TED Talks Daily - A surprisingly effective way to fight misinformation | Dave Jorgenson

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

What if the best defense against misinformation isn’t panic, but a punchline? Journalist and comedian Dave Jorgenson explores how misinformation has proliferated throughout history — from the age of Plato to the era of viral TikToks. With his own short, absurdist sketches that explain the news, he shows how humor can cut through fear, spark curiosity and explore nuanced truth.Learn more about our flagship conference happening this April at attend.ted.com/podcast Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Media literacy is an essential skill of our time. With each technological leap, we've had to work double time to keep up, says journalist and comedian Dave Jorgensen. In his talk, he explains why media literacy, which he defines as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media in various forms. is a crucial skill in an age of proliferating misinformation. But it doesn't mean you can't have a bit of fun doing it. With his absurdist sketches that he makes to explain the news,

he shows us how humor can cut through fear, spark curiosity, and cool down hot takes in order to explore more nuanced truths. And since this talk is quite visual, I'll jump in throughout to describe a few of the videos and images that Dave shares during his talk. I'd also recommend going to watch the video on TED.com. I'm Dave. I've spent pretty much my entire adult life working in video journalism and media.

But what is media and what forms does it take? Let me show you an example. This is Kipu. Hey, y'all, Elise here. So Dave is sharing an image of this Kipu in English, often spelled Q-U-I-P-U, which, as he said, was a record-keeping device. It looks almost like a half circle with long rays of string of different lengths coming down, or a large necklace.

The string is colorful, different earthy, oranges, blues, and yellows. It was used by the Incas in South America. It's a system of knots and strings. And every knot, the shapes, the colors, dimensions, numbers, all of it works together to tell a story. While you and I may not understand Kippu or how it works, this is a form of media. And let me give you another example of media.

from across the pond in around 370 BC. At this point, Dave shows us a photo of a piece of papyrus scroll with tiny ancient Greek writing on it. It's hard to read and clearly very old. Imagine an ancient manuscript you might see behind glass at a museum. So Plato wrote this story where he was imagining a conversation with his real-life teacher, Socrates, and a student, Phajus.

Eventually, the conversation veers into a debate about speech-giving and whether or not you should do. Kind of like 10 moderators deciding whether or not I should be at this event. Spoiler alert, I'm here. So I think I'm supposed to be. Anyway, the conversation eventually veers into another part where Plato, as Socrates, says that the written word is actually bad, that it could be misinterpreted and taken out of context.

So in other words, people have always been afraid of media and how it could be manipulated. So hundreds of years later, when the first films to ever come out, black and white, it's a train platform. This is a French film, so these are all French people and a French train, I presume. This film that Dave is playing

is an iconic 1896 French short, silent documentary film, and I mean really short, about 50 seconds long, directed and produced by August and Louis Lumiere. The audience sees the train hurtling towards the camera. That train is coming really fast. Duck! To prove his point, Dave starts to react the way that early observers of the film did. You guys see that?

He freaks out and ducks, literally throwing his body on the floor of the stage, only to realize that the train remained in the fully 2D space of the film. And he was safe the whole time. Oh, okay. He was coming right at. Anyway, rumor has it. That's how people reacted to it when they first saw it in theaters. They jumped out of the way.

Very scary. We just weren't ready for that type of media yet. Decades later, in 1938, there was a radio broadcast that scared a lot of Americans. Here's a snippet of it. Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio News. Special bulletin.

At 20 minutes before 8th Central Time, Professor Farrell of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing several explosions of incandescent gas Occurs. Occurring at regular intervals on the planet Mars. Mars. The spectoscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen and moving toward the Earth with enormous velocity. You guys, see that's coming towards Earth.

So we all know that that didn't really happen, but people listening thought it did. And it was an Orson-Wells broadcast. People heard this broadcast, and were literally in the streets forming mobs. There was police officers outside the CBS studios in New York, and the NECD executives were trying to shut the broadcast down. It was a widespread issue. the CBS affiliate in Cleveland, where the host was the Future Tonight Show host, Jack Parr,

he was there trying to convince listeners that it was a fictional story, but they didn't believe him. People were calling in and saying, no, this is app, he's like, no, this is an adaption of War of the Worlds. It's fictional. It's not real. And so every time there's a new form of media, we have to adapt. You guys remember email chains?

