Okay, evaluating truth, fiction, and everything in between. There's just almost too much material from the last few weeks to cover here, but I'm going to do my best. You see I have a bunch of tabs open.
I had about 20 more tabs open a minute ago, just pulling everything together. This is on purpose. I want to show you some of these tabs.
So I'm going to check chat from time to time. If you have burning questions, drop them in there. I don't know that, I can't promise that I'm going to have time to get to all the questions just because we do have a lot of participants.
But I'm going to talk today about how to navigate breaking news in the age of AI and a noisy information environment. And this webinar is really designed for everyone. We have an educator webinar. series coming up next week.
If you're an educator, even if you're not and you're just interested, you're welcome to join that as well. Just go ahead and register. All right, let's go right into it.
Today, we're going to discuss today's information environment, just a quick little overview, some overall principles and best practices for navigating breaking news, and we'll weave these in throughout all of our examples. And the most fun part is the examples. So Today's information environment.
You're probably familiar. That's how you found out about this webinar with our company, AdFontes Media, and the media bias chart that we are famous for. This is our most recent version of our flagship media bias chart, which was released in January. And keep your eyes peeled because we have a new version, a new flagship version that we're scheduling to release next week.
So you come to our site to download that. But things to notice about it. There are thousands of news sources. They vary in size and reliability and bias.
So there are news sources at the top and in the middle that are big and small. Like you don't have to be established for a long time or a large outlet in order to be highly reliable. You know, at the same time, being big and established for a long time doesn't necessarily make you reliable either. It can be lower on the chart, further left or right, et cetera.
But in today's news environment, we have individual reporters at these news sources, at these news outlets, writers who are not necessarily reporters, like opinion columnists, content creators, and influencers, you know, creators of podcasts, et cetera. And they... tend to share their information not only on their primary platforms, such as a podcast or a TV show or YouTube or the paper that they write for, but they also share this information on social media.
So we really get our information from a lot of different places. And there's a lot of overlap between the sources that are on here and the voices that you hear, you're tweeting this stuff out or posting it on threads or Facebook or TikTok or YouTube or whatever. So some overall principles and best practices, especially when it comes to breaking news. Here's our first set of overall principles and best practices.
One, your goal should be to gauge the likelihood of veracity, especially before speaking publicly about a claim. All right, so that part about especially before speaking publicly about a topic or a claim. Let's dive into that a little bit more. The next principle is really prioritizing accuracy over speed. It's best to wait.
And the bigger your audience, the greater your responsibility to verify accuracy before sharing information or weighing in with your opinion. And this is really easy to ignore in today's information environment, especially if you're the kind of person who's active on social media. So why I say...
before speaking publicly about a topic or a claim is because of this, the third principle. We all have some sort of audience. Your audience might only be like your friends and family and just people you talk to in real life if you're not somebody who shares stuff on social media. But if you are somebody, even if you don't have, let's say you have just sort of a normal online presence, maybe like Facebook or Instagram.
and you share content from your life, you have some sort of following. You have your friends that are on there. The things you say, you are saying out there to an audience.
Some have much bigger followings. So the bigger it is. That expands from people who have moderate to large followings to people who could be considered influencers to people who are journalists. There's a ton of folks. The size of audience really varies a lot.
But let's drill down a little bit on this likelihood of veracity concept. Why are we talking about likelihood? Why aren't we just talking about just truth?
Is it true or false? Is it? Is it true or is it a lie? Well, the deal with information on the internet, or any information really, is that it's truly rare when we can be 100% certain that something's true or false. And if you go back to epistemology and philosophy 101, philosophers have wrestled with one how you can truly know what's really true, like with 100% certainty.
For the most part, you can't. But... We want to be comfortable with the fact that even if we can't be 100% certain of what's true, the truth, we can reasonably sort out what's likelier to be true and likelier to be false. And, you know, there's things that we can be 90% certain or 80% certain or 50-50, you know, there's like those differences in gradients.
We want to get comfortable with the fact that some things, you know, we can have 90. plus percent confidence on that they're true or false. And we can't just throw up our hands and say, you know, we don't know what's true. We do have to decide.
We do have to like make decisions based on what we, and make bets on what is more likely. So in our own evaluation of reliability, we have an internal methodology for determining the... determining the likelihood of veracity for any particular claim that we come across, that our analysts come across in a newspaper article or a podcast or a TV show. And those steps are pretty simple. One, it's determine if you have reason to question the veracity of a statement or a claim, like putting your flags up.
