 Good morning, everyone. My name's Donald Barclay, and you can see the topic of my talk up here this morning. Thank you for coming. I wanted to start with a couple of caveats here. Oh, by the way, I'm at the University of California Merced Library. Of course, it says that, but I want to start with some caveats. The first is, who died and made me King of Fake News? Nobody. I kind of assumed the title on my own. And I'm sure there are people in this room who could speak as intelligently and as well as I can on it. But I put in a proposal, so I get to do it. My other caveat, I'm kind of concerned I'm going to talk about things that everybody knows. But I kind of wanted to go over some fundamental concepts. I hope it's not too dull. There are other presentations if it gets dull. And finally, I have a lot more questions than answers. So my plan is to end so that we have 15 minutes or so for discussion, questions, cat calls, brick bats, dope slaps, whatever we need. Or else, we have crickets, and we all go to lunch early, so either way we win. So you might have heard about Fake News. It was in all the papers and on all the media. And there was all kinds of stories flying around about it. There was the Donald Trump Motel scandal. There was Comet Ping Pong, The Alternative Facts. I don't know if you can quite see that little thing from Wikipedia. Somebody had gone in and altered the Wikipedia entry for Roger Stone, who's a Republican lobbyist, to say, how are we reasonably being diagnosed with cranky, racist, old man syndrome, blah, blah, blah. So lots of churn about this. And at the time, all this was really churning right after the election. The editors of The Conversation, which is a web publication I write for occasionally, said, hey, you want to write an article? I said, what about Fake News? I said, cool. So I wrote this article. And it was published on January 4th. And it kind of hit a sweet spot. It got a lot of attention over 50,000 reads on the Conversation website. It was picked up by websites of PBS, Salon, Newsweek. I had lots of exchanges with people who read the article. Really interesting stuff. Some people were very challenging. An interesting exchange with a guy from South Carolina who was very adamant that the Civil War was not about slavery. It was a better conversation than you might imagine. So that led to a couple of radio interviews. I did a Facebook Live thing. I've been asked to write an article. I'm probably going to write a book. Yada, yada, yada. I'm going to do an ALA national webinar in July. So suddenly I am myself crowning the king of libraries in Fake News. So I want to start out with a little alternative history. The Surgeon General's report on smoking and health was released on January 11th, 1964, by Luther D. Terry, who was the Surgeon General. So to put this in some context, this was less than two months after the Kennedy assassination, which I actually remember. I was the kindergartener on the grassy knoll. And about a month or so before the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. So right in that time period. And it was released on a Saturday because they wanted to kind of control the media response a little bit. And they also didn't want to affect the stock market. So they were very media aware about this. At that time, they didn't really want it to be on one of the three national news shows that everybody watched Monday through Friday. Huntley and Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, whatever was on ABC. They kind of wanted to tone it down a little bit and not have too much of an impact. So my alternative history is, what if the Surgeon General's report had been released at a time when we have the kind of social media, digital media, 24-hour news cycle we have today? What might have happened? Well, the first thing would have been memes, right? And these are real memes that I found on the internet. There are pro-smoking memes on the internet. I didn't have to invent any of these. And of course, in the upper left-hand corner, you have the favorite of all internet debaters, Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler was against smoking. Anybody who's against smoking is a Nazi. In the middle there is a Lib Tards cartoon where a hypocritical feminist is talking about no one has a right to her body. And then she's denying this poor conservative man his right to smoke and drink Mountain Dew. So memes would have come out immediately. And a lot of them would have been probably attacking the report, very likely. Probably would have seen some fake videos. This is one that I invented. This is not a real video. I just screen-captured some stuff from YouTube and created it. But you might have seen things like this. Very similar to the kind of fake videos that were done about Planned Parenthood, about Acorn, which was basically defunded because of a fake video. You certainly would have seen that, I'm sure. You would have seen tweets. And these are invented tweets. I made these up using some tweet-faking software. And you probably would