I've dug this one up the other day. Don't delete this. Scared the crap out of me. This is starting to sound like, When I was a man gave a 10-19, suddenly it all went to chaos. Forward this email. Everyone forward it. Get out your phones.

So obviously we figured out eventually that these emails were scams, and so were the Nigerian princes that shared them, though my Nigerian prince was real. Basically, I spent a lot of my job as a journalist trying to explain to people what they're getting wrong online versus actually talking about breaking news, because all of this is so complicated. And there's a word for that in understanding media. It's called media literacy, which is best defined as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media in various forms.

So I kind of soft-launched my career into media literacy with this viral PEZ video. I don't know if anyone saw this. It was someone showing you a PEZ dispenser and that you can actually load it by putting the candy in through the bottom. That is patently false. I was very angry to see this video,

going viral in all the comments saying, wow, I didn't know that. Well, you didn't know it because it wasn't true. And as someone who's made 5,000 journalism TikToks, I was like, I'm getting to the bottom of this. Here's the video. You may have seen a TikTok recently in which someone takes a fully wrapped stack of pez candy and puts it in the bottom of a pest dispenser and then it comes out fully unwrapped. It's fake.

There's a plastic bottom here that the candy would not be able to get around. I instantly knew this because I was a super cool and totally normal kid that collected 400 pest dispensers. But what about the other people that were also totally normal and cool kids that didn't see the obvious cut in that TikTok. Video in particular can be a very powerful vehicle for misinformation, and when it's something much more important than a pest dispenser, it can be really dangerous, too.

Here's some false claims that were made on the internet just last week. This video ends with scrolling text of a number of claims that have been made on the internet that are not true. For example, that COVID-19 isn't real or that Dave was really cool in high school. He ended with that one. My editor suggested the last one. Who knows that that's true? Anyway, so, you know, unless you were a Pezhead like me,

that story wasn't probably that important to you. But it was a nice way into talking about media literacy, especially on TikTok, where people were taking what they saw at face value and not really challenging it. And sometimes what happens is that everything you see online, people think, is true. So one example of that, more recently, up to date in 2025,

is this video from Will Smith's social media team. He was on a tour. Some of you, I heard some grumbles. Get ready for your minds to be blown. Because this video was a compilation of a lot of the crowds at his different concerts going through Europe, and it was pretty clearly AI-generated. There's a lot of extra fingers on these people.

Anyway, people were understandably pretty upset about this, and they were really upset, not just that it was AI-generated, but that it appeared that Will Smith tried to generate, people holding signs like this, which is obviously pretty upsetting. The picture Dave points to is of a crowd at what looks like a concert and a man holding up a sign that reads, you can make it, help me survive cancer. Thanks, Will. Will Smith is someone who is perhaps a little polarizing after his Oscar performance

at the award show. And for some people who feel a certain way about him, it was very easy to get very angry about this video. But it turns out the truth is much more complicated. This is an AI-generated crowd, but it comes from real photos of the real crowds at Will Smith's concerts. So here's a more in-depth look. Dave plays one of his videos here that follows the social media style where he's playing multiple characters and cutting back and forth between two of them. Dave as the teacher is seated behind the desk. And then there's Dave as two students, one in a backwards baseball hat and a sports jersey, the other one in a polo shirt. You may have seen the videos posted on Will Smith's Instagram and YouTube account that are almost

definitely AI generated. A lot of the hands. have like a bazillion fingers. One sign says for a six instead of fresh. And generally speaking, people just look off. This AI is so obvious. I can't believe they thought we would fall for them. Well, these may actually be real Will Smith fans. What? No, they aren't.

The video is very likely AI generated, but the photos themselves seem to actually come from people at the concert. The photo matches the video, but instead, everyone looks real. So the video is fake, but the people are real. Exactly. But the video he posted on YouTube is even more fake. Just last week, the YouTube creator liaison admitted that YouTube is using image enhancement to unblur and denoise YouTube shorts.

