How to spot fake news
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 796 Ratings
🗓️ 26 October 2020
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A former CIA analyst shares her tips on separating what’s true from what’s false. There’s been a lot of nervousness about the role of social media in the run up to next week’s US presidential elections with concerns over voting interference and disinformation campaigns from foreign actors. Cindy Otis was an analyst at the CIA for ten years and her job was to filter through information and weed out fake and misleading news. She has now written a book aimed at young adults called True or False: A CIA Analyst's Guide to Spotting Fake News and tells us how fake news works.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC with me, Manuel Saaragossa. |
| 0:06.6 | Coming up, how to spot fake news. |
| 0:09.3 | Lies move on the internet much faster than truth does. |
| 0:12.8 | And so we're really living in this age of what we're calling the infodemic. |
| 0:17.3 | You shouldn't have to be a disinformation investigator to find out, you know, where your information is |
| 0:22.9 | coming from. |
| 0:24.0 | Tips from a former CIA analyst, digital literacy in our social media age coming up here in Business |
| 0:30.2 | Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:34.7 | What's social media ever done for you? |
| 0:37.7 | Well, not much, according to a Netflix documentary |
| 0:40.6 | that's created quite a stir. |
| 0:44.9 | When you go to Google and type in Climate Change Is, |
| 0:47.8 | you're going to see different results depending on where you live |
| 0:50.5 | and the particular things that Google knows about your interests. |
| 0:54.1 | That's not by accident. That's a design technique. |
| 0:57.1 | What I want people to know is that everything they're doing online is being watched, is being |
| 1:01.6 | tracked. Every single action you take is carefully monitored and recorded. |
| 1:06.1 | The documentary is called The Social Dilemma and it features former executives at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, |
| 1:11.9 | and the like, blowing the whistle on their ex-employers. |
| 1:16.0 | I was the co-inventor of the Facebook Like button. |
| 1:18.5 | I was the president of Pinterest. |
| 1:19.6 | Google, Twitter, Instagram. |
... |
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