On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) was shot down over eastern Ukraine. The attack occurred in an area controlled by pro-Russian separatists and seemed the result of a surface-to-air missile. Everyone on board was killed.
The event triggered public outrage and an international season of the blame game. Western Europe, led by the U.S. and Ukraine, pointed fingers at Russia, while Russia tried to pin the blame on Ukraine, going so far as to claim a Ukrainian military jet tailed the commercial aircraft immediately before the disaster.
Later that year, an investigative team put out a report linking the pro-Russian separatists to the Buk-M1 missile launcher likely responsible for the tragedy. The team compiled photos, satellite imagery, and video evidence to follow a missile transport from Donetsk to Snizhne immediately before the downing of the aircraft. They then confirmed the transport leaving the area later, sans one missile.
This report was not filed by an NGO or a legacy news organization like the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, nor did the team have access to insider or classified information. Its authors were a small, independent collective of researchers and citizen journalists called Bellingcat, and their information came from social media posts, Google Maps satellite imagery, and videos uploaded to YouTube. In other words, the facts were out in the open for anyone to see. Bellingcat simply knew where to look.
Following the data
Dutch Safety Board Chairman Tjibbe Joustra speaks in front of the MH17 wreckage to present its final report into the attack.
Credit: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images
Bellingcat was founded by Eliot Higgins, a citizen journalist who gained online prominence investigating weapons smuggling during the Syrian war. The collective's report into the MH17 attack would serve as its breakthrough, and it would continue to improve our understanding of the tragic event and countering Russian disinformation.
Since then, Bellingcat has legally registered as a foundation in the Netherlands and has continued to unearth consequential details to some of the most important news stories of the last decade, including the Syrian War, the Christchurch mosque massacre, and the poisonings of Yulia Skripal and Alexei Navalny.
The foundation's model of journalism is known as "open-source investigation." According to Aric Toler, Bellingcat's director of research and training, it's less an overturning of investigative journalism than a "genre" within it. This type of investigation follows digital data trails that are freely available on the internet. The bread crumbs could be found in public records, media reports, photos on Twitter, or people silly enough to upload a video of themselves committing a crime on Parler.
"Bellingcat's rise reveals something new about our digitally mediated times: spying is no longer the preserve of nation states – anyone with an internet connection can do it. The balance between open and secret intelligence is shifting. The most useful stuff is often public," writes Luke Harding for the Guardian.
The vast amount of data available online allows Bellingcat's researchers to piece together timelines or connect seemingly disparate events to reveal their connective, underlying thread. In its investigation into the shooting of Ashli Babbitt, researchers created a timeline of radicalization through her social-media footprint; they also mapped her journey during the Capitol Riot by locating videos showing her in the crowd and comparing background details to publicly available floorplans of the U.S. Capitol Building.
Like a fussy math teacher, the foundation employs a "show-your-work approach" to maintain credibility, transparency, and back-of-the-book peeking. Each article or report meticulously presents its data points through links and images, building the trail of evidence crumb-by-crumb. By the end, readers have seen the same evidence as the researcher and can decide whether said evidence supports the researcher's conclusions.
Aware such evidence can sometimes vanish—either by the people who upload it or corporations fretting over public relations—Bellingcat has also gone to great lengths to archive and back up important data before they are lost.
Balancing clarity and caution
While today Bellingcat employs a small team of journalists and editors, it still relies on volunteers and citizen journalists willing to dedicate the time and effort to scrape the internet for leads.
This, Toler told us in our interview, is an advantage to Bellingcat's investigative methods. While traditional news outlets contend with shrinking budgets, less personnel, and more information to wrangle than ever, they simply lack the resources necessary to explore the deluge of data we call the internet. Conversely, Bellingcat can overcome these barriers by tapping into a pre-existing group of enthusiasts who thrive on a sense of devotion, interest, and personal satisfaction. And the more people who team up to solve a problem, the lighter the work becomes.
But there are challenges. "It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you have a clear gap in information. It's just not feasible for large outlets to cover this stuff to the degree it should be. But also, the people who do have time and do it, there's not as much responsibility on them, and who knows what they could do that causes harm," Toler said.
