How to Recognize Misinformation

Misinformation & how it's spread is our greatest threat

When I was a librarian, I taught freshman how to find and evaluate information to ensure they were using peer-reviewed and trusted resources in their research papers. It was always eye-opening to see that most students accepted the first couple of results from Google as the truth. And that was 10 years ago. That was before we had social media “doctors” and “experts” tell us that we need to eat our body weight in protein and perimenopause will ruin your life. (Maybe it’s just my age showing, but the “health” videos recommended to me by the algorithm are absolutely wild.)

I will admit: doing quality, personal research is hard. Listening to a 15 second Tiktok video is not. Don’t get me wrong: I believe we should be listening to people’s stories. It’s how we become more empathetic. But we also need data and quality research to back those stories up. Because…

Everything is a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve had people slide into my DMs to tell me that the hurricane was created by the government and that raw milk is safe. Both are terribly, scientifically and FACTUALLY wrong. (Here’s some real, trusted facts about the hurricane and raw milk.)

These messages are also extremely insensitive as someone who just went through a devastating hurricane and who almost died from Listeria, which can be found in raw milk.

A recent message I got from someone on social media and had to dispel.

So how do you know what’s real and what’s misinformation?

Here's one way I taught students to evaluate information: