A New “Truth to Youth” Program Makes Me Wonder if We Need a “Truth to People” Equivalent

Youth Employment Services or YES is a not-for-profit organization to empower young Canadians to seize the future through collaboration, entrepreneurship, and employment. It offers a mix of online curricula, counselling and mentorship engagement to help job seekers.

Its latest program launch is “Truth to Youth.” This video-based program includes leading media, law and political experts talking about how to spot online misinformation contained within social media sites, and ways to search for the truth. You can watch the video by clicking on the link provided at the beginning of this paragraph.

Why this only applies to youth escapes me. I would argue we need a “Truth to People” video equivalent that describes how all of us can seek the truth.

What acquired skills are needed? An ability to:

1. Compare multiple sources of the same information.
2. Check accuracy and credibility.
3. Gather evidence and facts.
4. Think before you share.
5. Avoid confirmation bias.

The Internet Age Brings Unfiltered Information from Everywhere

We live in the Internet Age. Access to what is going on around the world is instantaneous. Before the Internet, radio and television were the technologies that shared information coming from out there. And before that newspapers, books, and stuff printed disseminated information.

But the Internet created instantaneous universality that we never experienced before. We could use an application like Google to ask questions to retrieve pages of sorted search results. It was like having an online reference library in hand. But the problem with a reference library is the same problem that we get from a Google search. What do you filter out? What do you choose to read or watch?

When I was young in the 1950s I remember a television show “You Are There” which depicted a reporter recreating a historical event as if it was happening in the present. Walter Cronkite, the esteemed CBS news anchor was the host. And who wouldn’t believe Walter Cronkite?

The Internet and social media do what that show tried to do but without reenactments. Today, we see the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. We watch demonstrations on the streets of Tehran. All of this comes to us through television and the Internet. Anyone with a cellphone is a potential photojournalist as they turn their cameras on to record an event live and then put the video clip on Twitter, TikTok, YouTube and other Internet sites.

Social media applications distribute this type of content continuously with billions of postings daily. Social media predated the Internet. Universities and a few companies created internal social network applications. Later on, these applications migrated to the early Internet where we were first introduced to ClassMates and MySpace. Today, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok come to mind when talking about social media.

The mass adoption of these sites has been seen by traditional media sources as both an opportunity and a threat. The opportunity is to get more eyeballs on breaking news stories. The threat is to the continued existence of the print media companies that have seen revenue siphoned away by Internet media sites. The popularity of using the Internet for news and stories has fuelled the development of independent journalism. It has created opportunities for bloggers like me.

I’ve been writing 21st Century Tech Blog since 2009. My daily routine is to research, write and post articles on the blog site as well as on social media sites to drive readers to the blog. As a result, you can find my content on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. This power of content sharing through social media has given me an audience of readers from more than 40 countries.

The Descent to Misinformation is Easy

With the reach of the Internet, it is easy to see how one can disseminate misinformation. Josef Goebbels under the Nazis would have loved the Internet. Donald Trump and his MAGA movement have shown how effective social media can be in spreading lies while also raising hundreds of millions of dollars for political campaigns.

Cable television which vies with normal network television has through its news programming descended into misinformation with its biggest purveyors on the left and right of the political spectrum. The best example is Fox News which presents itself as a network news organization but in fact is no more than a purveyor of editorial opinion, much of it spurious. Through the Internet and cable news networks like Fox we are subjected to:

• Casual and deliberate misinformation.
• Bad Science that sows seeds of doubt in the public.
• Biases that cannot be countered by different viewpoints.
• And information appearing to be news that is not.

In the YES video, one of the speakers describes the Internet Age as an “information sewer.” He is not wrong.

Even “trusted” news networks can spread misinformation although not wilfully. How? When reporters are on a deadline and don’t do fact-checking of a source they are guilty. The practice of double and triple sources corroborating a fact helps to remove the bias that can come from only a single source. Multiple sources can give different viewpoints and reduce confirmation bias.

The best example I can think of regarding the sourcing of facts comes from the movie screen in “All the President’s Men,” the Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman retelling of the Watergate break-in and Washington Post investigation. We see at one point how verifying facts using multiple sources can go wrong as well. The two reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, used a rule when writing about information gleaned from unnamed sources. they had to do this because so many people working for Richard Nixon’s reelection did not want to be named in the newspaper even though they were willing to talk. The Woodward-Bernstein rule was to require two sources to confirm a fact. This avoided confirmation bias which certainly was a challenge for the two reporters as they followed the money behind the Watergate break-in, the trial of the burglars, and the cash trail leading back to the White House.

I make a similar effort when writing this blog. My subject material is largely technological and scientific. My sources are issued press releases, articles appearing in trusted publications, scientific and technical papers, company white papers, summary findings from international organizations, and reputable published articles from mainstream news sources. In writing this posting I started with a press release that came to my mailbox. I then visited the YES website. I read several news articles about “Truth to Youth,” and finally watched the video.

Everyone today if they have Internet access is faced with the bombardment of messaging that assails us daily. How can we discern information through a journalistic lens? The YES program may focus on giving youth the tools and tips to separate the wheat from the chaff, but adults who watch it can also apply these techniques when using social media sites, watching television, reading newspapers, or listening to a commentary on the radio. That’s because navigating to find real facts and real science doesn’t come naturally.