Consider the open-sourced nature of the evidence. Bellingcat's show-your-work approach is necessary for clarity and transparency, but it also creates a set of instructions for those looking to duplicate the formula. While Bellingcat maintains the guidelines of a traditional newsroom, others may not and bad actors could locate information Bellingcat deemed sensitive enough to redact and use it to harm others by, say, doxing.
"There's really no good solution because you can't control what the mob does. If someone is angry, they can dig into this stuff because it is open source, and if you give the transparency of how you got your stuff, then you can't avoid the fact that it can then be reproduced and found," Toler said.
Because of this, Bellingcat hopes to serve as a type of intermediary. Like a traditional newsroom, it vets its sources, sets up fail-safes to catch misinformation, and writes its reports to protect bystanders and prevent libel. It hopes these practices will serve as an example for citizen journalists to emulate. On the obverse, it aims to show established news outlets the power and reach of open-sourced investigative techniques and these online communities.
Recently, Bellingcat has worked to investigate the Jan.6 Capitol Riots.
Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Looking to the larger media landscape, Bellingcat doesn't see itself in competition with traditional news media. It views its position as one of cooperation. The foundation has worked with several news partners to investigate stories and promote its work, such as sharing the findings of its Riley June Williams investigation with NBC.
It also offers training workshops to teach open-source investigation. These are not only attended by journalists wishing to hone their skills but professionals like lawyers and finance managers looking to add these techniques to their trades. Because the foundation sees its methods as an extension of investigative journalism, not a replacement for it, it isn't looking to corner a market. Rather, it aims to evolve a profession to meet the challenges of its new 21st-century environment.
As Toler told us: "Journalism doesn't work one way or the other. It should be both. Do some open-source sleuthing to compliment and boost your on-the-ground reporting.
"Our gospel of open source, we're trying to spread that as much as we can. We want to make this a very mainstream part of traditional news. If we're made obsolete, that's a good thing because we'd like for more traditional news outlets to be doing digital investigation and verification work."
Not only do most people get their news from social media, a majority of users never make it past the headline. The infinite scroll means that once a headline is consumed and a judgment is rendered, chances of returning to the story are low. The memory of the news is quickly filed. Once solidified, changing your mind is nearly impossible.
We all know the dangers of news-by-tweet. On Facebook you might see a headline and lede, arming you with one additional sentence of information. Still, it's not enough, especially given the complexity of politics. Add misinformation and disinformation into the mix and the results are intellectually and socially toxic.
Yet that's the environment we live in. Share an article from a fact-checking website like Snopes and you're guaranteed to hear about a past incident involving the founders or the notion that Politifact is biased. The Washington Post tracked over 30,500 lies or misleading claims by Donald Trump in four years; his followers never blinked.
Rarely are debates argued on the merits of content. Emotionality rules on social media. If the site is not agreeing with the narrative you've already told yourself, it must be wrong.
Does that make the very concept of fact-checking impossible? A new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, argues against that idea—with caveats, of course. As MIT professor and co-author David Rand says, "We found that whether a false claim was corrected before people read it, while they read it, or after they read it influenced the effectiveness of the correction."
Neil deGrasse Tyson: How science literacy can save us from the internet | Big Think
For the study, 2,683 people viewed 18 true and 18 debunked news headlines. Three groups saw the words "true" or "false" written before, during, or after the headlines, while a control group saw no tags. They then rated the accuracy of each headline. A week later everyone returned and again rated headline accuracy, only this time no one received "true" or "false" prompts.
As with everything in life, the researchers discovered that timing matters. And it really matters, given that 44 percent of Americans visited "untrustworthy websites" leading up to the 2016 presidential election—certainly enough of an impact to sway an electorate.
When volunteers were shown the label immediately before the headline, inaccuracies were reduced by 5.7 percent; while reading the headline, 8.6 percent; and after the headline, 25.3 percent. Rand notes his shock at discovering this sequence.
"Going into the project, I had anticipated it would work best to give the correction beforehand, so that people already knew to disbelieve the false claim when they came into contact with it. To my surprise, we actually found the opposite. Debunking the claim after they were exposed to it was the most effective."
AFP journalist views a video on January 25, 2019, manipulated with artificial intelligence to potentially deceive viewers, or "deepfake" at his newsdesk in Washington, DC.