Two, this is so dead simple, but I'm going to keep coming back to it over and over, is look it up. Look it up. Look it up in a search engine. Literally Google it. I don't recommend asking Chad GPT for it or any other generative AI for it because they can give you wrong answers quite frequently with confidence that makes them sound right.
But look things up. It's just not a natural mechanism for most people because when you come across news, especially on social media, it's easy. The buttons there are, you know, some version of like or share or like repost with a quote. There's no like look it up function. You have to like open up a new browser to type in the thing that you want to verify and look it up.
But it does you so many favors. When you look things up, you get varying results based on what you entered as a search. So you want to sort the kinds of results that you get mentally into like high quality. medium and low quality sources of corroboration of the thing you're looking for. So generally, like highly reliable news sources would be, you know, high quality corroboration.
But when you're just finding, you know, medium or low value sources of corroboration, it can give you reason to question what you, the veracity of what you looked up in the first place. Follow the links and read further. on high quality corroborating sources.
This is why you need to sort them in the first place into high, medium, and low. Look for the best source that you're familiar with to dive deeper into the question. And you may find competing information that happens all the time, but we are able as humans to weigh the relative credibility of conflicting information.
We do it all the time. Okay. Let's get into some of these examples. All right. So this is somewhat chronological, these examples that I'll give that we're going through over the last, I think, four or five weeks in American politics.
So seems like a long time ago now, but Trump survived an assassination attempt. And there was lots of inaccurate information in the immediate aftermath of that. So one thing I thought was.
really fascinating is that some folks, especially on social media, who have like an anti-mainstream media posture. complained about big news outlets being slow to confirm significant information. So here's an example like this.
This person on X said, you know, they took a screenshot of Washington Post because the Washington Post headline said Trump rushed off stage after loud noises at rally. And then here's look at the caption here. Like you don't hate the media enough.
Like you should hate the media. because they're not telling you like the truth or whatever is like the underlying claim. However, it's really important for a big outlet to get a really, really important fact correct. And it's more important to get it correct than to put it out fast.
Remember when I said prioritize accuracy over speed? So think about you have a responsibility with your small audience. to be accurate. The Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, they have a much, much bigger responsibility because if they publish something that's not true, then that's a big deal.
So like publishing exactly only what you know at the time is actually really prudent. You should want your reliable news sources to wait a beat. wait a few seconds, um, and only write the things that they can definitely, definitely verify.
Okay. So let me, uh, here, let me back up just a second and talk to you about like my mental thought process when I first saw, um, the, like the footage of Trump, uh, having been shot and like, you know, we find out later, like he was shot and, you know, rushed off stage and like, we find it. more details later.
But when it happened, like there's only limited information that you have. They kept replaying this video over and over. And it was like, you know, you could hear some noises. You could like see him like go down to the ground and like wince. And then, you know, you can see there's like a little scuffle, a secret service comes in and then they like bring him over and he like says this thing.
And then they take him off to a car. Like they just showed that over and over. And like everybody, I had questions.
I'm like, oh my gosh, what happened? And it's totally normal to have questions when you don't have the information. Like you want to start piecing together, like based on what you have, what's happening here.
And you can like hypothesize or conjecture when you don't have a lot of information. Like one of the things I thought right away was like, well, seems like he wasn't hurt too bad. You know, it seems like he's got his cut on his ear.
And you know, those noises didn't seem very loud to me. Was it like a BB gun or something? This is what I thought in my head.
Okay. These are the questions that everyone has these sorts of questions. It would have been super irresponsible of me to just ask those questions out loud on social media to like hypothesize and conjecture because I didn't have any information that like my wonder if it's a BB gun thought was like even plausible. So like I didn't write anything just You can do that. You can just not say anything because you don't know and you don't have the information.
I was just like, well, I guess I'll just wait to find out. And, you know, we found all the information over time. So what happened? But people love to just like put their hypotheses on the Internet.
And this is this is one of the things that happens when when you do rush. OK, so there are a few outlets that published and republished some reporting. that said, you know, Donald Trump was hit by glass from a shattered teleprompter, not a bullet, according to sources.
And then, so a version of that appeared in MSN, in Newsmax, in Raw Story, in a few other outlets that were, you know, like fairly big and like have their big websites that have big followings. And it turned out to not be true. And it's shouldn't have been published by those outlets in the first place. Many major news outlets did not publish such a thing because they couldn't independently verify it. And the reason why is because these stories were actually like the published articles online were actually based on unverified tweets.
