that's all I really want to say in my little intro section here Just that false beliefs cause people to make poor decisions which harms them and everyone associated with them The internet is going to be the main source of information from Now on basically I'm getting more and more significant and ubiquitous all the time luckily we were at the dawn of the internet and We have the power To create the immune systems and this is you know a little diagram of human immune system And you see there's lots of different things that work for us and the internet's going to be the same We're gonna have lots of different apps different programs different avenues to control the spread of misinformation and We need to develop them and work on them and make them a reality To help prevent to help save our future generations from their believing brains brains that evolution have given us that Aren't ready for this level of misinformation dissemination So with those two ideas planted firmly in your minds We're going to move on to the first section of our workshop, which will be me talking about a project I've been working on called rebutter After that Tim will give us 10 or 15 minutes of overview of other apps that have come out recently Which are pretty cool to help with this process and Then after that Susan will talk about Susan's up the back We'll be talking about guerrilla skepticism on the on Wikipedia and her other project at skeptic action so That's the overview for it now while we're talking did we with the anyone has if if anyone has any questions during the Talk if you just put your hand up or make make eye contact with the people wearing the green shirts They've got bits of cardboard cardboard and pens can write your questions down and then at the end we'll have a bit of time to Answer a few of them So that's that Now on to rebutter So this is a project that I've been working on for about a year and a half now and Obviously, I keep mentioning memetic immune system. This is basically my attempt to make one of those So I'm just going to explain what rebutter is and how it works And then I'll show you why I believe we can actually destroy misinformation with this tool And then show some examples of it already in action So it all started about two years ago when a friend shared this article on Facebook I had a quick look at the article and I read the study behind it so I actually had a linked to a study which is pretty good for this sort of thing and I went and had a look at it, but I could see straight away all the flaws of the study I could see what was wrong with it and why this whole article was just nonsense and rubbish and Should have been it shouldn't exist. It should be ignored But I was stuck with this problem where a friend had just shared this article I mean they thought it was good reliable valuable information, which all their friends should know about So I needed a way to sort of to help them realize that it's not good information I couldn't just say this is crap because they wouldn't they wouldn't listen to that What I needed was a detailed thorough rebuttal showing them exactly what's wrong with it So It I could have written one myself Because I couldn't you know, I knew what was wrong with it I could have written it but it would have taken me an hour or two because I'm a slow writer and I also was very very confident that someone else had already done it I know the internet people do this all the time someone had rebutted this article. I just needed to find it so if you want to find things on the internet I went to Google and Unfortunately, Google is no good at finding rebuttals of specific articles Google's a topic search engine you put in the heading of that article you just get hundreds of copies of that article It's the same article over and over again on different pages because it was done as a press release Besides Google doesn't know the intention of the author. They don't know what a rebuttal is so they've got no way of finding it So Google was no help at all and then the article itself. That's they're not about to tell me where rebuttals of it is They're not going to help me out in this process. So I had no way of finding You know a counter argument to this page and so the idea behind rebuttal was just this frustration I wanted like Google you type in a search term It gives you a list of pages with the one at the top probably being the most relevant the best Page for what you're looking for. I wanted a list of pages that are rebuttals to this page with the top of the list Being the best so that's what we ended up going out and building Page on the left has been rebutted by the pages on the right on the right You've got a list of all the rebuttals of that page So if you write or find a rebuttal you can connect it to the page that it rebuts or anyone else can and Then anyone who wants to find rebuttals of this rebutted page can do so At the moment the primary delivery method is this browser extension Little rebuttal logo you install it into your browser and then as you browse the internet whenever you hit a rebutted page It pops up a little alert and says there are three rebuttals to this page You click on the plug-in again, and it gives you that list Thank you, and it gives you that list of the rebuttals That's our main System of delivering rebuttals, but also we put just a simple Google search on the website So now you can search our website for the page you want rebuttals of and if we have rebuttals of that page It'll come up in the search results So Google can't do this on their own because they don't have