Credit: Alexandra Robinson/AFP via Getty Images
While there's no silver bullet for battling misinformation, the researchers speculate that allowing people to form an opinion and then providing feedback might help the information "stick." Prebunking headlines might seem like the best strategy, though it actually has an opposite effect: readers gloss over the headline knowing it to be false. When later asked to judge, they didn't properly categorize the news as they weren't actually paying attention.
By contrast, showing the tags directly after reading the headline seems to "boost long-term retention" of truthfulness. One interesting phenomenon: the sense of surprise after a low-confidence guess turns out true reinforces the stickiness of the information. Learning the truth after an initial judgment seems to be the best course of action.
How this could be implemented in the age of infinite scrolling remains to be seen. But it does run counter to current practices by Facebook and Twitter, which mark false stories with a warning before you're allowed to view them. While this seems to be the right way to go, recall human nature: we love forbidden fruit. Tell us "this is wrong" and watch the results.
In fact, you don't need to—the MIT researchers did it for us. We know we need new models of news gathering and consumption. This study could provide at least one mechanism for achieving such a model.
--
Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His most recent book is "Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy."
Researchers at the University of Koblenz-Landau, the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and the Wharton School of Business have found that people are more likely to get respect from others in moral and political conversations when sharing personal experiences instead of facts. The research group conducted 15 separate experiments to test this theory and to learn more about tolerance in specifically political arguments.
Use personal experience, not facts, to gain respect in a disagreement
Do personal anecdotes mean more than facts in a world where facts can't be trusted?
Image by ngupakarti on Adobe Stock
According to the study, both liberals and conservatives believe that using facts in a political discussion will help foster mutual respect and understanding — however, all fifteen of these experiments (across multiple methodologies and issues) show that isn't quite true.
These studies were conducted using topics that have proved quite polarizing in the past, such as:
- Conversations about guns
- Discussion over comments from YouTube videos regarding abortion opinions
- An archive of 137 interview transcripts from Fox News and CNN
"What would make you respect their opinion on the subject"?
In the first study (n = 251), participants were asked to "imagine someone disagrees with you on moral issues" (abortion, for example). They were then asked, "What would make you respect their opinion on the subject"?
Responses were then categorized into themes with a majority of respondents (55.78 percent) stating that basing one's stance on facts and statistics would increase respect, followed by basing one's stance on personal experiences (21.12 percent), followed by an understanding of mutual respect (14.34 percent).
"When discussing political beliefs, who is more rational?"
Next, a sample of participants (n = 859) was asked to imagine interacting with two political opponents, one who based their beliefs on facts, and one who based their beliefs on personal experiences. Participants rated their imaginary fact-based opponent as more rational than the opponent who based their stance on personal experiences. They also voted that they respected them more and wanted to interact with them more.
A separate study from this experiment (study number four, n = 177) had participants weighing in on topics such as taxes, coal, and gun policies. They then were asked to read about individuals who disagreed with them on these subjects either due to personal experiences or factual knowledge. Participants in this study rated how rational their opponent seemed, and those who based their arguments on personal experience were perceived as more rational than those basing their opinions on factual knowledge.
How does this translate to real-world conversations?
This section of the experiment had 153 participants engaging in conversations on the street (with people they assumed were passersby but were actually members of the research team) about the topic of gun control. Analyses of these conversations revealed that strangers who based their stance on personal experiences were treated as more rational (and were more respected/interacted with more) by participants than those who based their stance on facts.
Confirming the theory that even when facts are true, personal experiences garner more respect and willingness to engage in conversation.
This experiment (n = 194) sought to reaffirm the theory that personal experiences garnered more respect while ruling out possible alternative explanations. The researchers contrasted concrete facts about gun control (taken from JustFacts.com) with personal experiences. For example, someone reading an annual report that mentions 73 percent of murders in the United States are committed with firearms (factual knowledge) versus "someone's young daughter was hit by a stray bullet" (experience-driven argument).
This study found that these facts were rated as higher in specificity and concreteness than the personal experience, however, personal experiences gained more respect and willingness to discuss the topic.
Facts, even when proven true, are often less respected than personal experiences.