So this is actually a Newsmax reporter and Newsmax ended up like publishing this article and it's still up to this day. They've like not corrected it. But this one that I showed you right here is still up.
And so is that MSN one, by the way, raw stories corrected their, their original reporting on that. But a Newsmax reporter was on the ground and Axios reporter also was on the ground and tweeted that too. Right.
The Axios reporter later deleted her tweet. And the reason that other outlets didn't just, you know, look at the unverified tweets and republish them is because like, this is sort of a major fact. Like you would.
want to make sure that you can verify independently if you're going to go ahead and publish such a thing. Because what happened with this, like just enough credibility in the large websites having re-reported it, there was quite a bit of confusion about the underlying truth of that. It had the effect. Here we go. These had the effect of giving the early report a lot more credibility than it ever should have.
Sorry for the sizing here. But this first transcript here that I'm showing you, this is from the New York Times podcast, The Daily. And in the middle, like this is a whole podcast about like evidence, like there's a photo taken by a New York Times reporter. It showed a bullet that was likely a bullet grazing past Trump's head. And but in the middle of this transcript, it says, and do we know for sure it was a bullet that hit him?
And it says that's a little bit ambiguous. There were some reports that he was injured by a flying glass from a teleprompter. But in a truth social post, he said he was shot by a bullet. And in a conference call today with the FBI, they refused to address the issue at all.
And that makes it sound a little bit more ambiguous than it was. It's really not ambiguous at all. Here, let me just pull up this Snopes article on it real quick.
Here, Snopes. Oh, I will get to Snopes, JD Vance. Don't you worry.
But let's look at teleprompter glass shards. Ah, drunk. Okay. So, uh, this, you know, that initial reporting was false and you know what, based on what was the evidence that was available at the time, uh, the reports should have known that the writer should have known that it was false.
Uh, one of the major, uh, like the major things was that like, you could see right here, like this, this was the image that we all watched live. Like over and over and over 50 times like in order for like a glass charge specifically um from a teleprompter specifically to have like hit him in the ear you would need to have shattered teleprompters and here it's like boop boop there's like two intact teleprompters right there you know so there's um the fact that this uh people rush to uh to to judgment on it even days later like here's michael steel michael steel on msnbc said there are a lot of questions around that year um mediaite this is an article from mediaite that says he flirts with trump shooting conspiracy theories in uh bizarre commentary all right okay let's move on to another example um oh wait no okay second set uh sorry for the order of this okay Overall principles and best practices second set. Let's recognize when information sources present speculation instead of evidence.
When you see news outlets or information sources saying things like, well, it just doesn't add up or it just makes sense. Like they're providing like logical arguments rather than evidence. You should have your guard up.
When they pose a lot of questions in a row. That's a rhetorical device. Just at the quote, just asking questions is a rhetorical device.
What just asking questions as like a trope is, is when you, you ask this rhetorical question, like, well, why wasn't it this? It makes the reader or the listener. assume that the answer is something negative, that they didn't say that they didn't have evidence for. And the related principle...
Is it like there's nothing wrong with questions? You know, like I said, I went through like a litany of questions in my head when I saw this, you know, this assassination attempt. That's where reporting starts. It starts with a question, but the actual reporting itself should be the answers to that question.
When people just publish questions, that's not news. That's not journalism. It's not reporting. So here's let's dive into this.
example. Biden dropped out of the presidential race. And like the information on some websites was like, well, maybe he's dead. And, you know, some people believe this for a short period of time.
You know, maybe he's dead, just asking questions. This article is from a outlet called American Spectator. It says, believe nothing about Biden's resignation and don't give him any credit, blah, blah, blah. So.
I'm just going to pull up the actual article itself. And it there's a lot of, you know, you know, anti Biden bias here. But let's jump in here in the middle. He basically says, you know, the Democrats and so and so are a bunch of liars. And he says, if they say the sky is blue, we better see some verification, like, whatever the Biden and the Democrats have to say.
not to be trusted. And he says, and there's no verification as of this writing. Well, more than 24 hours of the fact after the fact that Joe Biden has quit the 2024 race of his own volition. So they're like demanding proof that he did this out of his own volition, even though there's no evidence that shows that he didn't. They're trying to shift the burden of proof from the thing that's likely to the thing that's unlikely.
