My name is Gabriela Resto-Montero I'm the managing editor at Rocky Mountain PBS, and Im here today with Alex Mahadevan, and he is a journalist with the Poynter Institute.

He's the director of MediaWise, which is a media literacy project aimed at combating digital misinformation.

He joins us today as Rocky Mountain PBSs ongoing democracy and media literacy project ahead of the 2024 election.

So welcome, Alex.

It's really great to be here.

Thank you so much for taking the to be with us.

I wanted to establish a few of your guidelines and kind of your thoughts on misinformation for our audience who are also interested in all of this.

So can we just start with you telling us a little bit about what MediaWise does and how you define misinformation VS. disinformation?

So MediaWise was founded in 2018 and our goal right off the bat was to help a million teenagers separate fact from fiction online.

And the way we do that is by teaching people how to think like fact checkers.

So our whole goal throughout all of these years has been to empower people to use the tools that fact checkers and journalists use to spot misinformation wherever they see it in their own life.

And so I just used the word misinformation.

So a lot of people hear misinforma- tion or disinformation.

There's some confusion about what those two terms mean.

So misinformation is anything false shared for any reason whatsoever So this might be my aunt shares a meme saying that Amazon is offering free $20 gift cards.

If you just call this number, you know, it might be totally false and totally a scam, but she's just sharing it because she loves me and she wants to pad my bank account.

So that's misinformation, for any reason its shared.

Disinformation is anything false that's shared on purpose.

So that's when you or I or any other expert is able to determine, hey, this person created this piece of false information, this video, this post, for a purpose, to scam people out of money, to influence how someone votes just to disrupt our democracy.

Is there any misinformation that is harmless?

That's a really good a really good question.

You're the expert.

I'd like to say that there are pieces of misinformation that are harmless.

I mean, personally, I'm a big fan of trying to find out about Florida's Skunk Ape which is my home state's version of the Sasquatch Now, that is, you know, to me, it seems relatively harmless, but the problem is, you know, our reality is in the we go about our lives.

Every decision we make is based upon the information that we consume.

The Facebook post, we see the Tik Tok videos, you know, the goofy memes that our friends send us.

So, you know, when you let your guard down for what you think might be harmless pieces of misinformation that can have ripple effects, the last thing I want to do is you know, encourage people to to establish bad habits.

You know, so I really enjoy, you know, like the Onion.

Satire is, you know, it's great.

But the problem is if someone shares an Onion article and they take out the part where it says it's from The Onion, it becomes misinformation and then it's harmful.

There are little white lies out there, but the problem is when they start adding up, they can affect your decisions, your friends, family and community.

When you encounter misinformation in the wild, like in your example, if your aunt shared a discount code that did not exist, how do you as as a non-journalist, how do you address that in a way thats not condescending or isolating the person who shared it or making them feel like they've done something horrible?

Be a good listener.

I think what's missing from a lot of the discourse is empathy right now for anything dealing with misinformation in particular.

So I think going into a conversation, even if its as harmless as a fake Amazon discount code, going in with empathy and talking to my aunt and asking, you know, hey, hey, you know, where did you see that post?

I really appreciate that you shared that with me.

It means you care about me, right?

did you do any research like, did you check out that person's profile?

And I guarantee she's not going to get defensive If you open with empathy and kind of explain to people, hey, listen, everybody falls for misinformation.

I always love to lead with you know, I have I have definitely fallen for misinformation.

And I'm an expert in this field.

So finding common ground, using empathy and listening, which admittedly are three things that we need a lot more of in the public discourse.

Are those keys - listening, empathy, do those also translate in a journalism setting when you're talking about fact checking & that as a discipline within journalism and how we in our work address misinformation.

Yes.

So, you know, I, I think a really well-written fact check is written in a way that is disarming to the audience.

You never want to be condescending, especially with, like Poynters.

PolitiFact is a member of Facebook's third party fact checking program.

So their goal is to attach fact checks to basically as many pieces of misinformation So people on Facebook will share and they will actually see a little thing that says this information is false.

So when you when you fact check you have to understand that there's someone on the other end of that fact check.

So I think fact checkers, sometimes there's a separation between fact checking and journalism, but I think both sides can learn from each other.

I think the same way a journalist shows up to a train derailment and speaks to people with empathy, asks the first question how are you doing?

You know, rather than what's going on.

I think that that's how you approach fact checking as well.

Earlier, you mentioned that even though fact checkers will always make one or more parties angry with the fact check, that in the aggregate audiences are really hungry for fact checks.

They are really hungry for the looking beneath claims and looking beneath things that are shared by not just politicians but other people in the public eye.

Can you speak a little bit more about that and about how much more widespread fact checking is than people may realize?

Yeah, so fact checking has grown massively since PolitiFact was founded in 2007/2008.

There are more than 400 fact checkers worldwide growing.

There might even be more than that.

The international Fact-checking Network, which is also based at Poynter, has, 100 plus signatories from many countries around the world.

We we have an annual fact checking conference.

We have like 500 people there and and in Seoul recently, because what we are what we were determining is in the US, falsehoods spoken by politicians have dire consequences.

We saw what happened on January sixth.

We saw what happened with anti-vaccine misinformation during COVID 19.

That's in the U.S. You look in other countries and in India, there are murders that happen based on misinform- ation spreading on WhatsApp.

There are, you know, I mean, there are coups that can happen based on misinformation.

So I think what people have realized is that we need to go beyond traditional journalism and really dig in to finding and debunking falsehoods because they are undermining democracies around the world.

And I think that's why youve seen such a growth in that.