When imagining these different kinds of arguments, everyday Americans believe that supporting their belief with facts will lead to respect. However, the effectiveness of facts (even when proven correct) is unclear. The problem is, in the past decades, American has seen a decentralization of news and information that has allowed people to gather their "own facts." Facts themselves are now subject to doubt, especially surrounding controversial and polarizing topics.
2020 sucked. That's hardly news to anyone, nor a hot take that will stir up much in the way of debate. But a look at Google's past "Year in Search" results shows how starkly different 2020 has been from any other year the tech giant has chronicled.
Every year since 2001, Google has tabulated its annual "Year in Search" results by aggregating the trillions of searches on its site. Google then highlights the searches that showed the highest percentage increase over the year. This method means terms like "Netflix," "Facebook," and "YouTube" don't appear on the list despite a high search volume as their percentage change is negligible compared to previous years. What the method does provide, however, is a window into our changing needs, desires, and questions year-over-year.
In 2011, for example, Google's analytics reveal an America obsession with sports, DIY glitter shoes, and images of planking. We craved information on the latest technology, home appliances, and diets we absolutely stuck with (thank you very much). Political impasses and scandals remained as ubiquitous as ever, but there was a sense that we were finally rebuilding from the Great Recession. And the year's biggest letdowns—Google+ and "Game of Thrones"—wouldn't disappoint for several years yet.
Google's "Year in Search 2020" results inflect with a markedly different tone—one that's bleary, scared, and subdued, but also humane and compassionate. It was the year that, according to Google, more Americans than ever were asking, "Why?" It was also the year that, more than ever, we needed those answers.
Credit: Google
The year of coronavirus
Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller receives the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
Credit: Manuel Balce Ceneta-Pool/Getty Images
In any other year, an outbreak of a novel coronavirus strain—such as SARS and MERS—would have been a story tucked into the Science and Health section. In 2020, it was the issue that mattered most. The term "coronavirus" saw the second-largest increase in searches in the U.S., behind only "election results." Worldwide, it was number one.
Those entries, however, don't reflect coronavirus's hold over the year. The pandemic infected nearly every category in Google's annual analytics. People needed to know about coronavirus symptoms and keep up-to-date on the virus's spread. Trending news terms included "stock market," "stimulus check," and "unemployment," all driven by the dire economic straits the pandemic plunged the U.S. into this March. And top word searches ensured "pandemic," "quarantine," and "asymptomatic" would become commonplace in our national word-stock.
Coronavirus widened the country's already intractable polarization, revealed its devastating health gaps, and, as of this writing, has killed nearly 300,000 Americans. The potential long-term effects faced by America's 15 million COVID-19 survivors are unknown but may include complications of the cardiovascular, respiratory, and neurological systems.
While Russia announced the world's first COVID-19 vaccine in August, those claims were scientifically dubious. Since then, more rigorously tested vaccines have been green-lighted in the United Kingdom and the United States, and both countries have begun administering it to high-risk populations and front-line workers. However, the vaccine's effectiveness and how readily it will be available to everyone remains to be seen. For its first few months, at least, 2021 may be the pandemic sequel no one asked for.
The new national pastime
The Electoral College recently cemented Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election. Congress is scheduled to confirm the votes on January 6, 2021.
Credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Thanks to an anemic baseball season, politics became not just America's new pastime but the world's. The U.S.'s number one trending search term was "election results," and it was number two globally. Politicians became popular search terms, too, with "Joe Biden," "Kamala Harris," and "Pete Buttigieg" leading the pack. And coronavirus-related changes to traditional voting methods in many states propelled Americas to google about early voting, how to vote, and where they could vote.
While American politics have been contentious more often than not, the 2020 election proved fraught, vitriolic, all-encompassing, and seemingly everlasting. The political parties sparred over issues such as the economy, immigration, violent crime, racial inequality, climate change, and, of course, the incumbent's response to the coronavirus. The September passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg added another ideological melee into the larger political fray, and the entire process was further complicated by social media and the debate over its culpability in the spread of false information.
Worse, for many, the usual avenues of escape and mental decompression were barricaded by pandemic restrictions and mandates.