All we've been given is a letter supposedly written by Biden, but only equipped with a digital signature and not on presidential letterhead, which was released on Biden's ex-account that everyone knows he isn't in charge of. So it sounds like evidence, but it's actually not evidence. There's no actual evidence that this is a fake letter written by somebody else that wasn't Biden, that it was tweeted out by somebody not under his control, right?
So it sounds like evidence, but there's no actual evidence. It's just plausibility. Tradition indicates that something as dramatic, historic, and consequential as a sitting president refusing to run for re-election would be announced at a live press conference. So they're using as proof a logical argument or an intended logical argument that if this were real, this would have been... announced at a press conference.
Again, sounds like evidence, but it's not. So or at least via a televised address to the nation or perhaps a video statement or in a phone interview. So they're putting out a bunch of like hypotheticals, again, without presenting evidence that Joe Biden did not do this out of his own volition.
So let's see. You're welcome to believe that if you want here. Here's another possible interpretation.
This is from Charlie Kirk, who's a, you know, right, strong right, influencer as podcast, some media sources. I received multiple emails like this confirming many elements of the story. There was a plan that changed abruptly and they got him on AF1 very quickly.
Like something, something about like maybe Biden was rushed to a hospital or something. And it says, yes, Laura Loomer, who is even less credible because of past statements that she's made that are false on the Internet. This is even like admission that like, yeah, we know like Laura Loomer is not like the most credible.
Has Charlie Kirk corroborated it? Are either of them less credible than the people in charge of Joe Biden's ex account? Again, these are all just questions.
Still like a lot of sentences and zero evidence. So. um we all know that like a few days later joe biden like did an oval office address and was not dead and there's still been no evidence that uh he uh he didn't quit the race of his own of his own volition you know we've heard heard from him in interviews since then and it's just uh but it's funny that like during this window of time there's like a two three day period between when he announces on Sunday and then when he had made his Oval Office address. But there's a bunch of stories like this from like, you know, serious outlets like, I don't know, just asking questions. Maybe he's dead.
So the way to identify that is by looking for these kind of tropes, looking for this, you know, just asking questions or like just presenting a logical argument in lieu of evidence. All right. Isn't this fun? I'm having fun. Okay.
Let's do some other examples. All right. Other overall principles and best practices.
for evaluating information on the internet. Beware of claims that confirm your bias in a highly satisfying way. False claims that have very specific information are actually really easy to fact check, but they're also very easy not to fact check.
Jokes and lies are both very powerful in our political... discourse. What am I talking about here?
What example? You know the one. Okay. So the JD Vance couch thing. I'm going to get into this example here and I'm going to, and hopefully I gave enough of a pause where we can like put out a version of this video that we can cut out this example in particular because it's like mature content and, you know, maybe you want to share it with the, you know, classroom or something.
So we'll endeavor to put out a version that's got this part missing. This is the best outline of this whole story is in this Snopes fact check. No, J.D. Vance did not say he had sex with couch cushions. So let's take a look at it. And they lay out a few elements here.
So the claim is that J.D. Vance wrote his 2016 memoir about having sex with an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions, which is false. But the origin of this particular false statement, which you'll see people refer to as a joke, you'll see people refer to it as a rumor, and you'll see other people refer to it as a lie. And I think how you refer to it...
is kind of a giveaway about your left-leaning or right-leaning bias. You know, if you're like, oh, it's just a rumor, it's just a joke, you know, left-leaners would tend to ascribe that description, whereas, you know, it is a false statement. And folks on the right would ascribe the word lie. Okay, so this is the initial tweet that, like, kicked all of this off.
And I will allow you to just read it yourself. Um, but you know, some guy on the internet wrote this and then he has what appears to be a citation like Vance in his book, Hillbilly Elegy pages 179 to 181, really specific, you know, like a very specific citation. Like this is, this is checkable. You could go online and find a, um, you know, like a digital copy of this or or you could, you could Google it, you know, early on, there's probably not a lot, there weren't like any fact checks of this, but this, like the nature of this particular kind of claim is that it's very believable because if you were inclined to think like, you know, let me find some things about JD Vance to not like, or to make fun of, or to ridicule, you know, you, you all have probably noticed that in just the last month. you know, with J.D.
Vance being nominated as the vice presidential nominee and with Tim Walz as the other, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, you know, there are folks on the internet who are like really quick to jump to like finding evidence about why this person that we just started caring about is the worst person on the planet. So this is like ripe for, for taking and running with it. This is funny. This user said he signaled that he was joking when he followed up with a tweet with a go on the internet and tell lies meme.
