A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age (18 page)

Note that you don’t always want neutrality. When searching for the owner’s manual for your refrigerator, you probably want to visit the (partisan) manufacturer’s website (e.g., Frigidaire.com) rather than a site that could be redistributing an outdated or erroneous version of the manual. That .gov site may be biased toward government interests, but a .gov site can give you most accurate info on laws, tax codes, census figures, or how to register your car. CDC .gov and NIH.gov probably have more accurate information about most medical issues than a .com because they have no financial interest.

Who Is Behind It?

Could the website be operating under a name meant to deceive you? The Vitamin E Producers Association might create a website called
NutritionAndYou.info, just to make you think that their claims are unbiased. The president of the grocery chain Whole Foods was caught masquerading as a customer on the Web, touting the quality of his company’s groceries. Many rating sites, including Yelp! and Amazon, have found their ratings ballot boxes stuffed by friends and family of the people and products being rated. People are not always who they appear to be on the Web. Just because a website is named U.S. Government Health Service, that doesn’t mean it is run by the government; a site named Independent Laboratories doesn’t mean that it is independent—it could well be operated by an automobile manufacturer who wants to make its cars look good in not-so-independent tests.

In the
2014 congressional race for Florida’s thirteenth district, the local GOP offices created a website with the name of their Democratic opponent, Alex Sink, to trick people into thinking they were giving money to her; in reality, the money went to her opponent, David Jolly. The site, contribute.sinkforcongress2014.com, used Sink’s color scheme and featured a smiling photo of her, very similar to the photo on her own site.

Illustration of the website for Democratic Congressional candidate Alex Sink

Illustration of the GOP website used to solicit money for Alex Sink’s Republican opponent, David Jolly

The GOP’s site does say that the money will be used to defeat Sink, so it’s not outright fraud, but let’s face it—most people don’t take the time to read such things carefully. The most eye-catching parts of the trick site are the large photo of Sink, and the headline Alex Sink | Congress, which strongly implies that the site is
for
Alex Sink, not against her. Not to be outdone, Democrats responded with the same trick, creating the site www.JollyForCongress.com to collect money meant for Sink’s rival.

Dentec Safety Specialists and Degil Safety Products are competing companies with similar services and products. Dentec has a website, DentecSafety.com, to market their products, and Degil has a website, DegilSafety.com. However, Degil also registered Dentec Safety.ca to redirect Canadian customers to their own site in order
to steal customers.
A court case ruled that Degil had to pay Dentec $10,000 and to abandon DentecSafety.ca.

An online
vendor operated the website GetCanadaDrugs.com. A court found the site name to be “deceptively misdescriptive.” Major points included that the pharmaceutical products did not all originate in Canada, and that only around 5 percent of the website’s customers were Canadian. The domain name has now ceased to exist.

Knowing the domain name is helpful but hardly a foolproof verification system. MartinLutherKing.org sounds like a site that would provide information about the great orator and civil rights leader. Because it is a .org site, you might conclude that there is no ulterior motive of profit. The site proclaims that it offers “a true historical examination” of Martin Luther King. Wait a minute. Most people don’t begin an utterance by saying, “What I am about to tell you is true.” The BBC doesn’t begin every news item saying, “This is true.” Truth is the default position and we assume others are being truthful with us. An old joke goes, “How do you know that someone is lying to you? Because they begin with the phrase
to be perfectly honest.
” Honest people don’t need to preface their remarks this way.

What
MartinLutherKing.org contains is a shameful assortment of distortions, anti-Semitic rants, and out-of-context quotes. Who runs the site?
Stormfront, a white-supremacy, neo-Nazi hate group. What better way to hide a racist agenda than by promising “the truth” about a great civil rights leader?

Institutional Bias

Are there biases that could affect the way a person or organization structures and presents the information? Does this person or organization have a conflict of interest? A claim about the health value of almonds made by the Almond Growers’ Association is not as credible as one made by an independent testing laboratory.

When judging an expert, keep in mind that experts can be biased without even realizing it. For the same tumor, a surgical oncologist may advise surgery, while a radiation oncologist advises radiation and a medical oncologist advises chemotherapy. A psychiatrist may recommend drugs for depression while a psychologist recommends talk therapy. As the old saying goes, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Who’s right? You might have to look at the statistics yourself. Or find a neutral party who has assessed the various possibilities. This is what meta-analyses accomplish in science and medicine. (Or at least they’re supposed to.) A meta-analysis is a research technique whereby the results of dozens or hundreds of studies from different labs are analyzed together to determine the weight of evidence supporting a particular claim. It’s the reason companies bring in an auditor to look at their accounting records or a financial analyst to decide what a company they seek to buy is really worth. Insiders at the company to be acquired certainly are expert in their own company’s financial situation, but they are clearly biased. And not always in the direction you’d think. They may inflate the value of the company if they want to sell, or deflate it if they are worried about a hostile takeover.

Who Links to the Web Page?

