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Monday, October 07, 2013

A Troubling Trend

So, when I jump online with my coffee in the morning to read the news, a few blogs, and the last few minutes worth of social media, in the back of my mind, I'm always considering the question this blog attempts to address: How do we argue?

Three years ago, I wrote about my concern that the intentional spread of misinformation had the potential to taint what was already an unruly public discourse. Recently, a growing number of my posts have dealt with arguments based on misinformation seeping out of less rigorous parts of the blogosphere.

I'm starting to become more and more concerned about this.

It is no longer the occasional post by my crackpot friends (I know quite a few, and they are fun at parties).   People who I personally know to be smart and reasonable have used bad evidence to back up provocative statements about political debates.

The latest version of this was related to AmberAlert.gov, which went offline for days due to the shutdown. It turns out that the service itself was still running, but the website was offline - which was a bad visual, but not really bad news (Note: AmberAlert.com was not offline).

But here's where it gets ugly: The Blaze ran a story about how the Amber Alert website was down, and in the headline, The Blaze's Oliver Darcy noted that the website for Michele Obama's Let's Move Campaign was still up and running. Here's how Darcy wrote up that comparison in his story:

It was immediately unclear when the website was taken down. However, it should be noted that First Lady Michelle Obama’s website for her “Let’s Move” campaign is still up, running and fully functional.
 The AMBER Alert program is a voluntary partnership between law-enforcement and broadcasters that issues urgent bulletins following cases of child abductions.

Darcy did not lie or twist facts in that section of text. Instead, he simply implied a lie. He suggested, by placing these two websites side-by-side, that Letsmove.gov is a federally funded program and that the maintenance of its website is performed by federal workers - supported by federal tax dollars.

The implication suggests that Michele Obama is running a federal program and that her programs get special treatment.

And that is how the "story" was presented to me when someone I know and respect posted about this on a social network. The suggestion was that the federal government values Michele Obama's project more than it values missing children.

Three years ago, I would have expected this from the fringe. But today I'm seeing it come from mainstream voters who are civically engaged.

It is a troubling trend.

I teach critical thinking, ethical debate, and rhetorical skills because I want my students to push back against this. I honestly don't care about their politics; I just want them to know how to argue their positions from an informed place.

I'll keep doing that work, but here's two questions for the interwebs:

  1. What can our connected and networked society do to push back against this trend?
  2. What skills do today's readers need to identify the kind of misinformation we're seeing?


3 comments:

Dan Kaufman said...

I am truly not sure what we can do to push back. It is more work to do research and prove someone's rhetoric wrong that spouting some ideology. I am exhausted.

As for your second question, I think two things are critical. Number one, we need to teach people that it is ok to be wrong. Accepting new information and revising your opinions and theories is what makes you a stronger, more intelligent person. Your positions also become stronger. Second, people need to be aware of studies like this Politics Wrecks your ability to do math. If people are aware, I think they are more likely to avoid traps.

I run into this on facebook all the time. Recently, someone posted an article about how President Obama is presiding over the first shutdown in 17 years. I got annoyed and pointed out how the president has nothing to do with it. The response was "stop getting so defensive, the article doesn't say it is Obama's fault". Although that is true, the point of the article is to connect (and therefore blame) Obama to the government shutdown. Most stuff in the article was technically true, but it deliberately misled people.

Hogan said...

"It is okay to be wrong" as a skill is a great response.

Active learning assumes missteps (requires it really).

Nice, Dan.

Traci said...

Not only is it okay to be wrong, it's okay to simply not know the answer in the first place.