This national drama, which normally would have ended on Super Tuesday, entered its third act with a protracted vote count. As critical battleground states slowly tallied the influx of mail-in ballots, "who is winning the election" quickly became one of Google's most searched for questions of the year. The answer was determined to be challenger Joe Biden, bringing a decisive end to one of 2020's most challenging moments.
Kidding! In an unprecedented move, incumbent Donald Trump claimed the results were fraudulent and has (as of this writing) refused to concede. He and his legal team have filed more than 50 lawsuits to contest the results, most of which have been shot down as frivolous. For the record: There has been no evidence of widespread fraud in the election.
The Electoral College has since cemented Joe Biden's victory, and it looks like this is one 2020 contention that we can safely put behind us come New Year's. Kidding, kidding! A cohort of Republican lawmakers has proposed challenging the Electoral College votes when Congress convenes to confirm them on January 6. Sigh.
Livin' in virtual insanity
New York students returned to school for in-person learning this December.
Credit: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images
Conspicuously absent from Google's "Year in Search 2020" are the usual events and happenings. With Americans forced to shelter-in-place and events canceled under pandemic restrictions, we've transitioned to a year of virtual living.
"Zoom" entered the top trending searches at number six, and "virtual" became a trending category. Many of the year's virtual inquiries related to education and student enrichment—with "virtual field trips," "virtual museum tours," "virtual learning," and "virtual classroom" all landing in the top ten virtual searches.
For schools, parents, and students alike, remote learning has proven one of the year's Herculean labors. While there is evidence that remote education has decreased anxiety for some children, there's also evidence suggesting that such setups are taking a mental health toll on others. Unfortunately, we likely won't know for some time how a year of peer separation will affect student's social development or their scholastic achievements.
American adults have also felt the social claustrophobia of stay-at-home orders and are seeking a virtual escape. Trending searches include "virtual marriage," "virtual baby shower," "virtual NBA fans," and "virtual EDC raves." As with their pint-sized peers, it remains unknown how this year of isolation will affect mental health in adults. However, data suggest stress, anxiety, depression, and other mental maladies have become more widespread alongside altered health habits and a lack of access to mental health support services.
These virtual events may serve as an analgesic, but they aren't a cure for the problem.
Personal growth becomes personal beauty
Credit: Eugenio Marongiu / Adobe Stock
Personal growth and health habits typically have a strong standing in Google's "Year of Search," but in 2020, diets and mindfulness took a backseat to the how-to's. How-to questions became trending searches thanks to Americans being cut off from amenities such as beauty parlors and nail salons.
Most of the trending how-to searches were for hair care. How to cut men's hair and women's hair. How to plop hair, color hair, and style curtain bangs. Americans clearly pined for their stylists in 2020.
Other notable how-to's included dermaplaning, washing hands properly, sewing a face mask, and rocking sweatpants with style. And if that list doesn't signal just how difficult 2020 was, then what else does?
Mother Nature pushes back
Well, science news may. 2020's trending science searches centered on natural disasters. Americans googled "fires near me" as conflagrations devoured the West Coast, destroying forests, neighborhoods, and even whole towns as they went. Hurricane Laura, a Category 4 storm, also trended after slamming into Louisiana this August.
All told, 2020 witnessed record-breaking levels of natural disasters, many hitting with a force more devastating than previous years. This rise in climate emergencies is part of a two-decade trend that scientists have linked to climate change and increased global temperatures.
When not worrying about natural disasters, Americans were fretting over "murder hornets," another trending term. Entomologists discovered the murder hornets—actually named the Asian giant hornets—in Washington state this year. Because native bees have no natural defenses against this invasive species, their colonies can be massacred by a few dozen hornets in mere hours. While one murder hornet's nest was discovered and destroyed near Blaine, Washington, experts worry there may be more.
At least there was that baby platypus to enjoy. Except no. In true 2020 fashion, that picture was bogus—although, not to be a total buzzkill, real platypus babies are darn cute.
Aiming to make 2021 a better year
Students line up to receive food aid packages provided by the charity Secours Populaire in France.
Credit: Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images
If we're looking for a silver lining to 2020—and at this point it'd be nice—it's that people were actively searching for ways to make the world better.
The categories "how to donate" and "how to help" both trended in the United States. People wanted to know how to help Yemen, Beirut, Black Lives Matter, and the Australian bushfires. They searched how to assist during the pandemic or help someone having a panic attack. They wanted to donate to Goodwill and send N95 masks to medical facilities. Even search terms about how to donate blood and plasma became trending in 2020.