And I actually want to click through this because this is a really helpful website, this Know Your Meme website. Oh, wait, no, that's not it. It's Know Your Meme. No, that was... It's this one, go on the internet and tell lies.
If you're not familiar with a meme is a really good place to like figure out what the deal is. Um, you really think someone would just do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies.
It was intended to be a giveaway, but people actually did go on the internet and believe it. So this person basically repeated the information, saying on pages 79 through 81, blah, blah, blah, and then making a larger point about J.D. Vance. And then more people tweeted about it as if it was true.
And so I'm going to stop with this. with this article because they go through and say like, you know, we check the book itself. It does not say that in there on those pages, nor anywhere else in that book.
And with the rest of the article, they go on to talk about how many people made jokes about it online. And they gave so, so, so many examples of joke after joke, after joke, after joke that was, that was on. the uh on the internet about this that it was like a little excessive it was over the top it was like indicative of bias like it was just funny it must have been funny to like the writers at snopes so to keep going on with this but what i noticed about the online uh discourse around this is that um when people found out that it wasn't um it wasn't true like i think people um many folks initially believed it was true especially on the left And, you know, both folks on the left and the right like to point to examples for each other saying, see, you believe to misinformation. And when folks found out that it wasn't true, because not only did like Snopes publish a fact check, AP published a fact check. They ended up pulling the AP fact check down and they said, well, it didn't meet our editorial standards.
And. you know, reading between the lines, it seems like they just didn't want to like get swept up in this online, like sort of like immature, like in the gutter kind of conversation. But, you know, they published a fact check and they got swept up into the conversation. When people found out that it wasn't true, a lot of folks, especially folks who are like, oh, they're right.
You know, they traffic in all this misinformation. They're like, well, I don't care if it's not true. It's just a joke and it's funny, you know?
And there was, you know, quite a bit of whataboutism. Like, well, you know, the right can't complain about this because they lied about X, Y, and Z, about the election. You know, we're clearly just joking and having fun with it. Therefore, we're justified.
So you can see how that wouldn't be like super compelling to folks on the right. Like they're just going to continue talking about this because it's justifiable because it's a joke. So that gets to my point about jokes and lies, both being very powerful in our discourse. Like there are still people today who like truly don't know the underlying truth of this because they never like went and looked it up.
And that's sort of the nature of all of this, all the examples that I've gone through. Like. We went through the examples and we said, all right, here's the information that came out at the beginning that was false. Let's dig into it.
We found that it's false. Now we know the real the true information. And we've like abandoned that old information. A lot of people don't don't ever get there.
Like they just they think it's true. It doesn't they don't need to necessarily find out that it's false. And they just go on believing it's false for a long time.
I mean, even though Biden like came out. in the Oval Office address, there are probably still people that are like, yeah, Biden's probably like, he's probably dead. And they just have like doing like a weekend of Bernie's kind of thing for him.
So, you know, that's when a joke, call it a joke, call it a lie. But when false information gets out there, it tends to stick. And it sticks forever for a lot of folks.
And it makes it difficult for people to like share a common set of beliefs. Last thing I'll say about jokes and lies is that they have the same net effect for polarization. Here's, here's what I mean. Here's what I mean by that. You know, I saw like, it might be satisfying, like folks on the left around this, like J.D.
Van Sink saying, I'm just writing it off like it's a joke. I know it's false, but I'm just going to keep like posting memes about it. That's satisfying to people that they already agree with. But it's really alienating to folks on the other side.
you know so when the effective jokes and uh the effective jokes and lies are that they are both really terrible arguments for convincing people who are on your uh on your opposite um oh sorry the screen is uh the screen is like i just um i just unshared for for just a second i'm gonna put it back up okay uh let me all right let me go on to our next example. Okay. All right. Overall principles and best practices. Here's the fourth set.
All right. Don't get your facts from memes and posts. That seems pretty straightforward, but it's not. When you see people fighting over facts on social media, go look up the actual story from one or more reliable news sources. We can't have a real discussion about issues when we don't share common facts.
So let's talk about this example of Algerian boxer Imane Khalif. Here are a couple of memes that I saw. I saw this one on the left, this I'm with her one quite a bit on Facebook.
