Finding Trustworthy Sources

If you’ve been to school in the past decade or two, especially in high school or middle school, you’ve been told not to use Wikipedia as a source for a paper or research project. It makes sense; anybody can edit it, publish an article, or delete content from it. Over the years plenty of teachers have told horror stories of students trying to use Wikipedia as a source only for the entire page to have been messed with so not a single fact was true. I think it might even be an urban legend among teachers at this point. I’ve also seen posts on social media of people editing little pieces of Wikipedia articles, slowly, over time, like enlarging a state on an image of a map without changing any of the surrounding states, in the hopes that nobody notices until it’s obvious. So, it’s something we all know don’t trust Wikipedia for “official” sources. You can use it for a jumping off point, but don’t put it in a bibliography.

 

But what sites can you trust? You’ve probably heard that websites that end in .org are more reliable than ones that end in .com or .net, but this isn’t necessarily true. Anybody can get a .org domain for their website, which can be used for any purpose. Some people will use the borrowed credibility to their advantage and run scams or misinformation through their websites. Just because it’s supposed to be more reputable, doesn’t mean it is.

 

Another domain people tend to think of for trustworthy domains is a .gov site. As the domain suggests, a .gov page belongs to the government. Sometimes, if the site is for a specific state in the US, it’ll include that state’s initials in the domain. So a New York website would be “.ny.gov.” IN a similar vein, countries other than the US have country codes in place of the .gov domain, such as Canada having .ca as it’s domain. (I don’t know if this means the US-government sites have a country code when accessed from other countries.) Now, you can trust .gov websites as along as you trust whatever government is behind them. Politics will obviously color anyone’s views of what is trustworthy and what isn’t.

 

My preferred method of finding articles I trust is to use a database if I can, or to find a website that has a good reputation. I used to use Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) when I was in high school but have since become rather fond of JSTOR. JSTOR does have the problem that you need to be affiliated with an educational institution, though, so it isn’t available to everyone. If you already have a school email, then you probably also have access to a school library or database, as well. Everyone can use Google Scholar, though.

Advertising and Social Media

 It was reassuring for me to find out that people have discovered how to use social media to make a profit. Sometimes, it’s good to remember the constants in life: the sky is blue, the grass is green, and there’s always people who, somewhere and somehow, are quick to jump on anything that might look like a new marketing technique. God bless ‘em. 

  I’m not knocking this practice, exactly; honestly, it’s not that much different from regular advertising, in that it’s usually out in the open and screaming for attention. Occasionally irritating, to be sure, but still obvious. It’s not necessarily a bad thing if you consider, let’s say, the increased social media presence of librarians and library-based programs; sometimes, social media is the best way to advertise your services to the community, since there’s a good chance that people will see it. That said, when content creators are being paid to sponsor certain goods and services, that’s usually enough of a sign for me to raise an eyebrow and question the validity of the content being presented. 

Like advertising, sponsoring products is nothing new--if there’s a celebrity that needs cash, you can bet that you’ll be seeing them in a commercial sometime in the future. Heck, The Flintstones used to sponsor Winston cigarettes back in the 60s, so that alone tells you how much money sponsorships bring. It wasn’t authentic back then, and it’s even less authentic now; today, you have companies that send their products to reviewers on YouTube, all for the purpose of generating buzz for the company and money for the reviewer. Sponsorship like this isn’t bad, per say--business is business--but it certainly makes the content feel less genuine and organic.

Social Media and Social Engineering

Recently, I have been thinking about memes and social media. Memes, which Merriam-Webster defines as "an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture" or "an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media" (Merriam-Webster), commonly take a few forms on social media. They can be items that are spread as they are (sometimes called image macros) or slightly modified to add relatable nuance to the joke, such as changing a caption to reference a character from a popular television show or celebrity. Memes can also take a different form, however. Some memes rely on answering questions or providing personal information through quizzes, questionnaires, or supplying photos or videos in response to prompts. On the surface, these can seem like a fun way to connect with your friends and remember the past (or brag about your accomplishments). You might be asked to rank the ten best concerts you have been to, mark off which unusual foods you have eaten, or share photos and answer questions about your life ten years ago. Depending on where you share your answers and who you are connected do on that particular social network, it might be a trip down memory lane for long time friends or finding out something new about a newer acquaintance.