And I think that's why audiences respond so well to it because, people don't want to be fooled.

People don't want to cast a vote and then find out that they've been manipulated.

Nobody likes to be manipulated.

Nobody likes that.

So I think people are hungry for fact checks because they want to know, When I go to the polls, I'm making a decision that's based on my thoughts, not some disinformer who's tried to influence my vote Yeah, thats certainly why we're taking on media literacy as a company.

You monitor a lot of the trends, I guess, in misinformation.

What are you seeing ahead of the 2024 election that is concerning you or that you feel that people should be a little bit more on alert about?

Well, a big one as of late falsehoods about the amount of illegal immigration into the country.

I think every election like clockwork, you start to see misinformation claiming that it's the worst year ever or the worst week ever or worst day ever for illegal immigration in the United States.

People like to share videos that claim to show the border people amassed at the border or caravans.

A great deal of that content is out of context.

So maybe like a video of a group of people at a different border from ten years ago, it's mis-captioned it's mis-contextualized.

So I think people need to be really on guard about when they see and hear politicians talking about immigration or, you know, illegal immigration, that they need to make sure that they're getting the facts, checking in with fact checkers.

Election integrity.

I think it some politicians have found that calling election integrity into question has become a really potent way to score votes, or at least to make people stay home and not vote.

So what we will definitely see is claims about, you know, absentee ballots being unsafe or not being counted or being over counted or you'll see lots and lots of voting misinformation.

And then the other thing that that always concerns me is misinformation about whats happening at polling places.

And, you know, is this polling place closed down or are there going to be ICE agents at this polling place that are looking..

So really what concerns me the most is misinformation around election integrity.

And and you know, how and when and where to vote.

That's a perfect segue way into part of your educational drive is giving folks the strategies to cope with misinformation when they encounter it in the wild.

So can you go over those strategies with us?

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, you know, I love journalists and I love fact checkers, but there's only so many of us.

So unfortunately, theres only so many videos we can debunk, memes we can say are not true.

So unfortunately, in this day and age, as personally someone who wakes up and is on X first thing in the morning, watches Tik Tok, I spend the entire day consuming information on social media.

So, you know, that's rough.

But part of it is my job.

But I kind of, you know, as consumers of social media and users of all online platforms, we kind of have to become our own fact checkers because theres just too much content out there.

It's not back in the day when you sat down and there were 3 news anchors you'd watch, now you're getting your news from 1,000 different sources, a newsletter, Substack, name it.

So you have to be able to be your own fact checker.

So to start, you know, the first thing that that I think it's really important to do is practice something called lateral reading.

So when you see a video or you see a meme or you see a post online instead of just reading vertically or just scrolling and watching the video, and what you're going to do is you're going to think about that video.

You're going to bounce to another another tab, use a search engine, plug in some keywords and try to find out if that video is true, if that post is legit, where it originally came from.

where it originally came from.

Open another tab.

Google who posted it.

Try to find out who's behind that post.

So you end up reading laterally, so youre reading across tabs to find more information about that post.

So instead of just staying in one tab, you're going to do multiple tabs.

The other key is something called click restraint.

So click restraint is really important because when you are using a search engine to find out whether that video of the border is real, you want to make sure youre clicking on the best search result you get.

So instead of clicking the first thing you see at the top of those search results, scroll down.

See if you recognize a news source.

See if you recognize your local PBS station.

Do you see an Associated Press article?

Do you see a PolitiFact fact check?

So using click restraint and really scanning search results is really important as well.

You're basically a mini reporter Turning people into mini reporters.

And that's the entire basis of the MediaWise program was around research from the Stanford History Education Group and they studied fact checkers, academics and students And what they found is academics and students were actually both pretty bad at spotting misinformation.

Fact checkers naturally were.

So they tried to figure out how do fact checkers actually navigate the Internet.

So they read laterally, they use click restraint.

They try to find out who's behind the information.

They read multiple sources.

So really, everything we teach is based on to turn you into your own fact checker.

When we were discussing just our best practices in the newsroom, theres the question about whether or not you want to go in for the indicator that gives the green light on a fact or the red light on a fact or you're going to have a Pinocchio or what have you.

So I'm going to put you on the spot.

I'm going to ask you for Rocky Mountain PBS.

What should our truth meter look like?

The truth-o-meter.. if we were going to have a truth meter on our fact checks.

What would it look like?

Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, it could be....

I try to think...

I don't know.

Im visualizing mountains..

Right.

and half the mountains are covered in snow because the fact has been obscured.

Oh.

That's very good.

Maybe you are a completely covered mountain and that is totally not legit.

I don't know I mean yeah.

With our readers actually a totally snow covered mountain might be legit, Id say.

Oh yeah, this is fresh powder.

This is an excellent start.

Thank you so much.

It is a challenge coming up with you know how to how do you actually call out a piece of misinformation?

At PolitiFact, it's pants on fire or false or mostly false.

But, there is a science that that goes into it.

So before I let you go, what is what you hope is the main takeaway for folks to have about media literacy and how they consume news?

Well, the main takeaway is every decision you make from the breakfast cereal you get at the grocery store to the vote that youre going to cast in this coming election is based on everything you see online.

And if you are consuming misinformation, you're being manipulated into making decisions that don't align with what you believe.

So by employing media literacy, by making sure you share good information, by talking to your friends and family about the importance of facts, you are protecting yourself.

You're protecting your friends, your family, and your community.

And you are being a good digital citizen.

Beautiful.

Thank you so much for your time.

We really appreciate it.

And we will be checking in with with our project.

Thank you.

Excited to see it launch.