this mapping of the semantic connection This is a rebuttal, but because we've created this map Now you can search for them We've also developed a Twitter widget which allows you to tweet the rebuttal articles as Replies to people that are sharing the rebutted pages So you can take the message of the rebuttals straight to the people that are spreading the misinformation And finally we're about to start work on a frame model I've just mopped this up so a frame will work within the browser So you don't need to install a plug-in, but that's coming in the future So that's right So I just put this slide up just to reiterate the simplicity of what we're doing Rebutter is a one-to-one connection That page is rebutted by that page But we don't it's not exclusive It's not like they can only be rebutted by that page and that page can only rebut that this page is Rebutted by 24 different pages. So 24 people have written articles saying that that's wrong for whatever reason That page is then also rebutted by two different pages So this page is rebutted by that page that page is rebutted by other pages So we actually form a bit of a discussion across the internet. We map the discussion This page rebuts zero that page rebuts 15 So we actually through this simple concept of connecting one page to another we end up getting a network a map of rebuttals and rebuttings so But at its basis, it's just a one-to-one connection. It's very simple But don't let that simplicity deceive you because I think like stacking bricks is an incredibly simple process But you don't just stack bricks for the fun of it you stack bricks because you have a vision You want to build a house you want to build a mansion something there's a goal or purpose of the action And so adding these one-to-one links has a purpose and I want to talk to you now About our vision and our purpose is behind rebuttum And so to get started with that I want to share something with you that I learned recently Now I'm sure most people know that public speaking is one of like the top ten fears usually One or two on the list Luckily, I don't have a debilitating version of that fear, but still I get nervous when I have to give public talks But I learned something just recently Which helps with that? Now I think also most people know about body language and how I can have closed arms It sort of implies you're afraid or a little bit, you know scared or Yeah, you close don't want to talk to people where the opposite if you sort of you know Gregeri's people are large and move around and whatever Well, I learned just recently that the opposite works as well where instead of letting your emotions control your body language You can manipulate your body language and create emotions So the research indicates that whenever you're going to do something like public speaking or you get an interview or something Which creates a bit of nervousness if you spend two minutes in a position like This the Wonder Woman pose You just sort of spend two minutes in this position or that position some sort of big open position It actually changes your brain and releases You know testosterone I think it was was was one of the chemicals and just various things that make you feel more confident make you feel stronger more capable So I learned that recently I thought that's very cool Now just want to get a show of hands who he has not heard of this before Every be brave put your hands up. You haven't heard of this. Okay, now keep your hands up keep your hands up everyone who Thinks that having heard this and this is gonna sound like a trick question because I'm talking about rebuttals and proving things wrong But I promise you it's not I genuinely believe what I just said. It's real who he is willing to believe that what I said is true So believe you know Cool and who he is believes that it's true enough that may actually repeat the story until their friends You know not necessarily say this is definitely true, but you say I heard this cool thing you'd pass it on because I Didn't tell you this to help you all become more confident that that's a cool side effect But what I wanted to do is share with as many people as possible That magical moment where you just encountered information for the first time you had no opinion about it You had no belief and you've gone from having no opinion or belief to learning something and then tentatively forming a belief possibly permanently here you're at that point where You're making your mind up as to whether you're going to believe it or not and you can be swayed by a little bit more evidence a little bit More information or potentially have the whole belief destroyed if I now bring a slide up, which says I made it all up You probably not believe it from then on But if the next speaker comes up and reiterates it again and again, then it'll form a belief I believe that Magical moment when your brain is encountering information and not sure is where this fight against false information will be won or lost This moment when we is where we need to fight false beliefs because changing minds is really hard When someone's made their mind up. They don't like changing it again How hard exactly? We have to overcome confirmation bias, which is I love I love confirmation bias Everyone knows the term but I just love the fact that it's the tendency to search for interpret and remember Information in a way which concerns which confirms your preconceptions It's like three levels that it works on you look for it And then when you get it you interpret it your way and then even if it's not again for