have had people from the alt-right saying, what's the government getting in our business for? They're taking away our rights, blah, blah, blah. They're against men. Smoking's a man thing. They're trying to take it away from us. You might have had people who were pro-legalized marijuana seeing this as some kind of a government attempt to keep weed illegal. They're attacking smoking, so they're attacking pot, right? And then you might have seen the 24-hour news cycle chiming in. Again, I made this one up. This is not a real headline. But with relative degrees of fairness and balance, you can imagine how CNN and MSNBC and Fox and all these other people, Hanley and Combs and Bill O'Reilly and Rachel Maddow, might have reacted to the Smote Surgeon General's Report. So again, thinking about this as alternative history, one of the things that happened in 1964 that would happen in our current world was the people with money interests immediately lashed out and did everything they could to cross the report. Philip Morris was not having any of this Surgeon General's Report. And as everybody probably knows from knowing their history of tobacco, they spent a lot of money over the years trying to fight the science of the Surgeon General's Report, trying to fight efforts to curb tobacco smoking. And that happened in 1964 with every media they could get their hands on. And it certainly would happen today. You could imagine an astroturf roots campaign of outraged citizens defending their rights that was being paid for by Philip Morris and all these other people who have huge money interests in tobacco. So in the alternative history, what would have been really tragic was, you can imagine, Lyndon Johnson is new as president of the United States. He's got Vietnam bubbling up. He's trying to fight the war on poverty. He's worried about civil rights. And suddenly he's got this tobacco fiasco on his hands. As president, he might have said, you know what? Let's just put this on the back burner. Let's not get into this fight right now. I got too much going on. And maybe this room would have a haze of smoke. And there'd be ashtrays everywhere. And we'd still be smoking like it was 1965. And that would be really sad. In 1964, it was a peak year for smoking. 42% of the people in adults in the United States smoke. Today, it's about 18%. That's really amazing. And it would have been a real, I think, almost anyone would agree. Maybe there's some dissidents out there somewhere. But most people agree. That was a real public health victory. And it's a good thing. From a personal standpoint, I remember the Kennedy Association. I remember the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. And I remember about 1967 or 1968, my dad quit smoking. And I remember that he outlived all his brothers and brothers-in-laws who didn't by decades. It was an important thing. So alternate history aside, I wanted to now talk about some of the terminology flying around. Now, one of the things that we need to be clear about is what is propaganda. A little bit different than fake news. I'm going to talk about fake news in a minute. But when we think of propaganda, very often your mind goes to, oh, the Nazis in the 20th century, the great masters of propaganda. Typically, propaganda has a political purpose. It's trying to convince somebody to do something. It usually has a harmful purpose, although you probably find examples of helpful propaganda. People who might say the anti-smoking campaign was helpful propaganda, maybe, maybe not. But typically, propaganda is different than just regular straightforward information in that there's a mix of truth, a little bit of truth with a lot of fake. So the Nazis, they love to talk about how terrible Jewish bankers were to Germany. Now, were there Jewish bankers in Germany before the Nazis? There certainly were. Were some of them very wealthy? Absolutely. Did some of them probably bend the rules a little bit? Hey, they were bankers. I'm sure they did. But almost everything they had to say about Jewish bankers, the Nazis had to say was made up. It wasn't true. A little bit of truth, a lot of lies. And of course, propaganda is an eye of the beholder. If this were a panel of skinheads, an audience of skinheads out here, you might be going, that's not propaganda. They were telling the truth. You're living in a false world. Of course, the Germans were not the only people who did propaganda in the 20th century. It was pretty widespread. And propaganda is really old. This is an inscription that is called the Behistun inscription. It's from about 15, excuse me, 515 BCE. And it's basically telling you about the huge victory of Darius the Great, who made Persia great again, and what a wonderful guy he was. And this is probably the oldest known written propaganda. We can imagine probably that oral propaganda existed before this time. And so it goes back a long way. We know the Romans had a lot of propaganda, goes on through history. This is from 1598, and it's an engraving by Protestant Germans who had never been to the New World depicting the atrocities of the Spanish in the New World. And it was anti-Catholic, anti-Spanish. And there was some truth to it. The Spanish were pretty brutal in the New World, but this was just really made up stuff. Other kinds of, you know, what is propaganda? Is this cigarette advertisement propaganda? Some people would say yes. Going back to my smoking analogies, at the start of the 20th century, the per capita consumption of US of cigarettes was 54 cigarettes a year, with the invention of machine-made cigarettes and vast advertising campaigns, print, radio, later TV, of course, product placement in films. By the peak year, again, 1965, 1964, the average consumption was 4,259 cigarettes a year. That's some pretty effective propaganda. It's partly the machinery made it possible, but it was also the propaganda of advertising. I wanted to show this one. This is a bit of propaganda from about the time of the Surgeon General's report. And I'm going to play this for you. I hope it plays. Did that actually play? Did you see the video? OK, it didn't play on my machine. So when I was a kid, this commercial, strangely, it was in black and white when I was a kid, on my parents' TV anyway. Everybody wanted a slinky. And most of my friends got a slinky at birthday, Christmas, whatever. I had a slinky. Nobody I knew was actually able to make that damn thing go down the stairs. Basically, you played it for 10 minutes, and it turned into an entangled mess, and you threw it away. That's a kind of, again, a kind of advertising propaganda. They made us believe something was true by basically lying to us, and we bought it. So again, with propaganda, this is an example of a website called Natural News that I would consider propaganda. And again, I'm not going to ask for it. I'll show up hands or anything. Maybe some people in this room don't. There are a lot of people in this country who don't consider this propaganda, who think that Western medicine and scientific medicine is the propaganda, and this website is telling you the truth. And it's probably, for me to call it propaganda, yeah. Can I say for a fact that everything on this website is a lie and wrong? I can't. I haven't looked at all of it. I haven't checked it all out. Maybe there's some good information in here. Maybe not. And that's one of the things about propaganda. It's in the eye of the beholder. Again, the skinheads saying no Nazi propaganda would not call it propaganda. And it's also nuanced. To what extent is it propaganda? To what extent was this slinky ad lying to us? A lot, a little hard to say. So the other side of the coin is the fake news. And there's a couple definitions of fake news. The one definition that we see tweeted a lot is anything that disagrees with my worldview is automatically fake news. That's one definition. But the broader definition is the kind of thing we're seeing, which is basically the clickbait stuff that's done not for political purposes like propaganda, but it's done to make money to get people to click on your site and you're getting ad revenue for that. And it's also done for humor purposes. So on this example here, I've got some examples of clickbait. In the upper right-hand corner, there's a picture of Ivanka Trump. And it says, you won't believe what Ivanka Trump does in the morning. Now, the person who wrote this could have totally made this up, probably doesn't have any stake in what Ivanka Trump does, doesn't care what we think Ivanka Trump does, doesn't care what these words actually say, as long as people click on that because they're going to get ad revenue. That's a very typical example of clickbait. They just want you to look at it. There's also clickbait for humor purposes or fake news for humor purposes. The onion is a great example of that. I'm sure everybody's familiar with that. And you've probably read stories about how articles in the onion get picked up and passed off as true. People posted on Facebook, even other news sources have picked up their articles and posted them as true. On the lower left, there is a website for something called the Landover Baptist Church. And it looks like a real church website until you start looking at it. And it's actually a parody of evangelical Christianity. On the right is DHMO, which looks like a kind of a healthcare website until you stop and think DHMO is another word for water. It's a parody of scare websites. So, I would say, for some, the difference between fake news and propaganda is that political purpose, but it's not always easy to detect. In the upper right-hand corner here, we've got a clickbait article, 15 celebrities who have converted to Islam. I believe that's Paris Hilton, I think wearing some kind of a headscarf. And the person who wrote this might not have anything against Islam, might not have any problem with it, might not care about that. But you could see how this kind of article, even if it didn't have a political intent, could have a political effect. Somebody who was unhappy with Islam, uneasy with Islam, afraid of Islam, might look at this and go, oh, look at those Hollywood idiots. And just another sign that, you know, Islam is ready to take over our country, where's my AR-15, you know? So, the intent there becomes very muddy. Again, a very nuanced thing between what's propaganda and what's fake news. Fake news, not that new. It predates the internet. The weekly world news, I don't believe it exists anymore, but it used to show up in supermarkets, and it would just have crazy stories that nobody in their right mind would really believe. But the idea was they would either get people to buy it as a joke, or maybe some people believed it, but it was just kind of a, I think everybody, pretty much everybody was in on the joke of the weekly world news. So the more outrageous article they can have, Elvis scene, working in a gas station, you name it, they would print it to get people to read it, and then basically to sell subscriptions and or sell copies and to sell ads. But fake news is even older than that. This is an article from the New York Sun, April 13th, 1844, and it's really hard to see. But the big headline is astounding news. Atlantic Cross in three days, single triumph of Mr. Monk Mason's flying machine, this balloon, the Victoria flew across the Atlantic in 75 hours, a whole big story about it, totally made up to sell papers and sell advertising, and the author was Edgar Allan Poe. So fake news isn't new. So propaganda isn't new, fake news isn't new. So the question is, is there anything new under the sun? And as you are familiar with the sun, the British newspaper, it's a good example of fake news. I think there are some things that are new that it's why this may be something that we wanna address. The first thing is the volume of information, and these are some slides about the number of tweets and the number of YouTube videos and so on. And everybody in this room knows the internet caught on at some point in the 90s, early 2000s, and it's just taken off, and there's lots of information out there. So the amount of information you have to deal with today as opposed to 1964, many, many times greater. There's a lot of stuff out there. The volume is new. Also volume in the sense of the reach of information. This is a picture of somebody standing on a soap box in Hyde Park Square. This person could be saying untrue things, but his audience is gonna be anybody who's within the sound of his voice. Not a very large volume that he can project. He can't reach very many people. Okay, so of course the printing press came along and that allowed people to print things and to distribute to a wider audience more broadly. Of course, that really started to matter a lot more when transportation improved. When you had railroads to move things around, you could really print a newspaper in London and have it all over the country before the end of the day. That was a big improvement in the volume that you could project. Of course you had radio and television, which could reach millions of people potentially, but of course you had to have access. You had to be able to get on the radio, get on TV. Again, going back to 1964, most people in this country had three TV channels. At my house we had two that we got. So getting on the radio, getting on TV, radio was certainly easier, but radio or TV was a challenge. Another source for distributing information that was really important for a while was the coffee shop, not coffee shop, the coffee shop. And I remember when I was in the 80s, I knew this guy who worked at the night shift at Kinkos in Boise. And at night, they didn't have many customers walking in. It was a 24-hour operation. So they would print out large batch jobs that they had. For example, like church flyers or coupons for a business. They'd do those big jobs at night. Well, one of the things he did a lot of were Christian identity people and other extremist groups would have these big runs of their propaganda that they would have printed out at Kinkos. They'd pick them up and then they'd have to mail them or hand distribute them to their audience. That was an important tool. I doubt that many of those people are doing that now. I don't think Kinkos is a big source of their information because it's cheaper and easier and potentially a much bigger audience to put it on the web, of course. So the ability for someone to potentially reach millions of people to worldwide audience is there and it's being used by white Christian identity people to use it, Al Qaeda uses it, ISIS uses it, everybody's using it. Another thing that's I think different is the ability for people to manipulate images and video and sound. And what we have here in the upper left-hand corner are the so-called Kotlinly Ferries, which was a photo hoax reporting that these little girls living in England had discovered ferries. And if we look at these pictures now we go, that's a really bad Photoshop job. But it actually took people in at the time. The upper right-hand corner is the famous Robert Capper photo of a soldier taking a bullet during the