In an era of information overload, where the lines between facts and fiction too often blur, identifying what’s true can be a formidable challenge. The digital age, packed full of echo chambers and AI hallucinations, demands a critical eye and a sense of awareness.
In this battle, your iPhone can be a source of misinformation – but also a weapon against it. Here’s how to wield it wisely to get at the facts.
Be wary of social media
Social media, with its endless scroll of opinions masquerading as facts, can be a treacherous landscape. The unfiltered nature of these platforms – once hailed as a democratizing force – has become a breeding ground for misinformation and disinformation. Bad actors and deceptive accounts lurk, eager to spread insidious narratives. And even big names may lack credibility when not backed by news organizations that would filter their output through an editing process.
A legal forum on Reddit.
To navigate this minefield, be mindful of your sources. Question the motives behind information you encounter. Is it backed by evidence, or an echo of pre-existing biases? And be aware that YouTube and Reddit are effectively social networks too. The former is a firehose of videos and comments that prizes engagement and therefore tends to present increasingly extreme and inaccurate content. While Reddit is full of threads by self-proclaimed experts… who often aren’t. This is especially problematic in legal threads: it’s not ideal when people present themselves as confident yet are ultimately confidently wrong.
Use AI mindfully
Speaking of being confidently wrong, that’s a problem with AI, which is increasingly embedded in our daily lives. For all its promise, AI is far from infallible. The engines behind many AI products are prone to inaccuracy, because they are, in effect, fancy autocomplete. They use masses of training data to construct answers to prompts based on probability. Because they lack the critical thinking and contextual awareness humans possess, AIs have no understanding of ‘truth’. They just generate something that looks like truth.
Perplexity for iPhone.
Efforts to improve accuracy have involved AIs dutifully searching the web before providing answers, rather than relying on dated training data. However, they can still be comically wrong. At the time of writing, asking ChatGPT “What is the best iPhone?” resulted in a list of devices from the year before last. Better AIs for such tasks, like Perplexity and Arc Search, aggregate current opinions and provide sources. Even then, responses need evaluation rather than blind acceptance. The same goes for the Google search engine, which now prioritizes AI responses. So always dig deeper into the search results it offers.
Check multiple sources
We live in a world of competing narratives, with certain sources pushing partisan agendas and framing stories in a way that aligns more with ideology than objective, impartial facts. AIs further complicate matters by injecting inaccuracies into results. It’s therefore vital to compare different interpretations of stories and challenge your assumptions.
Google News.
For news, avoid AI entirely. Instead, try Ground News or Google News and its ‘full coverage’ button. Both can help you explore how different outlets are reporting the same story, which can highlight biases and inconsistencies. Alternatively, if you already trust specific news sources, you can subscribe to their email newsletters or follow them in NetNewsWire.
Get the facts
Beyond news, there’s no single source of information that covers everything. Wikipedia is closest. This online encyclopedia is imperfect but also relatively impartial, and funded by the masses rather than a single wealthy individual. Its ‘crowdsourced’ contribution model combined with demands for citations throughout texts makes it a good starting point for researching a topic.
Alternatively, if you’re looking to weed out falsehoods rather than learn facts, explore fact-checking websites, such as Snopes, Full Fact, AP Fact Check, and BBC Verify. Which probably sounds like hard work. But if you want your iPhone to be a powerful tool against fake news and false data, that requires you to be an active participant rather than a passive consumer. In this age of on-demand news and constant connectivity, the ability to distinguish fact from fiction isn’t merely a valuable skill – it’s essential.