you You'll remember it as if it was it's that's so pervasive Availability cascade, which is if you repeat something long enough. It becomes true Backfire effect when people react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening their beliefs Bias blind spot choice supportive bias Bayesian conservatism Belief revision in the bottom lower right the tendency to Insufficiently revise one's beliefs when presented with new evidence. We have all of these cognitive biases Which stop us from changing our beliefs? And plenty of studies have been done on this stuff as well This this is an article which came out very recently and it just asserts in the middle of it That people argue against counter-attitudinal evidence while readily accepting pro-attitudinal evidence is undisputed The next paper People who hold strong opinions on complex social issues are likely to examine relevant empirical evidence in a biased manner They are apt to accept confirming evidence at face value While subjecting disconfirming evidence to critical evaluation and as a result to draw undue support for their initial positions from mixed or random Empirical findings like this just it makes sense, right? But someone tells you something you agree with you like oh, yeah, of course Someone tells you something you disagree with you like hang on. I don't know about that You know, this is this is quite obvious, but I like to put up academic papers just to make sure I'm right, right? because I am so But it goes even deeper than that because not only Do we interpret things our way? But we go out of a way to avoid being exposed to information that contradicts our beliefs What when you believe something you have Your beliefs create preferences and so you watch the news program that agrees with you You go to the rallies which present the attitudes that suit you Use the websites to prevent present the information that again Backs up your beliefs because I guarantee you that creationists don't use Wikipedia Because it says things which contradict their beliefs just the same as you won't use conserva pedia I'm guessing because it says the Bible is a great book and sorry, not not the best example, but like The the entry on the Bible was quite entertaining to me what they have on conserva pedia And yeah If anyone ever ever had some time to read conserva pedia, it's good fun. Isn't it so When you have opinions and beliefs you have preferences and you sort you seek out those information sources which contradict The information source which contradicts beliefs tend to not be preferences things which tell us we are right Make us feel good things which tell us we are wrong make us feel bad And it makes sense too because our beliefs are like a giant lattice work And they all sort of rest up on each other and if you start challenging some of those beliefs Especially especially the core ones then it can destabilize other beliefs and it can bring our whole world crashing down It can be very traumatic for people. So it's best not to you know rock the house and rock the boat So people avoid it So so people avoid situations which might confront their beliefs and then if they somehow encounter them still then they will tend to avoid engaging with them anyway and Then if they accidentally engage with them that are all sorts of things to avoid changing their minds So clearly we should all stop wasting our time by arguing with people that have made their minds up, right? No, because I think particularly in the internet internet debates are just like public debates You're not actually debating with the people on the other table You are arguing against each other, but it's not for them. It's for the audience It's for the people that are watching because they've made up their mind. They are true believers They are absolutely devout But everyone in the audience is just watching and they're not sure they're trying to be persuaded because they're at that magical point Where their minds are being made up so I think it's important also not to forget that every single year there are another 134 million minds Joining us who have no beliefs at all And as each wave of those new vulnerable brains start encountering claims on the internet Do we really want them encountering misinformation without any sort of? Access to counter-arguments without any sort of memetic immune system And this brings us to my ultimate objective with rebutter It isn't about convincing true believers that they are wrong because that's hard Rebutter is all about using this debate process to build a system which exposes everyone to an iterative process of critical reflection So let me put that another way. We want to build a framework around the web Which will build something which constantly says someone disagrees with this perspective Whenever you see something on the internet and then gives you the ability To see exactly why that someone disagrees so As you browse you hit a website someone disagrees with this click through and you can read their rebuttal and tells you exactly why they Disagree put you in a constant state of skeptical approach to information And I want that there for the next generation as they start encountering information for the first time Now can you imagine what that will be like to grow up in that world? Where every time you encounter new information you said be skeptical Question this and if you're not sure how to be skeptical yourself go and read what someone else has said Maybe they've got a good example of it. I Think kids learn really well through demonstration So having that access to those rebuttals will teach them how to critically analyze an argument how to look for evidence How to question evidence and and you know so forth. It's just a demonstration example of how to be critical So we're not trying to change people people's minds We're trying to build a future of evidence-demanding critical thinkers who will challenge authority and have a deep understanding of logical fallacies and cognitive biases and Here's the beautiful thing for all the people for all the differences we have you know skeptics have with anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists and and you know psychics and whatever We all have one belief in common and that is we all absolutely certainly believe the evidence is on our side right, so Our goal is to provide a tool which will teach kids to critically analyze claims and look for the evidence So everyone can see the value in that proposition psychics homeopaths because We all believe that this means the next generation will finally break free from the brainwashing put onto them by whoever so This is you know, this is the message it conveys So there's no reason why Everyone of every belief system can install rebutter and use it to promote their own position and to push it because it's fighting for critical thinking and evidence-demanding future It's not about saying that we're right We will fight for our side We will push that you know vaccines are good and ghosts don't exist and whatever and absolutely we should and absolutely They should push their side because it's a debate It is a global debate where everyone has their say and the people watching are merely being exposed to that process of question this Don't take anything from authority and I think everyone in this room should agree that our side Definitely wants that we don't want anyone to believe things on authority We want them to use rational thinking critical analysis and to break information down and look for the evidence So we're trying to build that and I think that everyone Everyone in society agrees with that concept because again everyone thinks they're right So everyone's on board So I hope that now you can see that rebutter is not a tool for skeptics Butters a tool for making skeptics and that's So that's our vision and I'm going to now get back to the topic of the workshop which is crowdsourcing skepticism because Crowdsourcing requires volunteer participation We need your support if we're ever going to stand a chance of building this Internet which makes crit, you know, which creates critical thinkers So there are three primary things which we need more than anything else So the first one obviously installing our plug-ins just a necessary step You can't actually add rebuttals without the plug-in at this stage Though we hope to rectify this because at the moment we're only available in Chrome And we're not about to start working on the other plug-ins for the last year We've been saying we're going to expand to Firefox, but a year ago Firefox and Chrome were about the same level but as you can see all the other browsers are going down in Chrome It's getting more and more users. So at this point, we have limited resources. There's only one program. We're working with us co-founder and We need to pick and choose where we're going to invest our time so Only in Chrome at the moment, but as I said, we're hoping to build a frame which will be browser independent So you need to install the plug-in Which brings me to the second Bit of help that we need which is submitting rebuttals This is the primary part of our crowdsourcing efforts We need people that are browsing the internet to recognize when they are reading a rebuttal Because as I said the whole idea of this came from me finding an article and wanting a rebuttal and I couldn't find them They're hard to find when you're starting at the source page the page making the claim but if you guys You will read more rebuttals than anyone else because most skeptic blogs are debunking something, right? So whenever you read an article which says such-and-such said something and they are wrong because you're reading a rebuttal submit it it takes like 20 seconds You just need to hit this is a rebuttal this I'm going to show you how to do it in a few moments But we need people adding rebuttals Now actually at the beginning of this I talked about Well, I want to make the point that one of the great things about crowd sourcing is that you can have huge impacts with various small actions and I believe this is definitely the case with rebutta that that 20 seconds of submitting a rebuttal can have incredible impacts for a start You can have a huge impact by changing one or two people's lives if you've submitted a rebuttal to a scam Which is trying to scam people out of their money And there's God knows how many thousands of them on the internet You could save someone their life savings because they could hit that scam page and get the rebuttal and you know They may have acted on it, but the rebuttal saves them that could happen But I think you can also have huge impacts by having lots and lots of little impacts or Little impacts over a long period of time rebutta provides all of these so for example Does anyone remember Coney 2012? As that was happening we were adding rebuttals to that quite an extensive network of about it We've got 12 rebuttals to that page for example, and they carried on because the Coney 2012 Team responded to them and critics responded to them and whatnot So we mapped that discussion really well Of course, we were really new at the time We don't have