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Comment by Uehreka | Hacker News Reader

Lately I’ve come up with a heuristic that I think anyone can use:

Before reposting something, ask yourself “have I heard about this website before today (or before this news event/cycle)?” If you haven’t, google the thing you just read about, and see if you can find an article from a source you’ve heard of before today.

This isn’t to say that mainstream news doesn’t get things wrong, they definitely do sometimes, but so much of the real garbage I see on social media is people all sharing the same post from some random site called like newsline.xyz or something. In fact there’s so much low hanging fruit like that that I think a large amount of disinformation would go away if people just checked if anyone at all was reporting the story other than the source they’re reading.

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Had a fun experience at work this week: tsunami warning goes off on the west coast while we are all in a remote meeting. I say that there has been a large earthquake off the coast. 30 seconds go by and coworker posts a link to a news article with the headline that "tsunami warning tests were being conducted that week" and goes on to tell everyone it is just a test. I open the article and immediately see that it is from 8 months ago. Its an easy mistake and I do it all the time as well, nevertheless it was interesting to see how quickly the wrong thing gets out.

Ironically this used to be one of the better uses of Twitter.

> Before reposting something, ask yourself “have I heard about this website before today (or before this news event/cycle)?”

Here's a better heuristic: Stop wasting your precious time and mind on low-grade crap. Read/watch high-value sources only - you won't run out; there are too many to read them all.

It's not only the source, it's also the kind of content. It's of course not 100% reliable, but most bad content is pretty lurid stuff. Wedge issue content of any type can be safely ignored as well, or rather it's unsafe not to ignore.

> most bad content is pretty lurid stuff

That is the badly executed bad content. Well-executed disinfo/misinfo is what gets you.

Believing we can tell the difference just by looking at qualities such as luridness is the critical error. It's like people who think they can spot fake reviews - they can spot the reviews that don't fool them, not the reviews that do fool them.

It's not a perfect filter, but I think it's useful.

Got some good aggregate tips?

I'm not sure what you mean by 'aggregate', but there are still serious journalistic organizations:

* NY Times: Ignore the politicization of their reputation, and the demonization. Ignore that it's the boring, status quo answer - it is for a reason. Just look at the articles, which describe their methods for that article: The research is extensive, statements are made carefully, and they offend everyone on all sides equally. Their claims tend to be born out in the long run (though nothing is perfect and certainly they've made mistakes).

* Financial Times: Very expensive, but very good if you can afford it.

* The Guardian: Certainly a liberal point of view, but quality research for their journalism.

With the recent corruption of the Washington Post and CNN, and MSNBC (though that was always biased), we are running out of top quality, credible news.

Let’s say this idea is brilliant. How you gonna get that in front of people and then persuade them to use it?

Part of the problem with that approach is that a lot of people are getting their dis/misinformation from very large sources. Infowars, Breitbart, Zerohedge, The Free Press, Turning Point USA, etc: the list is endless of total nonsense sources that tend to spread around the same polemical and heterodox disinformation. People will cycle through the same content shared by each of these sources as "proof" of their claim when behind the scenes it's all just covering a single person's errant Tweet.

Yep was going to say something similar.

Probably best to stick to something like the BBC news for most things IMO - they're not funded by advertising or some billionaire trying to influence things, not politically aligned (some people will argue against that though), and do generally decent journalism.

This technique won’t stop those people, but then idk what will. I’m mostly talking about the kinds of things I get frustrated at seeing my liberal friends post.

Usually if I see one of them post something that’s total BS and I point out that it’s BS, they’ll apologize and take it down. But I don’t have the energy to constantly be “that guy” all the time. I think if more of my friends did this (since their reactions show that they are in fact interested in sharing things in good faith) then at the very least my own facebook timeline would have less junk in it.

When we single out publications, let's ensure we're not biased against the Right or the Left.

https://gatewayjr.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Media-Bias-...

Despite the intent to show an equal distribution visually, if you actually pay attention to the individual outlets you see a few things. Nearly all the outlets in the summit block, over 40 reliability score, are considered left or far left by republicans. The most extreme fringe of low reliability score are all right wing. I’m honestly not sure how any critical thinker could believe both sides are equally bad at spreading misinformation. Both sides do it to an extent, but the right is clearly worse, and that’s what your chart shows. Believing that is not bias. It’s reality.

I would say that the chart somewhat limited based on the score that CNN is getting. Every single day for years if you were to turn on CNN at any time of the day you would see stories about Trump + Russia. Sure you can call that "analysis" but I think it under-represents how much of an effect the repeated beating people over the head with one-way "analysis" has.

You probably wouldn't call this misinformation, but I belive it is deception because CNN markets itself as fact-based "news" (https://www.cnncreativemarketing.com/project/cnn_factsfirst/), but in fact it's just entertainment disguised as news. And like Fox News, CNN tries to bait it's viewers into emotional reactions and team-choosing, which ends up causing more division between us.

Anyway, that's why I get all my news from the Weather Channel.

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