However, what many people do not consider is that sharing pieces of information about yourself on social media, however seemingly innocuous, can make yourself vulnerable to a cybersecurity incident. Many websites that require a password also have a system of security questions on place to allow you to access your account should you forget the password. These questions are theoretically things that only you and perhaps those closest to you would know -- your father's middle name, your first grade teacher, your first pet, your favorite candy bar as a child. Some of these questionnaire-type memes, however, ask questions that either are information that might be used in security questions such as these, or questions that when taken together, particularly in conjunction with other public information about you on your social network profile for that site, allow a savvy person to put together a profile about you. This can include your full name, where you grew up, how old you are, your interests, et cetera, which can then make answers to those questions easier to crack. (For example, if the question is who was your first concert, there is a good chance that the answers will be very different for someone who is 25 versus someone who is 45.)

In a Wired article about this phenonmenon, Kate O'Neill reflects on a popular 2019 meme like this: the ten year then-and-now profile picture challenge. She semi-jokingly tweeted that providing carefully labeled photos of yourself ten years apart en masse like this was a great way to "train facial recognition algorithms on age progression and age recognition". By Facebook's account and her own conclusions, she did not think that this was ultimately the goal of this particular meme -- Facebook maintains that it was user generated and spread. However, it did provide an interesting platform on which to muse about how much information we share about ourselves with the internet, and the ways that this could come back to bite us. That's not to say that sharing a cute photo of you when you were younger or getting into a deep discussion on the best pizza toppings will necessarily result in our online banking passwords being hacked. (It's pepperoni, sausage, mushrooms and pineapple, in case you were wondering.) It is a good exercise, however, to regularly think critically about what we share and evaluate just how much of those seemingly inconsequential details about us are out there in the digital space, and being mindful about what we do share.

A Crowd of Trolls

Crowdsourcing, especially in the public sector, can be a difficult proposition in my experience. We've all seen big publicity stunts that rely on crowdsourcing go horribly wrong. Turns out some people can't be trusted to help out with things that don't directly benefit them. For example, look at the whole Tay fiasco. Tay was an artificial intelligence program developed by Microsoft and set loose on Twitter to learn from regular users. It only took about a week for Tay to be shut down because Twitter trolls had taught the bot to repeat the worst things they could think of. In other words, they made a robot racist. Of course this wasn't the fault of every Twitter user, it was clearly done by a small group of dedicated trolls who actively worked to make it happen. They saw an opportunity to annoy Microsoft and took it.

But focusing on the bad side of things isn't the only way to look at crowdsourcing. There are some very good examples of crowdsourcing working, particularly in the realm of creating content. The now-classic monster Slenderman is actually an example of crowdsourcing. Slenderman was created by Eric Knudsen on an internet forum and exploded from there, morphing into a mascot for crowdsourced internet horror stories known as creepypasta. Since Slenderman wasn't connected to a published work of fiction, copyright on the character was basically nonexistent and any type of media had free range to capitalize on the trend. There are Slenderman video games, movies, YouTube series, etc. The character evolved from a simple creepy design with a few vague concepts to a whole mythology, including related crowdsourced characters and common tropes.

And for those of us who crave even more there's also the SCP Foundation, an archive of thousands of horror stories centered around a single fictional world, all crowdsourced and freely available. Some of these stories are great reads and others are... not so great, but the SCP Foundation is much more controlled than something like Slenderman. It has a moderation team and strict rules for how stories should be formatted. This sort of crowdsourcing is way safer than Microsoft's racist Twitter bot, controlling how people are allowed to submit new content and imposing a barrier of entry to prevent low effort trolling. You actually have to write a story, not just send a tweet. Of course there's still trolls, but moderation deals with them quickly and effectively.

Censorship, Misinformation and Access

     Recently I came across an article in the Wall Street Journal (which can be found here), discussing Amazon pulling from sale in print, Kindle and Audible formats a book that portrayed LGBTQ+ identities as mental illness. Immediately I thought back to a time where a patron requested us to purchase a book that had a similar theme. I felt uncomfortable with the request because I thought that the book undermined the LGBTQ+ community in a similar way that the book from the recent article did. I also know that as a library staff member, I am not there pass judgement or filter the information that they request, especially when it is something I do not agree with. We are bridges to help reduce the gap between patrons and the information they seek. But where do we as librarians draw the line with having misinformation within our stacks? Or when a patrons requests materials that are considered subjective, disputed or contentious topics? 