many users but imagine an internet where everyone has rebutta installed or has access to this information Then when you've got 97 million people watching this video Then having access to those counterpoints could provide 97 million people with a much broader perspective on this topic You know, I'm not necessarily saying these guys were great or not great But having that wider perspective has an impact and if you have that small impact across 100 million people That's a huge impact But also These connections are permanent That video is stuck on the web now virtually forever and the rebuttals to it They're also there forever and that connection is therefore permanent So by mapping it doing that little bit of action you've added something permanently to the web You know, we're all warned don't put your personal information on the internet because you can't get rid of it It's the same with this you can't get rid of them, but Articles like this this was published four years ago and There's just resurfaced as if it was new on this website so This sort of thing happens all the time where stories just get regurgitated. It's really weird, but it keeps happening So maybe if you know in the internet where rebuttals ubiquitous The rebuttals will either stop it from being regurgitated because it's been answered or Make the regurgitation maybe they'll refine it and make it a little bit better than the original They'll fix ups and errors in it or if that doesn't happen if they just regurgitated still then define rebuttals to the new version You can just go to the old version and copy them across, you know, so The fact that these connections will last forever will help as we continue to move forward the more content is made and and Yeah, they'll always be there So The final action point was telling people about rebuttals so We're all about word of mouth so Sharing telling people about rebuttals is incredibly helpful to us particularly if you're telling journalists or people with large followings That's cool too, but um any sort of word of mouth sharing and anyone who does all three of these so if you install and add rebuttals and Tell people about us then Carl Sagan says I was just looking for an excuse to put that in to be honest Because ultimately our success in this project is completely up to you guys we need you and we love you no end we rebutter is nothing without a Loyal a loyal large following and so when the process are trying to build that because this vision of An internet which just lets people pick and choose their beliefs is terrifying to me And I think we need to do something to stop that so I I've got like two minutes left. Okay, then So I just want to give a couple of examples of how rebuttals being used currently Bob who is next door giving the presentation over there is one of our best users He found a rebuttal by David Gorski science-based medicine He's walking the things of the bozinski clinic and he systematically added that to over a hundred and seventeen Different pages on the web which talk about the bozinski clinic and how great it is so that's one example of how everybody can be used to just Now whenever anyone hits one of those many many pages that would redirect to that one page Of course all the bozinski clinic need to do now is rebut that one page and show that it's wrong and Completely undone at all, but no one stepped up yet, and there's no rebuttals to it But they'd need to have a really good argument another We need more people like pep and is from Denmark is he Saw these articles saying that students had shown that Wi-Fi kills plants So he wrote his own rebuttal to it Submitted it to all the articles he could find making the claim and then used our Twitter widget to reply to People that were sharing it and he ended up driving over 50,000 visitors to his article Now I want to say we really support people doing that if you write rebuttals drive as much traffic to To your article as you want because that's what we want. We want people reading rebuttals So we're trying our best to you know like this Twitter widget was a Small breakthrough for us for helping get traffic to the people that write the rebuttals Then Mary M is Passionate about GMO Genetically modified organism debate and she knows a lot about it So she's always adding rebuttals on that subject And I expect this to be the norm because most people are ignorant about most things and you have one or two areas You know a lot about so I expect most people to do this sort of thing and she's been constantly adding rebuttals over the last year And we love her for it And then we have someone like out on a boat here Submitted her first rebuttal and sent out two tweets One of them has a hundred and twelve thousand followers within a minute that person retweeted it to her hundred and twelve thousand followers So this is someone that sent sent out something about the armist not getting autism Yeah, look that use technology that I get autism and of course it's complete nonsense So they've shared misinformation, but then in or you know soon after then reshared. Oh, actually, maybe that's not true So how's that for an impact in the fight against misinformation? So this slide was just here to remind me to actually get my video ready But I think I'm out of time. So what I might do is I've got a little video demonstrating how to register install and submit rebuttals We'll see how we go for time at the end and with questions and I can stick it on at the end But Basically, of course, rebuttals completely free. I just like the image and We're not going to be charging