Biblioracle: If you’ve ever been lied to or misinformed online, try this book

Sadly, there are currently quite a few ongoing threats to democracy, some of which we as individuals may feel relatively powerless to address.

But there’s one big threat everyone has the capacity to resist, provided we put in the time and have the right tools to help us: the threat of disinformation and misinformation. Fortunately, a new book from two leading academics has arrived to help arm us against the flood of deliberate attempts to sow distrust and separate us from our own senses of what’s real and not.

The book is “Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions About What to Believe Online” by Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg, just published by the University of Chicago Press. Caulfield is a researcher at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, where he studies the ways we can be fooled online and how we can develop consistent strategies to make sense of what we see on the internet. Wineburg is an emeritus professor of education at Stanford University and a leading researcher on digital literacy.

This is a book I’ve been anticipating for a long time, for years having been an adherent of Caulfield’s SIFT model for evaluating online information, a technique that is central to the recommendations and approaches in “Verified.”

SIFT stands for: Stop; Investigate the source; Find better coverage; and Trace claims, quotations and media to the original context.

The beauty of SIFT is that it requires no specific subject matter expertise in order to judge the veracity of a claim, and the chief skill you have to develop is the “S” part of the method. Misinformation and disinformation often spread because they trigger a strong reflexive emotional response in the receiver upon first encounter. We are excited or outraged, and when fueled by these emotions, we act without thinking in spreading the bad information.

Once we train ourselves to pause at this response, we can go through the other steps. Investigating the original source is usually enough to further slow our roll as we realize that the inflammatory information is unsourced or coming from something unfamiliar. The final two steps allow us to track down the origins of this information and often (though not always) provide a definitive answer about the veracity and reliability of the original claim.

Caulfield’s method has been circulating in higher education for years, and I’ve used it with hundreds of students to help them assess and make use of information online. Quite quickly the process becomes second nature, and it is as if you’re carrying a shield protecting you from being fooled.

With “Verified,” Wineburg and Caulfield go deeper than SIFT by breaking down a number of common moves that are used to signal authority, but are often used to mislead audiences. The way numbers can be used to “bamboozle” us, and how to resist those attempts were particularly useful for me.

The book also contains practical tips for using search engines (particularly Google), and other public repositories of information that are under threat of being flooded by nonsense thanks to generative AI (such as ChatGPT) making it easier to create misinformation that looks plausible at a surface level.

Evaluating advertisements, sussing out fake videos, and how to find experts to trust are all also covered in their own chapters.

If you’ve been tempted to throw up your hands and retreat from the digital world because you can’t figure out what’s true and what isn’t, the challenge is only going to increase, but with the techniques in “Verified” at least you aren’t going into battle unarmed.

John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”

Twitter @biblioracle

Book recommendations from the Biblioracle

John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.

1. “The Heart’s Invisible Furies” by John Boyne

2. “Suspect” by Scott Turow

3. “The Soulmate” by Sally Hepworth

4. “Between Two Strangers” by Kate White

5. “Out of the Clear Blue Sky” by Kristan Higgins

— Mary O., Chicago

I think Mary will enjoy the classic story of mystery and intrigue that Patricia Highsmith serves up in “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”

1. “Demon Copperhead” by Barbara Kingsolver

2. “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma” by Bessel van der Kolk

3. “Hello Beautiful” by Ann Napolitano

4. “Lessons in Chemistry” by Bonnie Garmus

5. “Bright Young Women” by Jessica Knoll

— Linda P., Chicago

You can’t really go wrong with Barbara Pym and Linda will go very right with perhaps her most well-loved book, “Excellent Women.”

1. “The Rebel Angels” by Robertson Davies

2. “Dr. No” by Percival Everett

3. “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” by David Foster Wallace

4. “Freedom” by Jonathan Franzen

5. “The Plot Against America” by Philip Roth

— Matthew N., Chicago

A reader tipped me off to a somewhat strange and wonderful book not on my radar called “My Search for Warren Harding” by Robert Plunket. I am now paying it forward to another reader who I think will connect with the book.

Get a reading from the Biblioracle

Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com.