Spanish Civil War. It's widely believed that this photo was faked, although for years it was presented as a real combat photo. Lower left-hand corner, I'm sure everybody remembers, this one, the famous Time Magazine cover where they darkened OJ's skin. And then on the lower right was a photo that came out after 9-11 of a tourist allegedly standing on top of the World Trade Center as a plane is about to hit the World Trade Center and it was purported that it was found in a camera in the rubble later on proven to be a fake. That was 2001, the ability for people to fake images, as you all know, has increased a lot since then. And I'm sure there are a lot of people in this room who can do a pretty decent fake photo, I can. And there are people who are a lot better than me, I'm sure, I know there are. This is an interesting example of something which is a product that Adobe demonstrated last year. And it's a software where if you get 20 minutes of someone's speaking voice, you can basically type anything and have them say it in that voice. The computer will say it in their actual speaking voice. And what we have here is it's a little hard to follow, so I'm gonna explain it a little bit. We have the person who invented the software is demonstrating and then sitting up to the left, to his right on the dais is a comedian named Keegan-Michael Key. And what the person does is demonstrating is he has 20 minutes of Keegan-Michael Key's voice and he's having him say that he's kissing his comedy partner, Jordan Peele. So let me see if I can make this run. That's magic, I'm gonna show you guys this. We're not just going to do with words, we can actually type small phrases. So let's say, okay, so remove those words and we do three, four, three, two, one. Oh. Play back. And I kissed Jordan three times. So Adobe has claimed that they're putting lots of safeguards in this so that it can't be used for nefarious purposes, but you can imagine what could happen. You could have Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or anybody you're trying to smear. You have 20 minutes of them speaking, you can make them say almost anything and with a little manipulation, you can sync it to a video and suddenly you have a video of Barack Obama saying I was born in Kenya, I'm a lifelong Muslim and I'm a supporter of ISIS. Now, most of the people in this room would probably question that, but somebody who really believed that would go, there's your proof right there. And so that's a real scary, potentially a scary thing. It kind of reminds me of something actually from Harry Potter, which is the pensive in Harry Potter, which was a magical analog really for YouTube in which you could go back and watch events from the past that had been recorded in people's memories in the magical world. Harry goes back, Harry watches a video from the past which actually has been edited by one of the wizards to give a false history and that's an important plot point in the story. Harry is, and other people are taken in by this fake video. By the way, I have this elaborate theory about how the whole Harry Potter series is about digital technology, don't get me started. So we've got some things that I think are new. The volume in both those senses of the word and we've also got I think increased ability to manipulate reality or what seems to be reality in very convincing ways. So all of this is adding up to a lot of information overload. I copied and pasted this from Wikipedia because that source and context was good enough for what I needed to do here, which is sort of reminding everybody of sort of the basic textbook definition of what constitutes information overload and I'm sure most of you probably know all this already. But we're getting lots of new information created, it's easy to duplicate things, you can cut and paste. There's a lot more stuff to deal with historically. We've got more and more volume of information out there, low signals or noise ratio. All these things that are kind of basic things of information overload are happening and they're being, in my mind, being amplified by the power of our digital technology to reach lots of people, really cheap, really easy, really fast, 24 hour news cycle, all of these things are contributing to that. So what are we gonna do about it, if anything? So this is a really nice handout from IFLA on spotting fake news and I really like this handout. I've showed it to people, I use it to kind of refresh my memory when I'm talking about how to evaluate information, how to spot fake news. Really nice piece of work, but on the other hand it seems like things like this are trying to put our forest fire with a water pistol. There's so much information out there, it's happening so fast, there's so few of us. We have really so little contact with students when you think about it. There's so many students, so few librarians, so little time to get this into the curriculum. Faculty, I don't have time to get this into the curriculum, I'm too busy teaching anthropology or sociology or literature or