When stories and claims travel online, they can lose important context. And sometimes misleading or deceptive information can take its place. So when looking at a story or a photo that reaches you, it's important to get as close to the original source as possible.
Think of it like going back to the first person in a game of broken telephone. You know the message that reached you, but to find out whether it's been garbled, you've got to go back to the original source. The good news is it's relatively easy to get closer to the original source, and once you have found that source, easy to figure out whether the source has been properly represented. Let's look at an example.
The headline of this story claims that a majority of Canadians support defunding the police. Now, this is a case of re-reporting. Often a website will take information originally reported somewhere else. The site may summarize that original report. cut parts out, blend it with other information, other sources on the same topic, and that can be helpful, but a lot can be left out in that process of re-reporting.
If we scroll down, we see that there is a link included to the original reporting source, Global News, and we're lucky here since we're given that link, but if the site hadn't provided that link, it wouldn't matter. You can usually find the original story using the search terms. The same sort of techniques we used earlier to see if a claim was reported. by other sources. Now, what do we learn when we look at this Global News article?
Well, so Global commissioned a poll from the polling firm Ipsos, and it found that 51% of Canadians support the idea of defunding the police. Now, first, we notice the headline here is a little bit different, right? A little bit different than on the story that we found. The original headline referred to a majority of Canadians. But this feels a little bit exaggerated, since in this case, the majority is very slim, just 51% to 49%.
The global headline here, much more measured, probably more accurate, saying Canadians are divided on the issue. Looking at the global story, we also get more context. First, the article describes what defund the police means, which is important context for this discussion. Getting into the habit of tracing information to the original source can help...
bring you to higher quality sources, sources which often provide this more complete or more nuanced story. One way misinformation can spread is through false context. False context or false framing is when real content is shared with a false comment or summary that misrepresents the story.
Take this tweet. This person shared a surprising story on Twitter claiming that the NDP leader praised U.S. President Donald Trump.
and said that Canada should adopt U.S. policies on race. Now, initially, this looks good. The link that they shared goes to the Globe and Mail, a reliable source.
The headline suggests that the story is actually about Singh asking Prime Minister Trudeau to address systemic racism in Canada. But there's two parts to this, right? There's the linked story, right, which is from a reputable source, which we know. And then there's this reaction to what's said in that story.
which here is provided by someone that we don't know. So what do we do? Well, we start by just clicking into the story, right? That's step one.
For step two, we want to see if this claim is accurate or if we're missing additional context. Now, we can read the whole story from top to bottom, but a faster way to check this is to search the page for keywords. So let's do that here. Many of you will already know how to search a web page, but just in case, On desktop browsers, you use Control-F, Command-F on a Mac.
On a phone, use this little drop-down on your browser. This is usually in the upper right-hand corner. It says Find In Page or something like that.
We plug in the search terms. And since we're interested in whether Singh actually praised Trump, let's just start with Trump. This brings us immediately to the quote in question where Singh does reference Trump, but it's hardly praise.
He accuses Trudeau of doing even less than Trump in terms of policy change, but also says that Trump has been horrible on this issue. If we go back to our Control-F trick in plug-in policy, we see that this is the only reference to policy in the article. Singh isn't exactly saying that Canada should adopt U.S. policies. It's an interesting article.
Singh is certainly critical of how the Canadian government is addressing systemic racism. But his response was complete. completely misrepresented by the person who shared the story on Twitter.
The upshot is this. If a source that you don't know or trust is summarizing a link for you, verify their summary by clicking through and executing a simple search. Thank