Some Definitions (from Canadian Association of Journalists' Misinfo 101 workshop)

Misinformation:

Information that is false or inaccurate, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm.

• For example: sh*tposting with friends about something untrue but funny or unknowingly sharing an article with outdated statistics or the wrong dates with someone.

Disinformation:

Information that is false or inaccurate and is deliberately created or shared to harm a person, social group, organization or country.

• For example: deepfakes.

Malinformation:

Information that is based in reality (but often exaggerated or selectively edited) and shared to inflict harm on a person, social group, organization or country.

• For example: sharing private data or images publicly - "revenge porn"

Image Credit: First Draft News “Understanding Information Disorder,” https://web.archive.org/web/20241009174006/https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/understanding-information-disorder/

Figure 1

Peter Steiner's Famous 1993 New Yorker Cartoon Illustrating an Issue Central to Information Evaluation

Note. From "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" [Cartoon], by P. Steiner, 1993, Wikimedia (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.jpg).

Evaluating Information

It is good to find lots of search results, but, in order to use information skilfully, you need to know how to evaluate that information to determine whether a specific resource is appropriate to use in a specific use case (i.e. for a specific assignment).

The phrase "evaluating information" actually stands in for a wide range of judgments that we make about information in many different contexts, whether those judgments are about relevance, timeliness, quality, etc.

Librarians have developed several different techniques to help people evaluate information. Two of my personal favourites are RADAR and lateral reading!

RADAR stands for

Relevance

Authority

Date

Accuracy

Reason for Creation

Comparing RADAR with Brian Carroll's "How to Identify Fake News" section (pp. 276-278) from this week's reading:

Step 1: Consider the source. (AUTHORITY)

Step 2: When was the article published? (DATE)

Step 3: Ask about agenda. (REASON FOR CREATION)

- What are the source's sources? (ACCURACY)

Step 4: What is the context?

We can ask the following questions to help us assess each criterion:

Relevance:

• Does this source fit my topic?

• What is this source's intended audience?

  • Is that intended audience appropriate for my use case in this assignment?

Authority:

• Is/are the creator(s) of this source clearly identified or known to us?

• How important is it in this use case to trust the source's creator(s)?

  • If it is important, why should we trust the source's creator(s)?

  • Is the source's creator credentialed or an expert in their field?

Date:

• Is the creation or publication date of this source identified or known to us?

• Is this source too old?

Accuracy:

• Do this source's facts "check out"?

• Does the source have references of its own?

Reason for Creation (take your best guess at this question using judgments from earlier criteria):

• Why was this source made?

• Was this source made to sell a product or service, to inform/educate, to entertain, etc?

(Adapted from Mandalios, J. (2013). RADAR: An approach for helping students evaluate Internet sources. Journal of Information Science, 39(4), 470-478. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551513478889)

The Five Pillars of Verification (First Draft News)

1. Provenance: Are you looking at the original piece of content?

2. Source: Who captured/created the piece of content?

3. Date: When was the piece of content captured/created?

4. Location: Where was the piece of content captured/created?

5. Motivation: Why was this piece of content captured/created?

Lateral Reading

Lateral reading is an information evaluation technique developed by the Stanford History Education Group (now Digital Inquiry Group) and based on research they conducted comparing the information evaluation habits of Stanford undergraduate students, professors from four different universities, and professional fact checkers.

What the SHEG found in its research was that professional fact checkers spend far less time reading "vertically" - staying on the specific source and evaluating its specific claims. Instead, professional fact checkers would read "laterally" to save themselves time - reading about the first source in other credible sources online to determine what the first source's potential biases may be, how credible it is, etc.

Generative Artificial Intelligence, Misinformation, and Disinformation

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot topic these days that is having an impact on many areas of cultural life, education, and the economy.

Generative AI tools can be used to create and spread misinformation and disinformation in multiple ways.

In NewsGuard's October 2024 audit of the 10 leading GenAI chatbots, the organization found that those chatbots "collectively repeated misinformation 24.67 percent of the time, offered a non-response 21.67 percent of the time, and a debunk 53.67 percent of the time. The 46.33 percent “fail” rate (percentage of responses containing misinformation or offering a non-response) increased from NewsGuard’s September audit."