Okay, so YouTube is using AI. He's arguing that image enhancement is not the same thing as AI, because it's a lot like the technology that most of your smartphones use when you're taking a video. Anyway, YouTube says they'll soon have a button where you can opt out. It's a good thing we have a media literacy class. Oh, this class isn't real. It's for a video. What?

Are you even the vice president? I'm not the vice president, but I am considering shaving my beard. That comparison is happening a lot. The laughter you hear here is because Dave just put up a photo of U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, who we have to admit, Dave looks a lot like. It's been a really long year. Anyway, these people don't have enough extra fingers on their hands to count how many times we get stuff wrong on TikTok or anywhere in media.

It's just really hard to keep up. And it's also hard to keep up with what's happening in where things he's, came from, like a rapture prediction. Do you guys know there was a rapture in September? Oh, I guess none of us made it. So this rapture happened and people were all over TikTok. On the screen, we see a quote from the New York Times article. It reads, for those who believe in the prediction, the TikTokers had some advice. Don't make any weekend plans. Leave your phone unlocked and your password's accessible for those who are left behind. And maybe leave your house and car unlocked. And for those who were curious, that article was published on September 25th, 2025.

And they were talking about how they were going to leave food for their kids in case their kids are raptured, which is, I don't know, maybe I might be a parenting issue. Anyway, they're making all these TikToks. And I'm watching all these and kind of secretly enjoying them a little bit, but also wondering, why is no one questioning where this prediction came from and why it happened? It turns out the prediction wasn't on TikTok. It came from YouTube. It was this guy from South Africa who said that in 2018 he had a dream that a rapture was coming in September 2025. But for some reason, he waited until 2025 to post a YouTube video about it. Anyway, I had to make a more in-depth video for the people, the pre-raptured masses.

The rapture is happening. Oh my God. What do we do? What do we do? No, I don't see anything in here about a rapture. That's because the rapture isn't in there. Okay, but I saw it on TikTok. Everything I see online is true. Okay, let's take this one chunk of a time. Fine, hurry up.

There's only a few hours left. according to this weird clock. The actual word rapture isn't in the Bible, but there is a possible reference. I knew it. In first, Thessalonians chapter 4, verse 16, Paul describes the living being caught up in the clouds together with the dead. But that could mean anything.

Right. And as far as today's rapture prediction goes, it just came from a YouTube video of some guy in South Africa saying that the rapture was coming. There's a date. There is a date. Yeah, and he's a pastor, right? Nope, he's just a dude who said he saw Jesus in a dream in 2018.

But why today? Why this year? He said it was because of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. What? Look, rapture predictions aren't new and they often take off during uncertain times. That makes sense. Yeah, for example, I don't even know if I'd be able to watch Jimmy Kimmel tonight because ABC brought him back, but the affiliates Sinclair and Nexstar have still banned him.

And so there's a lot of uncertainty around that. Very specific example, but yeah. Here, at what's clearly the end of the video, Dave is mid-sentence when he just disappears. He never disappeared from the stage, though, for those wondering. Anyway, it does make sense, though, that people had an emotional reaction to something like a rapture. We've always had emotional reactions to media. It's because we're afraid of it a lot of the time. And it turns out that fear and misinformation travel six times faster than the truth.

Headlines pop back up on the screen from PBS, the BBC, and MIT news, like fake news travels six times faster on Twitter than truthful news. And fake news travels faster study finds. So what emotion is more powerful than fear? I think it's humor. And humor is my way into informing the masses and really kind of meeting them where they are because it's much easier to talk to someone when you make yourself the butt of the joke

and rather than talk down to someone. They're not necessarily going to respond to that. And so by using humor, I've always been able to make these videos and kind of find my way into this world of misinformation and scary media. Now, if you went back in time and handed seven-year-old me and iPhone, I wouldn't know what to do with it, right?

We've always been scared of different forms of media. So my argument is that ultimately, we don't need to be scared of media. As long as we acknowledge that every time there's a new form of media, a new unprecedented form, we can overcome it and be a little bit less scared and have a little more fun. Thank you.

That was Dave Jorgensen, speaking at TED Next 2025. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TEDx. The TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little,

and Tonica Sung Marnivong. This episode was mixed by Lucy Little. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballerazzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening.