 Evaluating Web Resources – Understanding and Evaluating Information in the Digital Age. Brought to you by John M. Found Library at California State University, San Bernardino. So by the time you complete this tutorial, we hope that you will appreciate the complexity of the information landscape and human information behavior as well as the challenges these pose when it comes to evaluating information. We also hope you'll be able to use best practices and various tools to assist in evaluating the accuracy of information you encounter online, and finally, we hope that you will be able to overall apply critical thinking skills in your own research. So let's talk about the information environment. Fake news, tabloids, sensationalism, propaganda, etc. is not new, and you have some classic examples here on this slide, one of which is a bit more recent than the other. But social media and the speed at which information travels is new. So let's talk about some terminology you might have heard. First is misinformation. This is incomplete and perhaps misleading or vague information, whereas disinformation is straight up false. And I have an example here of disinformation. There have been claims that you can prevent or even cure COVID-19 by consuming certain foods. This is absolutely disinformation, and we will come back to this example later. Some other serious examples of disinformation and misinformation are related to the fake news industry. Fake news is a business and American clicks are where the monies act. This image is from a 2017 investigative piece CNN did as they were thinking about what the information landscape might look like running up to the 2020 election. They explored the country of Macedonia and they discovered a lot of political fake news was coming from there. They found that the actors could get money from advertisers for each click. And so the idea was that false stories were created specifically for American consumption to specifically make money. I don't care, said a man they interviewed, because the people are reading. At 22, I was earning more than someone in Macedonia will ever learn in his entire life. Scary stuff. So as I mentioned, this story ran in 2017, so social media and politics has, as we all know, grown even more increasingly sophisticated, and things are changing quickly. Beyond the phenomenon of fake news, the media landscape is really, really complex. Most media sites are businesses, so there's always content that's missing and content that is reflective of particular interests. Remember that most mainstream news is owned by a few companies like Time Warner, Hurst, Comcast. The key for us is to decipher which is more trustworthy than not. It's always important to look at multiple sources, which we will talk about later. In front of you, you see a media bias chart, and I'm not sharing this because I am a fan. This is not particularly helpful. Tools like this can even be misleading, leading viewers to imagine the content in the middle as okay and not having any sort of bias. Be skeptical of everything. Many outlets publish information that is okay, and also publish really bad or biased stuff. Some outlets that aren't traditionally taken seriously like Teen Vogue have produced really excellent political analyses. And many of those outlets do not even appear here on this chart. So the lesson here is that there are no shortcuts like what you see here. You need to consult multiple sources or read laterally, which we'll talk about shortly. Critical information literacy is a matrix of skills and critical thinking, using background knowledge, applied in context to information. It's also really useful to know what your own shortcomings and biases might be as a consumer of media too, however. So let's talk briefly about information behavior. Information behavior is something that information studies scholars look at, and it includes both cognitive and affective dimensions of engaging with information. So the first piece here is confirmation bias. This is the idea that as humans we seek out or interpret information in a way that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. No one is immune from this. I do it too because I am a human, so it's really important to know sort of what's happening in our brains in the background when we view something. The second piece here is satisfying. This word is a combination of the words satisfy and suffice. And it's the idea that humans often pick information that is good enough, but not necessarily great. And then finally, you might have heard of filter bubbles and or echo chambers. This is when it turns out that we are curating our information environments so that we see content from select users or publishers, right? So think about defriending people on Facebook who don't have the same political views as you. That is one example of creating your own filter bubble. However, we don't necessarily do this intentionally. So I highly recommend that you see the film, The Social Dilemma, if you're able. This really gets into the ways in which social media companies specifically tailor what you're seeing on your phones and on your computers. So what can we do about all of this? Beyond a complete overhaul of our information ecosystem or rewiring the human brain, there are some things that can help. So first, read laterally. Reading laterally simply means that you are not staying within one website or one web source. It means that you are looking and moving to other sources to investigate what you're viewing. There are some important questions that you can ask and you are probably familiar with this line of thinking. It's who, what, when, where, why, and how. So who is creating this information? This could be the individual author. It could be the media outlet. Find out what other sources are saying about this person or this outlet. Are they credible? What are their credentials? Do they have any bias? If so, what does that mean? What? What is the content of what you're reading? In the example I shared earlier, maybe you encounter an article that says you can cure COVID by eating garlic. Well, see what other sources are saying about that. When? When was this information produced? Does that matter? Is it relevant anymore? Where? Where was this information produced? Again, is that relevant? And if so, how? Why? This is a big one. Why was this information produced? Right? Again, does the author or the outlet have an ulterior motive or a bias? Do they