Weaponized Lies summary

We have access to more information than ever before. But it’s becoming harder and harder to distinguish between fact and fiction. This is the plight of those living in the information age.

Firstly, the source of much of this information – the internet – isn’t regulated. People can write anything they want and in this environment, it's easy to mask falsities as facts.

However, few of us have the time to fact-check everything we read online, and though we’re happy citation links exist, we rarely click them. Authors know they won’t be challenged, so the links often don’t really back up what’s said in the text.

The worst culprits tend to have a common tell: if an article proclaims its honesty, something's up.

Just take martinlutherking.org. Initially, it appears to be a site devoted to the life of the civil rights leader. But the veil is thin. It’s actually a fount of neo-Nazi propaganda that manipulates facts and uses out-of-context quotations to further its agenda.

One way to avoid deliberately dug pitfalls like this is to only look at respected publications, but it’s still good practice to stay alert.

Institutions like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal have long been respected sources of information as they verify their reports with trustworthy sources. However, these publications aren’t immune to making mistakes.

Consider how Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Jonathan Capehart was bamboozled in 2011. He wrote an article about a nonexistent congressman and his district based on a lead from a fake twitter account.

This happens because journalists are not infallible. They may cover subjects about which they know little or may need to analyze statistics and graphs beyond their capabilities. This means that if the source material is biased, the journalist may not realize it, thereby allowing the bias to slip into their own reporting too.

The lesson? We shouldn’t just take what we read on trust, no matter what the source.