And then here's a more like explicitly false one. It says, this is so heartbreaking to watch, female boxer. quits Olympic belt against biologically male opponent and breaks down in floods, floods of tears after brutal 46 seconds.
So whenever I saw like, especially this, I'm with her, uh, I'm with her one posted on Facebook. It was like, so engaging. It was, uh, you know, people just rushed into comment and often rushed in, uh, with a, a particular you orientation to the underlying facts. One, they just didn't know the facts. So this claim that the Imani Khalif is biologically male, all available evidence points to that being false.
She was born a woman. There are claims that she may have. xy chromosomes or elevated testosterone but um to claim that she's categorically a biological male based on the available evidence is false um she's also not transgender so um but people would read this and uh come to the conclusion that either she is male or she's transgender even if it didn't say that in there and she's participating in um in a women's sports and then have like arguments and discussions around that.
So they would just like not know the facts. Some people would come to the argument knowing like very specific, but very wrong facts. So you can imagine that like people, um, you can, you know, the, the term like biologically male or like transgender, um, about like what that can mean about somebody's like physiology.
I heard people claiming, uh, like without any citations or without anything that's like a credible, a credible corroboration. Like, well, I heard she has testicles in her stomach. I was like, where did that come from? So people would like strongly believe wrong facts that there was like no credible evidence for. The third posture that folks would come to with it is like, maybe they did know the underlying facts, but they sort of ignored them and just wanted to make their overall point known or their overall position known about trans people.
in sports. Like if you're arguing about like whether trans people, uh, trans, uh, women should participate in female, uh, and, uh, female sports, then, um, you, you wouldn't necessarily need to, um, like this wouldn't be applicable because this person is not trans. Like she's not gone through a transition at any point in her life.
Okay. So, um, if you, uh, in order to like, make sense of these arguments on Facebook. Like it, it doesn't make any sense to just like read through the comments because you will get really, really, really misinformed by just reading the comments back and forth.
Um, and even people defending, uh, Imani Khalifa would come to the table with their own misinformation, um, just from like what they had heard from reading other people's social media comments. So it's really easy to just like stay wrapped up in the social media world and say, well, I heard in that comment over there. And I heard in that comment over there that actually she has this syndrome, actually, um, her testosterone levels are this.
And I was like, all right, well, I need to like go and find out like what the whole, what the whole deal is. So let me like go and, um, Google it and find reputable sources on it. So the trouble with this and why a lot of people struggle with the facts of this case is because it's a really fact dense story. Let me sort of try to summarize the short version of it.
Actually, let me not. Go and read it for yourself. There are quite, there are.
multiple governing bodies of boxing, including like this international boxing association and the IOC. Uh, and there are, um, there are facts about, gosh, I'm trying to let me, let me, let me go back to what I initially said I was going to do. All right.
So, uh, Imani Khalif has participated in boxing competitions, uh, for, for many years. There is a a boxing governing body called the International Boxing Association that governs some things. But the IOC, International Olympic Committee, doesn't recognize that organization because for a bunch of other reasons. They said that they have issues with governance and corruption and stuff like that. And so the IOC and the IBA have their own like rules for who can compete in women's competitions.
And. Previously, not in this year's Olympics, the IBA has disqualified Imani Khalif and another boxer from Taiwan because they said that they failed certain gender tests. And there's some disputed reporting about what the nature of the failing of the test was.
There are some reports that say Imani Khalif has XY chromosomes. There are other reports say. She had elevated testosterone levels, but it's not known under which like she was disqualified for this other boxing competition, 2023 world championships. But the IOC, they're like, you know what? The IBA, we got a lot of problems with them.
We don't think we think their tests are really inaccurate. We have our own tests. We're not really going to talk about what they are.
But this boxer has like met all of our both the boxers competing in this Olympics. have met our qualification standards. They're born women and like, here's all of our other criteria and they're competing rightfully. So that's a lot of facts.
You know, it took me like three, four minutes to walk through all of those. And you know what, in order to find out those facts, I had to read like four articles about it. It was kind of a lot.
What's easier? Looking at this meme? Or like reading four articles with all the facts and trying to keep the different boxing associations in your mind and trying to weigh all the evidence about the various like credibility of their tests and the people who brought them forward.
It's kind of hard, but it's sort of important because if we don't share a common set of facts, then we can't have like real discussions about policy. Like, I think it's an appropriate conversation, like a question to say. you know under what circumstances can a person participate in female sports like there's a there's discussion to be had around it but if you but if you don't have the actual facts then you're just talking past uh that real issue okay so people can get duped uh even if they are you know professionals or they have big followings etc so the boston globe like they did they made a big whoopsie Like they, they wrote the title transgender boxer advances.