A special Google search allows you to see who else links to a web page you land on. Type “link:” followed by the website URL, and Google will return all the sites that link to it. (For example, link:breastcancer.org shows you the two hundred sites that have links to it.) Why might you want to do this? If a consumer protection agency, Better Business Bureau, or other watchdog organization links to a site, you might want to know whether they’re praising or condemning it. The page could be the exhibit in a lawsuit. Or it could be linked by an authoritative source, such as the American Cancer Society, as a valuable resource.

Alexa.com tells you about the demographics of site visitors—what country they are from, their educational background, and what sites people visited immediately before visiting the site in question. This information can give you a better picture of who is using the site and a sense of their motivations. A site with drug information that is visited by doctors is probably a more trusted source than one that isn’t. Reviews about a local business from people who are from your town are probably more relevant to you than reviews by people who are out of state.

Peer-Reviewed Journals

In peer-reviewed publications, scholars who are at arm’s length from one another evaluate a new experiment, report, theory, or claim. They must be expert in the domain they’re evaluating. The method is far from foolproof, and peer-reviewed findings are sometimes overturned, or papers retracted. Peer review is not the only system to rely on, but it provides a good foundation in helping us to draw our own conclusions, and like democracy, it’s the best such
system we have. If something appears in
Nature,
the
Lancet,
or
Cell
, for example, you can be sure it went through rigorous peer review. As when trying to decide whether to trust a tabloid or a serious news organization, the odds are better that a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal is correct.

In a scientific or scholarly article, the report should include footnotes or other citations to peer-reviewed academic literature. Claims should be justified, facts should be documented through citations to respected sources. Ten years ago, it was relatively easy to know whether a journal was reputable, but the lines have become blurred with the proliferation of open-access journals that will print anything for a fee, in a parallel world of pseudo-academia. Reference librarians can help you distinguish the two. Journals that appear on indexes such as PubMed (maintained by the U.S. National Library of Medicine) are selected for their quality; articles you return from a regular search are not. Scholar.Google.com is more restrictive than Google or other search engines, limiting search results to scholarly and academic papers, although it does not vet the journals and many pseudo-academic papers are included. It does do a good job of weeding out things that don’t even
resemble
scholarly research, but that’s a double-edged sword: That can make it more difficult to know what to believe because so many of the results appear to be valid. Jeffrey Beall, a research librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, has developed a blacklist of what he calls predatory open-access journals (which often charge high fees to authors). His list has grown from twenty publishers four years ago to more than three hundred today. Other sites exist that help you to vet research papers, such as the Social Science Research Network (ssrn.com).

Regulated Authority

On the Web, there is no central authority to prevent people from making claims that are untrue, no way to shut down an offending site other than going through the costly procedure of obtaining a court injunction.

Off the Web, the lay of the land can be easier to see. Textbooks and encyclopedias undergo careful peer review for accuracy (although that content is sometimes changed under political pressure by school boards and legislatures). Articles at major newspapers in democratic countries are rigorously sourced compared to the untrustworthy government-controlled newspapers of Iran or North Korea, for example. If a drug manufacturer makes a claim, the FDA in the United States (Health Canada in Canada, or similar agencies in other countries) had to certify it. If an ad appears on television, the FTC will investigate claims that it is untrue or misleading (in Canada this is done by the ASC, Advertising Standards Canada; in the U.K. by the ASA, the Advertising Standards Authority; Europe uses a self-regulation organization called the EASA, European Advertising Standards Alliance; many other countries have equivalent mechanisms).

The lying weasels who make fraudulent claims can face punishment, but often the punishment is meager and doesn’t serve as much of a deterrent.
Energy-drink company Red Bull paid more than $13 million in 2014 to settle a class-action lawsuit for misleading consumers with promises of increased physical and mental performance. In 2015,
Target agreed to pay $3.9 million to settle claims that the prices it charged in-store were higher than those it advertised, and that it misrepresented the weights of products. Grocery
retailer Whole Foods was similarly charged in 2015 with misrepresenting the weight of its prepackaged food items.
Kellogg’s paid $4 million to settle a lawsuit over misleading ads that claimed its Frosted Mini-Wheats were “clinically shown to improve kids’ attentiveness by 11 percent.” While these amounts might sound like a lot to us, to Red Bull ($7.7 billion in revenue for 2014), Kellogg’s ($14.6 billion), and Target ($72.6 billion) these fines are little more than a rounding error in their accounting.

Is the Information Current? Discredited?

Unlike books, newspapers, and conventional sources, Web pages seldom carry a date; graphs, charts, and tables don’t always reveal the time period they apply to. You can’t assume that the “Sales Earnings Year to Date” you read on a Web page today actually covers today in the “To Date,” or even that it applies to this year.

Because Web pages are relatively cheap and easy to create, people often abandon them when they’re done with them, move on to other projects, or just don’t feel like updating them anymore. They become the online equivalent of an abandoned storefront with a lighted neon sign saying “open” when, in fact, the store is closed.