As technology improves, it seems like it's becoming harder to find truthful information. Why?
When you lower the barrier to push information out to people en masse, the amount of noise grows. You can make up an infinite amount of falsities about an event but there's only so many things you can say about that same event that are strictly true. And for the most part, both those creating content and those consuming it aren't exactly incentivized to care about the truth. It's harder to be thorough and doing so will often have worse returns.
Sometimes a random instagram comment will post a false fact out of apathy, but other times sharing false info is actively malicious. To give an example, in Canada, election manipulation through dis-information has been a very hot issue for the past few years.
People's beliefs have a material impact on the world. What people buy, who they vote for– all of it genuinely matters. When someone uses their platform to push a demonstrably false narrative to further their own interests, it can and does impact lives.
For students in high school, there's little to no motivation to do well in a digital literacy course. Universities (at least in Canada) typically look at the grades you've attained in upper year core courses (math, science, english, and certain electives). Even if the curriculum's content was fantastic, there's still the major issue of getting people to care. Integrating media literacy content directly into existing classes might be an interesting area to explore.
To re-iterate the criticality of the issue: we have a problem of growing importance that can only truly be solved by the education system suddenly becoming great at promoting critical thinking skills.
Some creative approaches are going to be needed to tackle this. I wrote an article about how puzzles can be used to build intuition about fraud for ‘Paged Out!', a zine about programming tricks and hacking. You can read it here:
The puzzle idea isn't perfect (there's the whole self-selection bias issue of those who would try a puzzle in the first place, for instance). My hope is that by getting an audience of a bunch of creative problem solvers to think about media literacy, some more ideas will come out of it.
Send me an email at the address found here if you have any thoughts!
The article can also be found below:
Spotting Quacks
When something is framed as a puzzle, people inspect it closely.
That means the author has a rare commodity– a random person’s focused attention. If the puzzle author can get someone to try a bunch of puzzles sharing a theme, they can help the player to build up pattern recognition for that theme.
Capture the Flag challenges (security puzzles) are a great example.
The authors of CTF challenges direct the player’s attention and influence what patterns the player will look for in the future. After looking closely at a ton of web security challenges, you’ll gain an intuition for where a web-app might have flaws.
Pattern recognition is useful for more than just technical domains.
The Internet has lowered the barrier to spread fraud/propaganda and consequently increased the impor- tance of being able to recognize manipulation of info. Media literacy is hard to define, much less teach. Checking a set of criteria that a source should meet to be considered ‘good’ is mentally taxing to rigorously apply to everything that appears on your social-feed. Having fact-checkers is good and should stay, but it’s important to acknowledge that it shifts the responsibility away from the reader.
An approach to media literacy: puzzles that require inspecting examples of fraud to solve.
Instead of telling students to memorize criteria or read textbooks and answer questions, puzzles that re- quire reading key-stories to solve could result in closer inspection of text (less skimming for certain terms). For example, a puzzle could be started by the reader spotting an intentional contradiction between two statements, hinting towards the next stage. Over time, repeated close inspection of fraud should lead to stronger identification of when what you’re seeing in the present rhymes with the past.
Historical Quacks
Clark Stanley advertised his snake oil as “The Most Remarkable Curative discovery ever made in any age or country” [1]. Ten years after the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906, he was fined for misleading advertising and the fact that his snake oil didn’t even contain any actual snake oil [2]. L. Ron Hubbard called his creation of Dianetics “a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his inventions of the wheel and arch” [3]. Dianetics was the framework for Scientology. Despite the examples above being decades apart, it’s easy to see the similarities between the two when laid out directly. I’ve created puzzles that go into detail about the lives of both Stanley and Hubbard, which you can try at trackthequack.art.