whatever. I don't have the time to get this in. Can't you librarians take care of it? And that's, to my mind, is a real problem. Well, I think this is an effective tool. It feels like we're charging machine guns with a bayonet to use another analogy there. Another thing about, I think that happens to us as librarians is because we feel so overwhelmed, we sometimes get kind of reductionist. We have a hard time talking about the nuance of all of this because we're so working so hard to try to reach the basics to people. And as I've talked about before, there's a lot of nuance. What is propaganda? What is fake news? What is true? What is false? So our approaches work really good when we have something that's really factual to deal with. And I want to have a little vote here and this will not be graded. So everybody, choose your choice here. What is the approximate distance from the earth to the sun? Anybody who vote for A? No votes for A. B, good for B. C, and a couple C's. Well, the answer is B. And borrowing some kind of, you know, really amazing change of thinking in science that's not gonna change. I mean, you know, it might change a little bit, but it's pretty much about as factual as anything can get. And like a lot of factual things, we could have a vote on it, it doesn't matter. It stays the same. Our vote doesn't. We could have all voted for A and it wouldn't change the facts. So things like that are easy to deal with, but most things aren't that clear cut. And even then we can kind of waffle a bit. Well, it's approximately 93 million miles. And, you know, we could get into all these, have some physicists, astrophysicists come in here and tell us, well, that's really a ballpark number. Tell us why, you know, we really need to think differently about the distance from the earth to the sun. So we're dealing with a lot of nuance and one of the things that I think I found really useful and I think is well-timed is the new, fairly new framework for information literacy for higher education that's come out of ACRL, because it really challenges us as librarians to address this nuance, to not get so reductionist. If it's in a journal and it's peer reviewed, it's good. If it's not, it's bad. That's, you know, I think I've said that before to students, but it's a horribly reductionist and overly simplified way to talk about information because we all can sit here and every one of us could list five things that are really wrong with scientific communication off the top of our heads because we know it's not perfect. It's good, but it's not perfect. So this framework I think is really useful, but it's tough. It challenges us and I think that's why there's been some resistance to it because it really is a hard thing to teach. I've only got these students for 50 minutes. How am I supposed to go into all this nuance? So we have a tough problem to solve. We're getting some help. There are increasingly websites out there and other media that are trying to help with this problem of fake news and information overload. Snopes is one of the oldest. Snopes was founded in 1995. It deals with urban legends and it does a pretty good job, mostly debunking urban legends, occasionally confirming them. It's generally recognized as being pretty fair and balanced although there are people who say it's not. But again, it's been in business for a long time and certainly their business has picked up in the last few months, surprise. This is PolitiFact, another fairly well-known site. It's been around since 2007. It was created by the Tampa Bay Times and they really try to fairly and accurately report on factual things, are people really gonna lose their healthcare with this new act? Is restoring coal mining jobs really possible? All these questions that people are kicking around that are political footballs that they try to put some sense to. This is Red Feed, Blue Feed, which is a Wall Street Journal product. I think it's fairly new. I couldn't actually find the date when it started. It does sort of a liberal conservative point counterpoint things that are on the internet and on Facebook. This is a British fact-checking site, the News 4 where they do a similar sort of thing. This is an interesting one. This is called Climate Feedback. This is a group of climate scientists, one of whom is at my university, Emmanuel Vincent. And what they do is they review articles about climate change and they basically put importer on them of this is good information or this is not good information and they're trying to, as much as they can, brand climate information so people can tell the good stuff from the bad, the accurate from the inaccurate, the scientific from the non-scientific. And I'm sure there are other, in other scientific fields, there are probably things like this as well happening. This is a really neat website. It's called The Information Is Beautiful site and they use graphs and data to show as much as they can factual things about information. This is one has to deal with media inflamed fears where they sort of the gray line