In addition, as of November 11, 2024, NewsGuard's team has identified 1,121 unreliable AI-generated news and information websites spanning 16 languages.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, states, in its own documentation for GPT-4, that “[t]he profusion of false information from [large language models] … has the potential to cast doubt on the whole information environment, threatening our ability to distinguish fact from fiction.”

Two ways that this has happened already and that have made the news have been through fake image generation and textual fabrication.

A Specific Textual Fabrication Example From ChatGPT

Be sure to scrutinize any source(s) that generative AI provides you with on a topic. This is because, at this point, it is prone to error: what some have called "hallucination," but that I prefer to call "fabrication."

If generative AI provides you with a source:

(1) make sure that the source actually exists, and, if it does exist;

(2) make sure that the source actually contains the information that generative AI has attributed to it.

An Investigation of ChatGPT's Sources

1. Book: Influencer Marketing for Dummies by Kristy Sammis, Cat Lincoln, and Stefania Pomponi

   • This source does exist and it was written by these authors, but it is a For Dummies book that wouldn't be considered scholarly.

2. Book: Influencer Marketing: Building Brand in a Digital Age by Duncan Brown and Nick Haye

   • This source does exist and it was written by those authors, but ChatGPT has fabricated a subtitle for it that it doesn't have.

3. Academic Article: "The Rise of Influencer Marketing and Its Impact on Consumer Behavior" by Liu, Hu, and Zhang (2019)

   • To the best of my searching abilities, this source does not exist.

4. Academic Article: "Ethical and Legal Issues in Influencer Marketing" by Brenner, A. and Capron, L. (2019)

   • To the best of my searching abilities, this source does not exist.

5. Academic Article: "The Dark Side of Social Media: A Consumer Psychology Perspective" by Phua, J., Jin, S.V., and Kim, J.J. (2017)

   • This source is a Frankenstein composite of 2 sources. The authors have been taken from this article and the title has been taken from this edited book with which those authors had no involvement.

GenAI & Mis/Disinformation Activity

Here is a Padlet board to use to track your research: https://padlet.com/bleching/gned1403_genai

1. Please put your names below an item in a comment to claim your information source.

2. Next, perform a "lateral reading" of your source by searching the web for it and finding other reputable sources that talk about it or that are hosting it online.

Useful websites that you might use to analyze your source might be:

• Tineye

• Google's Reverse Image Search (instructions here) or (in Chrome) right click and "Search with Google Lens."

• You might also want to use Hive Moderation's AI-Generated Content Detector.

If your source has text, you may want to also search that text on Google in quotes to find more info about it. For example:

"example text"

3. Write what you find in other comments and try to answer some of these questions:

• Who created your source (if applicable/known)?

• Why did they create it (if applicable/known)?

• If you find that your source was AI generated, which GenAI tool(s) were used to create it (if applicable/known)?

• What issues related to GenAI does your source represent?

4. We will wrap up in ~10-12 mins.

• Source 1

• Source 2

• Source 3

• Source 4

• Source 5

• Source 6

• Source 7

• Source 8

• Source 9

• Source 10

• Source 11

TikTok and Misinformation/Disinformation

Given the video sharing platform TikTok's widespread popularity right now, it is full of misinformation and disinformation that can travel at lightning speed as bite-sized clips.

NewsGuard, an organization that tracks mis/disinformation online, performed an analysis of TikTok content in 2022. The organization found that the platform “repeatedly delivered videos containing false claims in the first 20 results, often within the first five" to users. Out of 540 TikTok videos that NewsGuard vetted for its report, 105 (19.4%) contained false or misleading claims.

Though the company claims to be combatting false information through collaboration with fact-checking organizations like PolitiFact and Reuters, there is still tremendous potential for misinformation and disinformation to spread on TikTok due to the nature of virality and how much content is circulating on the platform.

General TikTok Information Literacy Principles

- Be aware of the potential for the selective editing of video and video manipulation.

- Be aware of the potential for the selective editing of audio and audio manipulation.

- Consider how misinformation and disinformation from other platforms can easily spread on TikTok. (Example).

Further Resources

• NewsGuard Reports

• Civic Online Reasoning (Digital Inquiry Group)

• Media Smarts (Canada's Centre for Digital Media Literacy)

• Doubt It? (NewsWise)

• Spot Fake News (News Media Canada)

• Canadian Association of Journalists' Misinfo 101 National Guide

• Interactive Media Bias Chart (Ad Fontes Media)

• Deepfakes Tracker Research Portal (Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University)

• MRUnderstanding Misinformation (Developed by Dr. Brooks DeCillia - Journalism faculty here at MRU)

The Assignment

You have been asked to write a digital magazine feature article.  Within this article, you will:

• Interview an expert related to your chosen topic

• Cite at least 1 scholarly secondary source that supports your story

• Your source should be cited in APA

The Dog on the Internet Problem

Figure 1

Peter Steiner's Famous 1993 New Yorker Cartoon Illustrating an Issue Central to Information Evaluation

Note. From "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" [Cartoon], by P. Steiner, 1993, Wikimedia (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.jpg).

Evaluating Information

It is good to find lots of search results, but, in order to use information skilfully, you need to know how to evaluate that information to determine whether a specific resource is appropriate to use in a specific use case (i.e. for a specific assignment).

The phrase "evaluating information" actually stands in for a wide range of judgments that we make about information in many different contexts, whether those judgments are about relevance, timeliness, quality, etc.

Librarians have developed several different acronyms to help people remember useful criteria to use in information evaluation. One of my personal favourites is RADAR! You have also learned CRAAP for this class, too.

RADAR stands for

Relevance

Authority

Date (or Currency)

Accuracy

Reason for Creation (or Purpose)

We can ask the following questions to help us assess each criterion:

Relevance:

• Does this source fit my topic?

• What is this source's intended audience?

  • Is that intended audience appropriate for my use case in this assignment?

Authority:

• Is/are the creator(s) of this source clearly identified or known to us?

• How important is it in this use case to trust the source's creator(s)?

  • If it is important, why should we trust the source's creator(s)?

  • Is the source's creator credentialed or an expert in their field?

Date:

• Is the creation or publication date of this source identified or known to us?

• Is this source too old?

Accuracy:

• Do this source's facts "check out"?

• Does the source have references of its own?

Reason for Creation (take your best guess at this question using judgments from earlier criteria):

• Why was this source made?

• Was this source made to sell a product or service, to inform/educate, to entertain, etc?

(Adapted from Mandalios, J. (2013). RADAR: An approach for helping students evaluate Internet sources. Journal of Information Science, 39(4), 470-478. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551513478889)

Scholarly vs. Popular Sources

A scholarly publication contains articles written by experts in a particular field. The primary audience of these articles is other experts.

Many of these publications are also referred to as "peer-reviewed," academic, or "refereed." They all mean essentially the same thing and refer to the editorial and publication process in which scholars in the same field review the research and findings before the article is published.

Some Helpful Questions for Identifying a Scholarly/Academic Article

1. What are the author’s credentials? Was it written by an expert?

2. Was it published in a journal (is there a DOI?)? (If you are not sure if a source is a journal article, you can enter the title of the publication into Ulrichs Web to check.)

3. Does it use academic or more technical language?

4. Does it includes a reference list of sources that it is citing?

5. How long is it? (Scholarly articles are typically longer than popular or news articles.)

6. Does it have a "Received" and "Accepted" date on it?

7. Is it an actual article? (Sometimes other types of content are included in scholarly publications, such as editorials/opinion pieces and book reviews. Make sure you are looking at an article.)

 Add / Reorder 

Examples of scholarly articles: 

Beech, N., & Hewer, M. J. (2021). A climate change impact assessment (CCIA) of key indicators and critical thresholds for viticulture and oenology in the Fraser Valley, British Columbia, Canada. Weather, Climate, and Society, 13(3), 687-705.

van Leeuwen, C., Sgubin, G., Bois, B., Ollat, N., Swingedouw, D., Zito, S., & Gambetta, G. A. (2024). Climate change impacts and adaptations of wine production. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 5(4), 258-275.

Activity: Is It Scholarly?

To make sure we are all on the same page, let's put our knowledge to the test.

Skim the following resources available through the links keeping in mind the characteristics we have discussed in class (for example: what is this information and where did it come from? Was it written by an expert? Where is this source published?).

Vote whether you think this source is Scholarly or Not Scholarly.

Source 1

Source 2

Source 3

Source 4

Source 5

Source 6

But seriously...

Your scholarly sources will likely be one of the following:

• A peer reviewed journal article

• An academic encyclopedia entry (that gives you some substantive information)

• An academic book (published by an academic press, written by a scholar)

Remember: 

Use your critical evaluation skills to determine whether your other sources are good enough to use in this assignment! Look for references to data, evidence and links to reliable sources.  Make sure that the source you use comes from a reliable source.