for any time soon the whole project is self-funded by my partner and I we have other income sources and Basically, we just keep our costs as low as possible That said if anyone knows of any I know there's often charities funds and competitions If anyone knows of any of those that happen to work with what we're doing Then please send us an email because you know happy to apply for them because a bit of funding can help with our server costs and Travels to things like this. So Yeah, we're not looking for investors or anything like that either because we we don't want to have any financial burdens on our business. It's not trying to make money So that's that yep, I'm up to 42 minutes. So Thank you all for listening to my part of this workshop The video game Tim is going to take over now and give us a quick overview of other apps out Tim is the Owner of a blog called Skeptools Many of you probably know Tim is very active does a lot of stuff So, yeah, Tim knows all about all the tools out there which are trying to achieve all this stuff And a lot of a lot of them are crowdsourcing. He's gonna cover a few that are okay Tim I'm just gonna talk real quick about up-and-coming new tools There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in People building new tools like rebutter That are of interest to skeptics. Sometimes it's not entirely obvious. Sometimes they're not really targeted at skeptics like rebutter originally wasn't and I'll Clue you into a few that already exist and clue you into where you can spot these things when they come up The first one I'm going to talk about is one that launched in February called reality drop and this is from the A nonprofit called the climate reality group That Al Gore is involved in and it's about climate misinformation online and it targets that misinformation And the idea is that it to rally folks like us that are interested in the science of climate change To talk about climate change Share good information and to comment on bad articles Because if you go to climate change articles particularly on general-purpose news websites, you'll see there's an endless series of comments at the bottom By people who reject the science of climate change or whatever And they want to get another voice in there So they'll point out articles to for you to comment on are things that are trending topics Things that are being passed around on Twitter and things like that and the interesting thing about the site is that it uses something called gamification Which is they built the site as if it we were playing a video game almost In that it scores what you're doing and it grades you against other people The idea is to give you an incentive to do the thing and again It's a crowd-sourcing thing so the things you do are very simple like send a tweet about this article or go comment on this article But the net effect can be large So they'll measure that effect and they'll measure the net amount of stuff you've done on the system and give you an Idea of how you're doing relative to the other volunteers and it just kind of makes it a little bit of fun It's very silly, but you'd be amazed at how that acts as an incentive for people and it's at reality drop dot org I will post something later today on my blog that has all the links that are in this presentation This is what the main screen on reality drop looks like and they always have a couple of articles near the top Anything with a lot of green on it is an article that has good Reality-based climate science in it stuff with a lot of red perhaps has conspiracy theories myths Incorrect information and you can click the button to do various things relating to that article Maybe tweet a good article Maybe go comment on a bad one and they have a little crawl at the top now They also link all these articles with a database of what the basic facts are about climate change and they Licensed all that information you see the link in the middle that says myth versus reality They have a whole database in there of kind of the basics, you know, what is the hockey stick? you know how much Arctic ice are we losing those types of things and They link it in there so you can learn about climate change at the same time and those pages serve as a place that you can link People to when they ask questions. It's all the same data. They actually licensed the data from the skeptical science Website, which is a great resource for climate change and this is the score card For one of the users on the site You can see that you get an overall score and it lists how many different myths you've crushed They try to make it you use some fun Terminology and which ones they give you a chart of which ones you do the most and you can earn these little badges When you accomplish certain things Now that one was obviously built and targeted at us right at skeptics who are interested in the climate issue A lot of the other tools that I've been seeing in the last year and a half or so aren't necessarily targeted at us But where they're coming from is out of journalism You know if you've got a pulse and they're paying attention, you know, there's a lot of newspapers and magazines They're going out of business Journalism's kind of been in crisis for a couple of years because people don't read paper Newspapers anymore and where's the revenue all the all the classified ads went online And that's where a lot of their revenue was so they've been looking for new ways to do things How can we reform ourselves in an internet era? So that we can make money we can fit in and one of the ways They're doing this