Crimson and Gold Connection; Jorge Leon

Welcome to Crimson and Gold Connection, keeping you connected with the people and current events at Pittsburgh State University. This is the Crimson and Gold Connection on 89.9 KRPS. This week on the Crimson, we learn about fake news. It's defined as a form of news consisting of deliberate disinformation and hoaxes spread through traditional news media or online news media. We're joined this week by the Learning Outreach Librarian at Pittsburgh State's Axe Library. He's also an associate professor here at PSU, Jorge Leone. Thanks for joining me this week on the Crimson and Gold Connection. Oh, it's always a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. What are some of the tools that are available to spot fake news? I think that's one of the interesting things about this and it's one of the areas I try and focus about with students and with my work as a librarian talking about where to draw that line with fake news. So one of the things I really want early on is to define that not everything that's misinformation is fake news. There's a lot of misinformation. Misquotes that happen by mistake, satire, imparity that people misattribute. The real fake news, the thing where somebody has that intent to be deliberate and purposeful,

that is not as common and that's where I try and work with students and figure out how they can be better prepared to spot things like that and fact check. A lot of the things that most institutions talk about, everything from an American Library Association to international associations on a real broad level, is just being very aware. Being aware of the sources you're looking at, stopping yourself before something angers you to a point of just hitting retweet or reshare and saying what were they trying to get from me, what kind of emotional response, fact checking things with sources like with snopes, with politifact, with pointer, with different sites that are meant to help you fact check. And just doing very lateral research, research on the topic and go, can I find several sources that reinforce the same thing? And this isn't a new topic for you to research or be interested in. You've been looking into this for years now before taking more of our product.

Definitely. And I think you were mentioning components and pieces with NPR. We've seen this for a number of years. We've talked about misinformation for a number of years since the publishing of newspapers. And since there's been that trend, it's just that in the most recent election cycles, in the most recent political cycles, we see a term popularized so much so that now it's hard for people to even define what is fake news. That's a good question. In fact, this week with the with Iran so much in the news, there was a picture of a former president shaking the hand of a Iranian supreme leader. It looks like they're shaking the hand of the picture editing is excellent. But these two never met in real life. And the article that I saw is pointing out four different points on the picture of where you can see the edit isn't as good as it should be if it made it look perfect. So what are some of the ways off the top of your head that we can spot fake news in everyday life? Like I said, I think one of the things that's most important is to just be very vigilant

on something like that, if it was meant to make you confirm and agree and feel that aha moment, take a step back and go, is this something that maybe what can I do? And there's some incredibly simple and basic free tools. If you just go on Google as a web tool, they have a reverse image search. You can save and drop the image back in there and I'll tell you, has it been uploaded in different places? Does this show up in a place like Snopes and you can see if there's an article about that, has it been altered? There's a number of different other cases where the person that's sharing the image has cropped or reduced the picture where the image is 100% real. But because they're only showing you a fraction of the picture, the context is changed. And you've also created a car game. Right, right. So I think that's one of the things where I've been really intrigued and turning a lot of this tactile and research and information into something that we can play or have students

engage with. I've been researching this for a number of years and I always run into a problem that it's hard as an icebreaker to have this conversation with students, especially first of your students, who feel like they are digital natives so they should know better. So they're a little hesitant to have this conversation with an adult who's going to say, you guys aren't doing the internet right. So I turned it into a card game, a factual fictitious or for fun, a fafifu for short game where we really bridge the topic of, it's not just about, is it factual or fictitious, but what are the things in the middle? What's the gray area? What are the pieces that are sat higher? What are the pieces where somebody created it for fun, but somebody else took it way out of context. So give me an example of that. A really good one for that, a couple years back there was a case in the US about a person suing their parents, they were older age and they were suing their parents because they

were being kicked out of their domicile. Well, a national report, a satire news source, think of the onion, think of late night shows, create a parody piece of that, and their article kicked off and had way more hits than the original one did because it just sounded so plausible. It had been in a recent memories, so most people attributed that it was the same case. So was that real or fake? So the case in the US was real. The other one that the British news source created was a parody piece, they were making fun of the situation and people took it and ran with it on social media. Sure because in my Facebook feed, I see, I subscribe to the onion or the New Yorker has an onion version also. And some of the stuff they post, it seems so outlandish, but I have to think that somebody out there also thinks it's real. Well, and to be really famous, one of the best examples of this is a satire source called Blue News Network.

They clearly identify in the front page that the guy who writes it is called Mike DeCop and that it's for police officers to blow off some steam and have some satire outlandish articles, things like new TSA checks, but they've been cited in numerous times as if they're real articles because people don't take the time to look through it or it reinforces a belief that they already have or something happens that they don't take the opportunity to go away at a moment and they continue to share it. So a number of fact checkers have had to fact check their sources and just display that it says this is a satire source. Associate Professor and Learning Outreach Library at Pittsburgh State University and Pittsburgh State's Axe Library, Jorge Leone, thanks for joining me this week on the Crimson and Gold Connection. Pleasure to be here. Thank you very much. To get in contact with Jorge Leone and to learn more about his How to Spawn fake news card game, search for Pittsburgh State Axe Library Outreach.

I'm Fred Fletcher-Fierro and you've been listening to the Crimson and Gold Connection, a production of E-D-9-9 K-R-P-S. Join us for Crimson and Gold Connection Wednesdays at 8.50 and Fridays at 350.