In the age of fake news take back your power by comparing information

“The new autocrats use propaganda, censorship and other information-based tricks to inflate their ratings and to convince citizens of their superiority over available alternatives.”

The New Dictators Rule by Velvet Fist, By SERGEI GURIEV and DANIEL TREISMAN MAY 24, 2015

I qualified as a librarian back in 1993. That year, I used a Word Processor for the first time to type up an essay. I didn’t use the Internet until a couple of years later.

It all seems so archaic now and yet my qualification served as a discipline for embarking on a career of different paths.

Skip to a fundraising event in the early 2000s, when I was working in charity fundraising and I fleetingly met Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. If I could go back to that moment, what would be powerful questions to ask? What would you ask?

The more I think about it, I can’t escape the feeling that it’s less about his answers and more about taking responsibility for creating and using information in a way that is consistent with knowing and living your life values.

To be honest with you, being a librarian is something that I didn’t bother about for a long, long time. It didn’t seem very cool. I treated it as the stepping stone in my career.

It’s in recent years that the value of signposting people to the right places seems more essential then ever.

Especially now, with the rise of information and opinions that sit in the shades of grey, twisting unspoken fear into outspoken hatred, of fake news that fuels decisions based on falsehoods, of information we took for granted being cleansed and erased to deny and limit our choices.

As is the way in the entrepreneur’s journey, you use every tool in your kitbag when you’re starting up. For me, when I moved to Switzerland, that meant becoming a school librarian in an international school whilst building up my consultancy and coaching businesses. It meant I had the great privilege of teaching kids to explore, fuelling their imagination and creativity, as well as giving them the life-skill of knowing how to navigate information.

I have come to understand that the librarian in me is part of my DNA, in every role I take on, the need to equip people to know how to find answers for themselves.

As 2017 unfolds, I find myself filled with an overwhelming need to cut through the clichés of ‘we’ve got more access to information than we’ve ever had’ and instead ask you, ‘Do you know how to find answers?’

Maybe you’re thinking, ‘Why should I even care when there are bots seemingly doing all the hard yards for me?’

It’s simple really. The bots aren’t looking through the lens of your life values. If you aren’t taking ownership of what you look at and how you interpret it, then it takes ownership of you.

In the words of Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451, ‘If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.’

Don’t play into the hands of the myth-makers and only look at one side, or worse, no sides.

Become proactive in knowing how to find answers for yourself, so that you have the key tool for making your own choices. Then, no-one can control you. You own your power. You cannot be manipulated by fake news.

I don’t just want you to have access to this landscape of information: I want you to know what to do when you get there, to know how to move within it.

One of the core principles I teach kids is to ‘Cross-Reference & Compare’ when looking at information and you need to apply it too — starting today — to take ownership of what you hear and read.

1. Take the story, tweet, post, information or opinion.

2. Plug keywords from it into your internet search engine.

3. Ask yourself — does the story feature anywhere else?

4. If no, then you need to put it into the pot of doubt and questionable data.

5. If yes, then you need to triangulate it between sources and their bias of left, centre and right.

6. As you triangulate, then you need to compare the language used and the hard facts quoted.

7. Ask yourself, ‘What is consistent, what is not?’

8. Now, form your opinion and know where you got it from.

Seems like child’s play?

In many ways, it is. And yet, whilst kids are routinely taught this stuff in schools, voting adults are far less equipped with information-age skills.

Do it for a few days. Take ownership and responsibility by comparing. It takes less than 5 minutes to compare the same news story across 4 websites each morning.

Don’t let it be done to you. Take back your capacity for finding answers. Be active in challenging the myths and falsehoods.

Have a great week.

Elaine