The false online posts about government plots that have complicated hurricane recovery efforts are not anomalies.
Rumors about danger and disorder that spread online are regular fixtures far from disaster zones, creating panic and adding to the work of police departments, news reporters and other local officials.
Just ask Tim Cotton.
The now-retired lieutenant with the Bangor Police Department in Maine said roughly a few times a year, an online post would go wild locally that described something like a creep following a young person around a store or a parking lot, or “a van with strangers” attempting an abduction.
Bangor police would speak to the purported crime victims, check out security camera footage and do other investigating. In each case, Cotton said the online posts proved exaggerated or false, but the fear spread more quickly than police could check them out.
Crime rumors are nothing new, but Cotton lamented that they can now travel farther and faster.
“Once it gets put on the internet, it takes on a life of its own,” he said. “It’s nuclear-level gossip.”
Cotton’s experience suggests that misinformation including about recent hurricanes is not only the work of irresponsible politicians, anti-government attitudes or social media sites with little regard for the truth. It’s also more evidence that misinformation is a natural outgrowth of our human anxieties, turbocharged by online connections.
One lesson is that we’re all susceptible to overreacting to scary-sounding things that may not be true — and we all have a role to play in holding back the tide of misleading information that can hurt us and our neighbors.
Human judgment is a liability on the internet
Sam Wineburg has run experiments with students at Stanford University that show we’re often overconfident in our ability to judge whether online information is true or false.
Wineburg, co-founder of Digital Inquiry Group, a digital literacy nonprofit, showed students a website and gave them a few minutes to decide if it’s trustworthy. The students often fall for the trap of a website of gussied up junk science. Participants do best when they have the humility to recognize they can’t accurately evaluate information that sounds like it could be true.
The problem is that good and garbage information online can all seem the same, Wineburg said. That goes double when it’s something that hits us emotionally, such as a post about strangers targeting girls at the local Walmart.
“This stuff does an end-around your prefrontal cortex and hits you in the solar plexus,” he said. (Wineburg is also an emeritus professor at Stanford’s graduate school of education.)
What you can do about it
Wineburg says we need new skills to rewire our impulses for the internet age. He uses the term “critical ignoring,” a twist on critical thinking, to describe paying less attention to information that’s “misleading but cognitively attractive,” as researchers including Wineburg put it. Here’s some advice to try:
Ask yourself the right questions: Don’t think, “Is this true?” Wineburg advised. As the Stanford students found, we’re not adept at evaluating information that seems like it might be true.
Instead ask: Do I really know what I’m seeing? Is this person in a position to know? Are there web links? Can I find this information anywhere else on the internet? Is it in the news?
Also see if you can find the original source of the information. A local news reporter or a city council member might be less likely to post an unverified crime rumor, because they may face consequences if they’re wrong. Not so for some random guy on Nextdoor.
Try to notice when something you read or hear makes you angry, afraid or elated. Wineburg said in the history of human evolution, it’s been valuable to pay close attention to surprising or emotionally charged information and share it with those close to us. Now that we’re swimming in constant information, Wineburg said those instincts can be counterproductive.
Recognize the patterns common to both good and bad gossip. We like feeling as though we’re in the know about something — a Black Friday sale or tips about “secret” menu items at In-N-Out Burger. We want to help by passing along the information.
But it’s useful to assess when this good habit turns toxic, such as when we pass on nasty gossip about a neighbor or a rumor about strangers in a van.
“Take a step back and talk to a human being about it,” said Ben Decker, founder and CEO of the online information analysis firm Memetica.
Decker gave an example of Instagram posts that his wife saw of cute children’s beds shaped like Teddy bears or other stuffed animals. He thought they were AI-generated fakes, and the pair talked about it and tried to re-create similar AI images on their own.
The point was not to do an ironclad verification of Instagram posts but to engage in a “communal gut check,” Decker said. For all of us, if something you hear seems upsetting or surprising, talking about it with family, friends or neighbors can have more power than a million fact-checkers.
Back in Maine, Cotton had similar advice.
He said some rumors will be true and the police don’t want to discourage people from reporting crimes. But Cotton suggested there are twin benefits to calling the police instead of sharing a rumor you see online.
Official sources can check it out before that rumor makes more people unnecessarily afraid. And, echoing Decker, Cotton said talking to another human can make you feel better. Maybe a police dispatcher will say there was a bogus rumor like it last month, or they looked into this one and it’s not true.
“It’s easier to make a phone call to a law enforcement agency than to make a baloney post,” Cotton said.