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, that means that more people were searching for answers to these questions than in previous years, a likely sign of people trying to help others. So while 2020 certainly sucked, it would have been worse without the people who made it better in their own small way.
As we look to New Year's Eve, we can crank up Elton John's "I'm Still Standing" and take heart that if next year is better, it is because of the efforts we made in 2020. Because 2021 has got to be a better year. Right?
It could even be a call from a relative wanting to talk about a political issue.
All this information may leave many of us feeling as though we have no energy to engage.
As a philosopher who studies knowledge-sharing practices, I call this experience “epistemic exhaustion." The term “epistemic" comes from the Greek word episteme, often translated as “knowledge." So epistemic exhaustion is more of a knowledge-related exhaustion.
It is not knowledge itself that tires out many of us. Rather, it is the process of trying to gain or share knowledge under challenging circumstances.
Currently, there are at least three common sources that, from my perspective, are leading to such exhaustion. But there are also ways to deal with them.
1. Uncertainty
For many, this year has been full of uncertainty. In particular, the coronavirus pandemic has generated uncertainty about health, about best practices and about the future.
At the same time, Americans have faced uncertainty about the U.S. presidential election: first due to delayed results and now over questions about a peaceful transition of power.
Experiencing uncertainty can stress most of us out. People tend to prefer the planned and the predictable. Figures from 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes to 20th-century Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein have recognized the significance of having certainty in our lives.
With information so readily available, people may be checking news sites or social media in hopes of finding answers. But often, people are instead greeted with more reminders of uncertainty.
2. Polarization
Political polarization is stressing many Americans out.
As political scientist Lilliana Mason notes in her book, "Uncivil Disagreement: How Politics Became Our Identity," Americans have been increasingly dividing politically "into two partisan teams."
Many writers have discussed the negative effects of polarization, such as how it can damage democracy. But discussions about the harms of polarization often overlook the toll polarization takes on our ability to gain and share knowledge.
That can happen in at least two ways.
First, as philosopher Kevin Vallier has argued, there is a "causal feedback loop" between polarization and distrust. In other words, polarization and distrust fuel one another. Such a cycle can leave people feeling unsure whom to trust or what to believe.
Second, polarization can lead to competing narratives because in a deeply polarized society, as studies show, we can lose common ground and tend to have less agreement.
For those inclined to take the views of others seriously, this can create additional cognitive work. And when the issues are heated or sensitive, this can create additional stress and emotional burdens, such as sadness over damaged friendships or anger over partisan rhetoric.
3. Misinformation
Viral misinformation is everywhere. This includes political propaganda in the United States and around the world.
People are also inundated with advertising and misleading messaging from private corporations, what philosophers Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall have called "industrial propaganda." And in 2020, the public is also dealing with misinformation about COVID-19.
As chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov put it: "The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth."
Misinformation is often exhausting by design. For example, a video that went viral, "Plandemic," featured a large number of false claims about COVID-19 in rapid succession. This flooding of misinformation in rapid succession, a tactic known as a Gish gallop, makes it challenging and time-consuming for fact checkers to refute the many falsehoods following one after another.
What to do?
With all this uncertainty, polarization and misinformation, feeling tired is understandable. But there are things one can do.
The American Psychological Association suggests coping with uncertainty through activities like limiting news consumption and focusing on things in one's control. Another option is to work on becoming more comfortable with uncertainty through practices such as meditation and the cultivation of mindfulness.
To deal with polarization, consider communicating with the goal of creating empathetic understanding rather than "winning." Philosopher Michael Hannon describes empathetic understanding as "the ability to take up another person's perspective."
As for limiting the spread of misinformation: Share only those news stories that you've read and verified. And you can prioritize outlets that meet high ethical journalistic or fact-checking standards.
These solutions are limited and imperfect, but that's all right. Part of resisting epistemic exhaustion is learning to live with the limited and imperfect. No one has time to vet all the headlines, correct all the misinformation or gain all the relevant knowledge. To deny this is to set oneself up for exhaustion.
Mark Satta, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Wayne State University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