is through a number of nonprofits that are funding different research teams Sometimes people like Shane Sometimes more academic researchers, but just trying different things and building things and some of them are very Journalistic oriented that maybe wouldn't interest a skeptic like building tools that journalists would use in the newsroom But occasionally some of them are very interesting to skeptics because there's a lot of interest in the fact-checking space You know because everything's moved to the blogs and you have a lot of very biased sources on the net The idea of can we do automated fact-checking? Can we provide things like rebutter? Can we provide automated ways for people to figure out what's true and what's not? There's a lot of people interested in that space and there's a couple of experiments that aren't really crowdsourcing projects One's called truth teller that does live debunks of speeches that are being broadcast and literally Shows the fact-checks live and there's another one called truth goggles and those were prototypes that were built. They aren't Really a product you can use But here's one that you can use it's called pundit tracker and the target is to Track, you know, you've got all these talking heads on the news and they're constantly making predictions The economy is going to collapse. Obama is not going to be reelected. Whatever and there's no There's no penalty for being wrong and these guys are amazingly wrong So someone decided to build a site to show how amazingly wrong they are and they launched it Actually, they've had the site for a long time, but the actual game or what you want to call it was launched in September They track currently they track finance politics and sports. I've been bugging them saying hey You know psychics would kind of fit in here I don't know if they want to do that But maybe we can convince them at some point But there's a crowdsourcing aspect because site the users of the site vote on how bold the predictions are Obviously if I predict the Sun's gonna come up tomorrow, that's not a very useful prediction And it's gonna be right, but if I predict the world's gonna end tomorrow That's quite a different thing So they try to score those differently based on what the site users say about the predictions and then they rate the pundits for accuracy So you get a display like this and you can see that various people are given F ratings and C plus and Right in here are down on the lower left are the topics that have predictions have been made Recently that they're asking you to vote on so that's in that's an example of kind of this sort of in the journalism space Type of thing that's going on now. Here's something that could be used more directly by skeptics It's the US version of a site called journalism or journalism, which has existed in the UK for quite some time The US version launched in April By a nonprofit called the Sunlight Foundation and what it does is it automatically matches news articles against press releases published speeches Wikipedia articles so basically you can see how much of the news article you're reading was plagiarized or taken from various sources and The idea and the reason that the definition of the term journalism is cut and paste journalism journalists who get press releases from people and Just cut and paste things from the press release and don't do their homework and we're trying to catch people when they're doing that and Sometimes you can find out very interesting things now this site also has a chrome browser plug-in So it can automatically notify you that when you're looking at a site that they have information about the detail of that article and There's the link for it. It's journalism. That's sunlight foundation Now when you go to their site You can just paste the text of the article in if you want like if someone emailed you something or you can give It the URL and what it will do is generate this side-by-side view on the left side here is some pasted text of a New York Daily news article and I'm sure you can't read it, but it's an article about How millions of Americans believe that aliens are already here? And it's like oh really I wonder where that figure came from well It turns out that the text of this article matches in a substantive way a press release that came from a UFO group And so there's the match right there and this is on PR web. There's various places that press releases get Posted so they can match that up directly and when you scroll down you can see it'll actually highlight the text and draw a line And show you exactly where the text goes what's neat about that is that if this is a quote It you can see quotes that are taken out of context You can also see when journalists plagiarize Wikipedia articles and just cut and paste stuff from there so it's a very interesting tool to catch bad journalism and potentially sometimes catch You know how science articles will often talk about a study and they won't tell you where the study is well If there was a press release from the university about the study You'll often find it there and the university will always tell you where the study is because they want you to know about their work Kind of related to that is another UK Tool called unsource.org this launched about a year ago and this attacks that basic problem of Science articles and other articles that don't really tell you where their sources came from where did this statistic come from? Where was this paper actually written and it links the articles to to them now? Journalism is more of an automated tool