Oh, there's no evidence that she's transgender whatsoever. And the, this is actually an article that was written by the AP. This see Greg Beecham associated press.
So if you're not familiar, AP write stories and then they sell them to newspapers all over the world who can reprint them. Now they have to have like the byline for the author. and the Associated Press, but the news outlet can change the headline.
And they did. And the word transgender isn't anywhere in the article, but you know, maybe the, um, the editor or the person who wrote the headline, like they sort of saw something floating around on the internet and made the assumption that it was an issue of her being transgender without digging into the facts. Whoops.
So they did that in the print edition and then they had to like, you know, take it down and change it. And, um, and apologize. So, you know, real easy to mess up.
And it's when this is such a politicized issue, when people really want to make like score political points about something that's a very, very contentious in the United States. You know, J.D. Vance, Charlie retweeting Charlie Clark, really doubling down on, you know, she is a biological man without, you know, to the extent they dug into the factual underpinnings of the case. I am.
Not, you know, not giving a lot of benefit out of the doubt that they did so. But, you know, Riley Gaines tweets, Elon Musk retweeting it. Just really easy for folks to be like, ah, I see this information on the internet. I have these preconceived notions. I am going to make a statement about it.
All right. So let's see. Let's see.
We do have some good questions in this chat. And I think I will leave some. some time for them. Let me show you one more thing before I get to some questions. And that's about a story that's not, not super political, but it's here.
I'm going to stop sharing for a second before I jump into it. Let me describe to you a story that didn't get a ton of attention because again, it's not overtly political. There was a story about um, six weeks ago, they said the U.S. and Saudi Arabia had an agreement that was going to expire and nothing was replacing this, which meant that the U.S. petrodollar was going to be no more. Petrodollar, if you're wondering, if you've never heard that term, it's generally like the concept that like oil is traded in dollars and not like other currencies. And so a few accounts popped up online.
They're like, this is the biggest story. Why is nobody? talking about it.
This means the end of the dollar is like the controlling currency. This is a really big deal. Why, why isn't the media talking about this?
Turns out the media is not talking about this because it's like not a true thing. There's no like agreement that expired there. There's, it's just not, it just wasn't true in any sense.
So it sort of ricocheted around the internet very similarly to the whole like teleprompter. glass shards story. Like there was some, you know, there was some questionable reporting on it. And then like a more reputable outlet wrote that.
And then like a more reputable, like big website, anything in this case, MSN and nasdaq.com. Like they re they just republished the article from like the lower quality source. And people are like, well, it's on MSN.
It's on nasdaq.com. I think maybe it's true. So it ricocheted.
around the internet. And only people who like would follow this kind of oil markets and currency markets really closely would have paid attention to the story. But when we were researching the different news outlets that were re-reporting it, I came across this one that I thought was really fascinating.
Let me pull that up here. Okay. Because I Googled, I was Googling stories about the U.S. petrodollar, and I came across this website.
It's not one I had heard of, metalsedge.com. The Prince of Saudi Arabia decides not to renew the petrodollar agreement. So I'm like, oh, let me just read this story and see, is this any original reporting?
Is this like a source that's familiar with the oil markets or finance or in the Middle East? Because it's from... Treasure Coast Bullion Group seems to have something to do with finance.
But as you it says, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia has made a monumental decision. And at this point, I already knew that this was false. I'm like, what's up with this this article? So as we start reading it, we look at the pictures.
I actually looked at this with one of my analysts. And as soon as we scrolled past this initial picture, which seems like, I don't know, a picture of the Saudi Arabian flag. And yeah, if you. hover over it hopefully you see my little caption the saudi arabian flag hangs limply in the wind as prince's degree the the prince's decree is announced signaling the end of the petrodollar agreement um one of my analysts was like that's not the saudi arabian flag wait what hold on let's google that so the arabian flag all right images Oh man, hold on.
Let's look at this, this previous one. Okay. So there's like this crescent, like that's not the same flag at all. There's some like Arabic writing.
There's a straight sword, not a, not a curvy sword. And Um, what's with like, why is it square? Why does it have these ruffles?
There's this thing on top. I don't think those are even real words at this point. What is this?
