With four chapters of Verified, we have a lot to cover in this week’s post. Shockingly but fortunately, the chapters actually covered different topics this time.
Everyone Point and Laugh at Sam
Peer review am I right? As college students I’m pretty sure we’ve all been forced to go find peer reviewed articles for the sake of an essay. This chapter pretty simply goes over the reasons we consider peer review to be slightly more reliable than other sources.
We Finally Get Some Answers
I have been wondering this whole time why the authors hadn’t gotten to the Wikipedia chapter already. To the point where the chapter right before this one has a note from me asking why the authors haven’t explained their use of Wikipedia yet. After finally reading that chapter, I still don’t know why they didn’t just put that chapter towards the beginning of the book. My personal theory is that they wanted to up their word count by writing, “We’ll explain why you can and should mostly trust Wikipedia later,” every time they referenced Wikipedia.
Overall I found this chapter pretty interesting as it was essentially a brief history/overview of Wikipedia that was helpful after seeing the rest of the world continually bash Wikipedia.
Videos? I Thought You Said Lies
This chapter covered the things we should consider when we see an alarming video. For one, we need to see what the context of the video is. Is a clip taken from a longer video? Is the caption accurately describing what is happening in the video? Finding an original source and context is especially important as AI videos are flooding the web.
Ads be Advertising
The authors spent more time complaining about the fact that ads are ads than they spent trying to teach us to recognize ads. It kind of felt like that one article we read that spent more time bashing Facebook than talking about the subject. Ironically, Facebook was one of the ad sponsors the authors of Verified complained about.
I’m definitely not saying ad news is a good thing (I wholeheartedly agree that paid articles need to be very clearly and consistently labeled) but I think it’s unrealistic and even a bit ridiculous to waste time complaining about how ads work their way into journalism. Even unsponsored articles can be heavily biased and acting like advertising is the one thing that’s negatively impacting journalism instead of the intrinsic bias that all individuals have is just silly. There’s a reason Verified tells us to fact check any sources we find so I don’t think the fact that some sources might be ads changes the fact that we should already be looking into the accuracy of the things we see.
Comments
One response to “Is That *squints* Another Complaint About Facebook”
Your comment about the authors wanting to up their word count is funny. It is the only logical explanation right? If I had not read the whole book, I would have been doubting this book’s credibility just because it used wikipedia. The way our beliefs are ingrained into our judgements is pretty intense. AI videos flooding the web is actually a terrifying thing to have happening. We used to be able to tell something was real just because it was a video. Then we could gauge pretty well if something was edited. With AI now, our only hope really is to have more context about what is going on.