although you can help by actually pasting stuff in and it will show up in their sort of archives This tool is actually crowdsourced so they depend on people actually going out finding the sources and linking them up But they also have a browser plug-in so you can put it in your Chrome browser and when you're browsing the web It'll tell you when you're looking at a site that are looking at an article that's Un-sourced and will also link to their version of journalism and tell you whether or not that's an article that was just cut and pasted It's from the Media Standards Trust, which is a nonprofit in the UK. Here's an example of a screen you get when you have the unsourced This is a really crappy article about some survey about doing your partner's chores and these little yellow stickers pop up over top and says Oh, by the way, this article is basically a press release cut and pasted and this press release came from a dodgy survey That was done for the company involved There are a number like I said of fact-checking apps that people in the journalism space are working on They're not all completely fully baked a lot of them are kind of interesting ideas, but not quite there yet Two of them that are up and running and you can actually go log in on our fact link and Skeptive and these are crowdsourced sites so you can go in there and actually and they do basically sentence level I agree with this. I disagree with this. This is true. This is not true On the web It's not entirely clear to me. I mean you can kind of see the value in rebutter I'm not quite sure. I see where they're going with it But it's an interesting effort and there's a couple of others that I've heard about But and I've actually talked to the guy who's working on debunker, but they don't really have anything to show you There's called how true and debunker And I mentioned truth goggles easy earlier that draws from the political fact-checking sites Now a very interesting one that I want you all to pay attention to because they're just going into alpha now And this could be a very interesting tool for skeptics going for for Going forward and it's called hypothesis and it has that weirdly spelled domain name and it is a non-profit and it was launched be a Kickstarter in 2011 and They are building essentially an annotation layer for the entire web if you remember from the early days of the web There were a couple of startups that would let you put sticky notes on web pages that other people could see Essentially like those ones you just saw They're kind of redoing that on the argument that that was part of the idea of the web to begin with But they're doing it very slowly and very carefully They're designing it as open source so that potentially it'll plug into any browser And people will be able to comment on how it works and they're building a very careful reputation layer Into it. They actually had an entire conference just about how to design their reputation layer So for instance if I'm not an expert in how cameras work Something that I comment on a camera site would not mean as much as say someone who had designed cameras for Living and it remains to be seen like I said, it's only an alpha you can go to Hypothesis slash alpha and you can actually load it into your browser and try it out But we should be watching this and the reason we should be watching this and Shane touched on this in his presentation Too is critical mass is crucial for these projects. We have to have people helping out Or they won't go anywhere. You can't crowdsource without a crowd And so if skeptics aren't ready to jump in and be the crowd for these fact-checking sites They can easily die We need to be ready to volunteer. We need to promote it to other skeptics. We need to talk about what we're doing And to give you an example There was a really I thought kind of neat thing that launched last September after we did the workshop last year And it's already been shut down It was called truth market and it was sort of a cross between if you know Kickstarter is a way to fund new projects and of course, you know the million-dollar challenge J refs million-dollar challenge truth market was sort of a cross between the two you could set up a campaign To get people to donate money to challenge people who were making claims and it wasn't necessarily for It wasn't for paranormal things, but it was for science-based claims political claims any sort of public claim that you know Someone claims that this can cure cancer. All right, I'll put up $5,000 if you can prove whether it's right and they had set up a Organization where they were going to have basically a jury Experts judge what was right and if you challenged someone and they were proven wrong you would get the money So basically you could earn money by issuing challenges and other people could put money in the fund And you would get paid if the jury decided you were correct and that person was wrong And it would become part of the public record, but there wasn't a lot of interest in it People didn't step up. They didn't make challenges on the site. They didn't put their money in and it just didn't go Anywhere and they decided it wasn't working and shut it down in April So that's an example of where if we're not paying attention and we don't notice that these things are getting launched They'll go away so I Talk about this stuff all the time on my blog skeptools.com I also am on the Skepticality podcast and a virtual skeptics and I talk about these types of things all the time So seek me out and you'll learn about these things as they come up