have an agenda? You can only sometimes figure that out if you read laterally and explore what other sources are saying about your source. And finally, how? How is the argument or how are the claims being made? So for example, one source might arrive at a completely different conclusion than another source using the same data set. So it's important to really explore how claims are being made. And again, why? So I'm going to review briefly some tools that might help. One tool are fact checking sites. You might have heard of some of these. Snopes.com is a very popular one. I also like factcheck.org and politifact.com. One quick way of investigating a claim, for example, is to do what I call a smart search. And this is when you type in, in a search tool, it could be Google, it could be duck.go. You type in your keywords. So here I have garlic, COVID. And then you do site colon and then your site. So sitesnopes.com. I'm going to go ahead and click on this. This will open up that search. And we can see here, will garlic water cure coronavirus from Snopes.com? And no miracle foods or diets can prevent or cure COVID-19, also from Snopes.com. So I can click on that. And what Snopes does is it presents the claim. And it has very obviously here the rating and this rating is false. So that claim, according to Snopes, is false and they do provide supporting evidence and some background information here. So Snopes is a great, great tool. I highly recommend it. So I alluded to this before. It's also important to determine what other reputable sites are saying about the website where you found your information. So again, you can do a smart search. This is a little more complicated, but you will type in the search bar again, Google or DuckDuckGo, whatever tool you use. You will type in the website URL. So in this case, wnd.com, let's say we read an article there. And then we will do minus site colon wnd.com. What you're doing here is saying, hey, I want information about wnd.com, but not from wnd.com. So if I click on this, my first result here is from Wikipedia. The second one is from Washington Post, Library of Congress, and so on and so forth. And so these can all give me some good information about what I might find on WorldNet Daily, which is the website. Okay. And finally, you can find out who owns the website, which can at times be illuminating. There is a tool called whois.com, which gives you information about the registration date, the name, the organization affiliated with the URL. So you can click on this and it opens whois.com. And in the top right, you can enter your domain or IP address, so I will do csusb.edu. And what this tells me here is that it gives me the registrant and the address, which I know this is California State University's address, which is legitimate, contact information, and so on and so forth. So as you can imagine, this can be a really useful tool if you are unfamiliar with a website and you want to dig a little deeper. And as far as images, you can also search for images and see where they have appeared on the Internet over time. So memes are really big right now. I'm a big meme fan, but sometimes it's really useful to find out where that original came from. So there are two resources you can use. One is TinI, and this is, again, is a reverse image search. And you can either upload an image here or you can enter a URL for an image and it will show you the results. I will close this. Google Images works in much of the same way. It's images.google.com and you can type in your URL or you can upload an image here. And it will show you other instances where that same image has appeared online and you can hopefully hunt down the original. And last but not least, it's always important to follow the breadcrumbs. So if the web resource mentions or gestures to a scholarly journal article or a research study, use what information is provided to get to the original. Either the author's name or the name of the journal is included in a newspaper article, for example. If they don't have that information or you're not sure where to start, please contact the FOW Library. Librarians are happy to help you hunt down those scholarly journal articles and get the information that you need. So let's practice together. If you recall, I started out today's tutorial with this image. You might have been curious about what you were looking at. So here we have a man who looks like he's mowing and not far behind him. There is a massive tornado. So I was really curious about this image and I did a snopes search. So I did man mowing tornado site colon snopes.com and I will show you what I found. So the article or the excerpt says man mowed lawn during tornado. It's got that image. This is actually true. So this is always a humbling experience for me because sometimes you are wrong. And then the final image I want us to explore together is this really adorable image of a frog on a turtle's back. And this one sort of gestures to the complexities of what we see online. This is from a PBS news hour. And news hours source the photograph from Getty Images, which is an image database. And it turned out that the photographer told news hour in an interview that he had purchased the animals in a pet shop and then he staged the image. And so there are some concerns here about not only animal welfare, right? Whether the animals wanted to be picked up, you know, they might have been terrified being around one another and also, of course, journalistic integrity. In my opinion, this piece is intentionally misleading, however adorable it is. And so this might not exactly be misinformation or disinformation, but it certainly should cause you to question what you see, especially all those really cute animal pictures out there. So wrapping up, today we talked about the complexity of the information landscape. We also talked about human information behavior, some of the affective and cognitive dimensions of information seeking. We talked about the challenges these pose when it comes to evaluating information because we are up against a lot. We also talked about best practices like reading laterally and not relying on simple lists of good versus bad sources. We also covered some tools to assist in evaluating the accuracy of information that we encounter online. And then finally, I hope if you take nothing else away that you are encouraged to always and consistently apply critical thinking skills in your own research. Thank you very much.