    I also thought that it was a very powerful move that Amazon made halting the sales of this title. According to the article, a 53% of books purchased in the United States are through Amazon, and 80% of eBook titles as well. Amazon put out a statement that they provide customers “with access to a variety of viewpoints, including books that some customers may find objectionable. That said, we reserve the right not to sell certain content.” I am intrigued to see if going forward Amazon pulls more titles that are deemed harmful, or controversial. 

(Not So) Personal Information

When I was a kid and the internet first started being, well, the internet, everyone I knew was told never to post your name or address or any personal details online. It wasn’t safe, someone would steal your identity or kidnap you. That started to change around 2010, when I was in high school and Facebook was on its way up to the giant platform it eventually became. When I first signed up, I used a fake last name because that’s what I thought you were supposed to do. My friends all had the same reaction, which was that they thought it was a little weird but understandable. Eventually I just switched my last name to my real last name.

It’s always going to be weird to me how much information we’re expected to post about ourselves online. You can find a person’s name, birthday, school, and friends through Facebook. You can find where they work and have worked on LinkedIn. I’ve never liked LinkedIn, but I’ve been told it’s necessary in order to get a professional job. It hasn’t helped me too much, and I hate having the actual location of where I work just out there for people to see.

Facebook isn’t any better. A lot of people I know don’t really use it much anymore but keep it around for the messaging system. Back in “the day” everyone had heard of Facebook-stalking. It was a regular practice for meeting new people. You’d go to their Facebook profile and learn everything about them you could by checking out their “liked” pages, friends, pictures, status updates, everything. Of course, we knew that a person’s online presence was curated to show what they wanted to the world, but it still felt like sneaking around. It’s kind of terrifying to think about how much people I’ve never actually met could know about me.

It’s not just what we willingly put online. Everything you search or like gets catalogued somewhere. People joke about how you’ll have a conversation about something and then get ads for it later on when you check your phone. “Oh, it’s listening to me,” you’ll say. The phone may or may not be monitoring your verbal conversations, but it does see what you’ve been looking at. Targeted ads track your internet activity, including google searches, videos you watch online, any post you “like.” Any site with a like button automatically reroutes the information that you’ve “liked” something back to Facebook, where the like button originated. That information is also sold to third parties, which use it for advertising. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t a member of Facebook and aren’t on the Facebook website. It is redirected there anyway. So if you “like” something about a book on Twitter or favorite a movie on Letterboxd, it goes back to Facebook and you receive ads based on that information down the line. It’s definitely concerning. The fact that all “like” button information goes back to Facebook is, to my knowledge, not a well-known fact. The amount of information about you out there, whether you put it there yourself or otherwise, is staggering.

Social media and professional identities

 Where do we draw the line between personal and professional identities? A lot of it probably depends on how you define a “personal” identity and a “professional” identity, but the basic idea likely remains the same: your personal identity is what you’re like outside of work, and your professional identity is what you’re like during work. But what does it mean when your personal identity interferes with your professional identity? 

This issue existed before social media, of course. However, what makes social media unique is that, depending on what account is being used, you are granted an illusion of anonymity, which might be a problem if you fall into a certain state of mind. Not only that, but if you use social media in your daily life, it’s very easy to slip up and use language that might be acceptable for a personal account, but not a professional account. The company Twitter accounts of Wendy’s and Burger King has been mentioned by a couple of other students, but I think there’s an aspect to them that’s often overlooked: both Twitter accounts might be entertaining, but they are also EXTREMELY belligerent in ways that are, quite frankly, unprofessional. It’s one thing to use Twitter to advertise your company’s 2-for-1 burger special; it’s quite another thing to use your company’s Twitter account to cuss out your competition. 

In my opinion, it’s important to have a good grasp on both your personal and professional identities. You wouldn’t go into work with a massive hangover (or at least, you shouldn’t), so why should social media be any different?