on the right that really spikes high was Ebola, for example. The amount of coverage that Ebola got in a very short period of time, it peaked and declined really fast. So again, another site that's doing that, Facebook quite famously began trying to flag fake news and of course there was a lot of controversy about that, about how fair it was, how effective it's gonna be. So we're seeing all these silos out there trying to do something about this issue. Of course we've got the big question of who watches the Watchman. I wouldn't be surprised, I haven't looked for it, I wouldn't be surprised if there are propaganda sites out there claiming to be fact checking sites right now that are telling you, we check the facts and give you the truth and they're strictly giving one side of the story or very propaganda, hateful stuff. The red feed, blue feed is Wall Street Journal. A lot of people don't trust the Wall Street Journal. Not everybody does. How reliable is the Tampa Bay Times? Probably as reliable as any other newspaper but we've heard people say that newspapers aren't reliable recently, I've heard that somewhere. So that's a problem too. We've got little silos trying to do something about it and they're disconnected and the chance for fraudulent little silos to build up is there. What would be really nice would be a Google of Truth. Something like Google where you could go to, everybody would know that's the place to get the most factual information you can taking into account that there's a lot of nuance to everything and so on. That would be a really, basically an ultimate goal to achieve. So, I left a lot of time for conversation which is good. I actually went through this faster than I thought I would but that's okay. So I have some questions that really strike me because again I have more questions than answers. So my first question is, is concern over fake news a passing moral panic? Is it a scary clown's fear? Is it, say, tannic daycare fear? Something that a lot of people like me are worried about and oh my gosh, there's all this fake news. People seem to be falling for everything. We're seeing Time Magazine as truth, dead. Are we living in a post-truth era? Can a world leader get up and say anything they want and people are gonna believe them because they're on that person's team and if you're not on their team, you're not gonna believe them. That's, are we really in that era? Or is this just something that's part of that whole cycle of lots of volume and lots of news, 24 hour news and lots of cycling of things through and it's gonna pass and in a few years we're gonna go, yeah it really wasn't any different than things from Darius the Great or the black legend of Spain or what was going on in Nazi Germany. We lived through that too and we were fine. So that's one question that I think is worth asking. Should librarians, should we as librarians make a concerted effort to do something about bad information? Should we get together in some way and put our efforts into trying to create the Google of Truth and I'm using, I don't really believe there could be a Google of Truth but something like that where maybe we say, well librarians are pretty well trusted, librarians can be impartial, can be, they don't have to be but we can be. We could take the lead in this maybe through ALA, maybe through some other organization, maybe we have to create a new organization to tackle this, to do something, to try to create tools that are easy to use and widely available and easy to understand so that people, ideally we'd have a world where if people go, well if I have a question I'll go to Google and if I have a concern about whether something's true I'm gonna go to librarians for truth or whatever. Is that something that we should do? If yes, then what should we do? How should we do that? Is it gonna be a technology solution? Is it gonna be more of a human interface kind of solution? Again, I'm concerned about fighting a wildfire with water pistols, there's so much out there, reaching 20 students at a time is not gonna get us very far. Should we work to maybe work with educators across the board to try to get media literacy and information literacy started in kindergarten and all the way through the curriculum? Should we work with academics to get it embedded in more and more of the higher education curriculum so it's not just the job of librarians to take care of it? I don't know, I don't know the answer. And the last question, is it too big for us to tackle? Is it something that's beyond us as librarians to do? And those are my questions and so we've got almost 20 minutes here to talk about it. So I hope there's some questions otherwise we're gonna be going to lunch early just for a quick information here. Anybody who would like this presentation I think it's gonna be available through CNI but if you'd like me to send you my slides or wanna ask me questions, I'm at UC Merced, I'm easy to find, you can email me dbarkleyatucmerced.edu, I'll be glad to chat with you, email or talk to you or send you my stuff.