Figure 2. Copely, R. Huge stand in the market with a large selection of fruits [Photograph]. Pixy.org. https://pixy.org/143529/

What word(s) would you use to describe this image? 

Questions to consider

• Are you using the terminology that an expert in the field would use?

• Is there more than one way to spell the word?

• Are there any synonyms or other terms that could apply to your topic?

Tip: Think about your topic in terms of a simple sentence and then highlight key terms. 

Example Problem: Do female faculty get paid less than male faculty in Canadian universities? 

Conducting Academic Research With LibrarySearch 

LibrarySearch is MRU Library's one-stop search interface/catalogue that brings together resources across format, time, and subject. 

We have millions of e-resources and 221,000 physical resources in our collection, and LibrarySearch searches across those.

Things to remember when using LibrarySearch:

1. Sign in to save searches, items, and to request materials.

2. Use the pin icon to save books and articles to your Favorites for future reference.

3. Use the filters on the right. You will use Availability, Resource Type, and Date filters most often. Filter settings can be "locked in" so that you don't have to reapply them to every search that you make.

4. Some items may not be available, however, you can request unavailable items using what is called interlibrary loan.

5. When viewing an item record, scroll down to the Get it (for hardcopy/physical items) or Access options (for electronic items) section to get access to the item.

Helpful Search Operators to Use in LibrarySearch

You can use what are called search operators to search in a way to combine or omit different terms by telling the search engine exactly what you want and this can help you save some time (and frustration!)

• Use quotation marks to keep specific phrases together:

  • "pay equity"

• Use AND to combine search terms (LibrarySearch automatically creates an AND when you write terms one after another, but it can be good practice to use an AND to help you understand the searches that you build) (AND narrows your search):

  • "higher education" AND salary AND "gender discrimination" AND Canada

• Use OR to connect two or more similar terms (OR broadens your search):

  • "pay equity" OR "pay equality"

• Use wild cards to substitute a letter or suffix with a symbol:

  • Canad* (in this example, the search Canad* will search for records that contain strings such as Canada and Canadian)

Conducting Academic Research With Google Scholar

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is another great way to find high quality resources.

Besides providing links to resources in MRU databases, Google Scholar links to online repositories that contain articles the author has been allowed to upload.  Academia.edu and ResearchGate are among the repositories searched by Google Scholar.

By clicking on the Settings icon, you can select library links to show library access for up to 5 libraries (type in Mount Royal and click on save).  If you are logged into MRU library, links should automatically populate if you are running a Google search in another window. 

Google Scholar has a nifty citation chaining function. The Cited by function will forward you to indexed scholarly material that has cited a resource that you may be interested in. The Related articles link will direct you to similar articles that may have the same metadata or keywords. 

Helpful Search Operators to Use in Google Scholar

Google Scholar's Advanced Search is found by clicking the menu icon in the top left.

You can also add search operators to Google Scholar searches to build your own custom advanced searches in similar ways to LibrarySearch:

• Use quotation marks to keep specific phrases together:

  • "higher education"

• Avoid using AND to combine search terms with Google Scholar, as the search engine automatically creates ANDs between concepts and sometimes adding an additional AND can confuse the search syntax.

• Use OR to connect two or more similar terms:

  • salary OR pay OR compensation

• Use wild cards to substitute a letter or suffix with a symbol:

  • Canad* (in this example, the search Canad* will search for records that contain strings such as Canada and Canadian)

Citation Help

• Use the "cite" feature in most search tools to get you started with most resources (you will need to review and correct the citation).

• Cite Sources: Learn the correct way to cite sources by using these guides, tutorials, and videos.

  • MRU Guide to APA Style for Referencing (2024-2025)

  • MRU Guide to APA Style for Formatting a Paper (2024-2025)

• Academic Success Workshops: Academic Success Workshops are 75 minutes long and are offered both in-person and online. Registration is required.

• Appointments: Personalized online or in-person 30-minute appointments with a Learning Strategist at Student Learning Services located on the 2nd floor of the Riddell Library & Learning Centre.

• Use the Service Desk on the 1st floor of the RLLC for assistance as well as the library chat feature on the library website for quick citation questions.