This is an AI generated image. Ah, um, there's a no caption on it too. There's like no photo credit. And so like you keep scrolling. If you didn't notice that one, you might notice like, if you look closely and you do want to look closely, um, in this age of like AI generated images.
So brief tangent, but we want to talk about like being able to spot AI generated images. So I'm like, it seems a little, it seems a little like perfect and glossy until you look closely. And I'm like, why is one side of his mustache up and the other side down?
And that just seems like a lot of extra fingers. Why is he drinking like a green tonic out of this bottle? And something's wrong with this microphone.
Also, this is supposed to be like the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. This seems like princely outfit, but like, I know. like the i've seen pictures of the crowd uh saudi crown prince i don't think this is that guy let's look that up uh crown prince of saudi arabia muhammad bin salman yeah that's not the same guy this is just some generic AI Saudi prince.
And then all the rest of the pictures are like, you know, here's more Saudi, a Saudi prince picture. Maybe all these are all AI generated fun stuff. Okay.
I'm going to stop and take some questions. We have at least one in the chat. It says, how do you deal with someone who doubts all facts because it's a global conspiracy?
The only, only facts that are reliable to him is Newsmax and some social media. Yeah, that's super frustrating. So, you know, there's, there are people who are reachable, and there are people who are not. And, you know, sometimes you don't know where that line is, sometimes it's like really clear, like, nothing I say is going to make a difference. But, you know, I think we dismiss people a little too quickly sometimes, because people do change their minds, people are influenced by new information that's presented to them.
um it's a availability bias like one of the reasons he believes the things he believes is because that's what's available to him so presenting new information usually is not going to change their somebody's mind in the moment in this way like you show them a thing like you show them the chart like hey newsmax is like not as reliable or like i know you saw this story but here let me show you another story that says like the opposite thing doesn't this seem more reasonable usually that conversation is not going to end up with that person being like you know what, you're right. And I was totally wrong. Like people don't like to admit their mistakes, especially immediately.
However, if you can like be gracious about presenting new information, like ask with curiosity, like where they got the information from and then present it in like a kind manner, that has a higher likelihood of changing their mind or softening their position even without them quite realizing it later. So like the next time, say they posted a false thing and he said, you know, actually, I read this other article that says that thing is not true, but you're kind about it. The next time they come across that information, they are less likely to reshare it.
This happened on the Algerian boxer Facebook thing. Like I saw somebody post this thing and then nine out of the 10 comments were like, yeah, I can't believe they let a man punch that woman. uh just agreeing and then one person was like you know if you look at the facts of the case you know this is not this is not true here's a link and the person who posted it was like oh that's the first time i heard that i'll look into it happens okay uh somebody said why didn't you mention that tim wallace was one of the people who spread the jd uh vance disinformation ah interesting i um i uh feel free to like uh say more about that From what I am familiar with, I believe his reference to J.D. Walls was that like, I think he said in one of his early speeches, you know, I'll debate J.D.
Vance. He's just got to get up off this couch to do it or whatever. And it wasn't, as far as I'm aware, it wasn't explicit spreading of that rumor, but it was sort of like a, you know, lowbrow acknowledgement of the existence of that joke. online, which I think is totally inappropriate.
Yeah, I don't think our elected leaders should do that. And I mean, that's my personal opinion. But if there's anything more about that, that I missed, like him spreading.
that online, then please bring it to my attention. If you did, that's, that would be totally inappropriate. All right.
It's six o'clock. My how time flies. See, so aren't there stories about, there aren't stories about Trump's cognitive decline because they're questions rather than answers.
Yeah. Like you'd want, you don't just want conjecture. You don't just want like, You don't want people just raising questions.
You want to demand evidence. When, like, that's when things will make a jump from like really partisan media to like more reputable, like higher editorial quality media sources is when there's evidence instead of conjecture. All right. If you have any more questions, please email us. at info at adfontesmedia.com.
One thing I'll point you to as just a last bit, sorry for the pauses at the beginning, but we've got a website and an app, a free mobile app. If you can just download this app, you can search any of the 3,000 news sources. that we've rated that are on our interactive media bias chart for free.
It's a limit of five per day. It's like a hard limit there. But you can search like any individual one.
Whereas on our website, after, like you can't search all of them. You can search only five, but, and then there's also further limits. So use this during the election. Tell your friends and family about it. And thanks for your time and attention tonight.
We'll send out the recording to you. Feel free to share. All right. Thanks, everybody.
Bye.