Keepin' It Real: Tips & Strategies for Evaluating Fake News

Are your news sources diverse? How do you encounter viewpoints different from your own? Can you listen and try to understand the other side?

If the answer is no, you may be in a filter bubble!

College is a time when you will be exposed to other points of views, to engage with challenging or uncomfortable information, and to expose yourself to diverse voices as outlined by LMU.

"You can't have a good democracy without a good flow of information." -Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble

What is a Filter Bubble?

• your own personal, unique universe of information you live in online. And what's in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do. But the thing is that you don't decide what gets in. And more importantly, you don't actually see what gets edited out (via Eli Pariser's TED Talk)
• the intellectual isolation that can occur when websites make use of algorithms to selectively assume the information a user would want to see, and then give information to the user according to this assumption (via Techopedia)
• information network that results from sources using its vats of data to offer us what it thinks we want to see and hear (via Digital Trends)

What about confirmation bias?

Definition: Confirmation bias is the phenomenon that you are more likely to accept information that you already agree with or are prone to agree with. When your searching only pulls up information that you agree with or are expecting, you will be satisfied and not notice that you may not be getting the full picture (via Humboldt State Guide)

Safiya Noble is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. In her PDF 2016 talk, Noble explains why we should care about commercial spaces dominating our information landscape.

Search engines have become our most trusted sources of information and arbiters of truth. But can we ever get an unbiased search result? Swedish author and journalist Andreas Ekström argues that such a thing is a philosophical impossibility. In this thoughtful talk, he calls on us to strengthen the bonds between technology and the humanities, and he reminds us that behind every algorithm is a set of personal beliefs that no code can ever completely eradicate.