Spreading misinformation can be as simple as hitting the share button when something grabs your attention on social media. It might be a post about river water making dogs sick. Or it can be related to an emergency like a wildfire – and make it harder for accurate lifesaving information to get through.
Montana Public Radio’s Maxine Speier spoke to a Missoula-based expert on viral misinformation on how to stop the spread of online rumors. Madison Dapcevich is a reporter and fact checker with Lead Stories and Snopes who researches and documents falsehoods online. They start the conversation talking about misinformation that recently went viral in Missoula.
Maxine Speier: There was an example of that right here in Missoula this summer, there was a post circulating on social media that multiple dogs had gotten sick and died from drinking toxic water out of the Clark Fork River. And this was ultimately proven to be not true, but it caused a lot of confusion and panic, especially for dog owners. You know, I have two dogs. Can you tell me how you first heard about this rumor?
Madison Dapcevich: Absolutely. I also have two dogs and the day that I saw that post, I had some friends send it to me. I had actually just gotten back from the dog park and my dogs were in the river swimming. So I was, you know, instantly interested in this and, and concerned.
But I did notice that right off the bat, it had signs of what we call “copypasta,” which is a portmanteau for copy and paste. And this is a misinformation or disinformation sort of tactic that we often see that is a generally vague post.
It says a friend of mine had two dogs that got sick and died in the Clark Fork River. They're missing key pieces of information. Who is this friend? Where in the Clark Fork River? What date did this occur? And then of course, we're seeing re-shares and repost of this and screenshots of posts. So you're not really getting that original information. And we're not getting that key information that helps us vet whether or not this is true.
So when I came across this, it was a very interesting sort of blend of my personal and professional lives and I took a personal interest in that, of course, and decided just on my own volition to call the Department of Environmental Quality and see if they had any reports of this event having occurred. And when I talked to them, they said, we don't, you know, we don't have an official report. We can't say whether or not this is true. And then they started an investigation after a number of other local journalists also contacted them with that misinformation about toxic water.
Speier: It took about a week for the truth to come out like you mentioned. So many people were calling and concerned, so experts did extra water testing at different areas in the Clark Fork to figure out if there was any risk, and they found that there wasn't.
But sometimes misinformation crops up during emergencies. Officials at a public meeting for the ongoing Colt fire near Seeley were recently warning people about the danger of spreading misinformation and causing panic. When time is crunched in a crisis like a wildfire, how can people quickly evaluate what they're hearing or seeing online?
Dapcevich: I think the most important thing that people can do is really think critically about the source in which they're getting their information from. So again, if it's a friend of a friend who copied and pasted or screen shotted a post and is then sharing it, just question it. Right?. That's our first step, is to question whether or not this is authentic before you hit share.
And then let's think about where the source is coming from. Is it somebody that you know, personally and you can speak to their credibility? Is it a friend of a friend of a friend or is it an official notice? Is it the county sheriff's department? Is it the rural fire department? Is it the city or a federal or state agency?
Speier: What advice do you have for people who aren't professional misinformation-debunkers like yourself? What kind of things should people look out for when they're finding suspicious posts?
Dapcevich: When it comes to content that is questionable, my first flag is always whether or not this post has specific information that I can validate externally from a second source, or if it's intentionally vague. If it's not giving me a person, place, time or source, I'm instantly questioning the validity of that claim.
You know, when we're looking at misinformation and disinformation and the spreading of fake news, we oftentimes, and I am also guilty of this, think of it as a broader scale, right? There are nefarious actors at the federal level, the international level, but this algae incident is a perfect example that this concept can affect us even at the local level.
And it may seem harmless, right? Or it may seem like, what's the harm in sharing this because if it does exist, people should know; but these posts and this false information has a ripple effect where you begin to sow seeds of doubt in official agencies and resources. And it kind of spurs this distrust in our officials who are trained to protect us and to protect our communities.
So really just being aware of that at every single level, you know, it happens at the international, the national, the state and then of course, at the community level, and really being a smart and safe consumer of news.
