The Liz Moody Podcast - The Ways We're Being Manipulated Online + How To Tell What's True In The Wellness World & Beyond
Episode Date: October 14, 2024Today I’m delving into the pervasive issue of misinformation online, exploring the challenges of discerning truth amidst digital noise. We’re discussing the role of algorithms in amplifying inflam...matory content on social media and media platforms, driven by engagement metrics. We’re also going to learn some incredibly important tools for media literacy, like the SIFT method by Mike Caulfield for quickly validating online information. As a longtime journalist and content creator, I’m giving insights into the impact of personalized social feeds, biases in search engines, and the need for skepticism and diverse sources in evaluating online content. This episode offers practical techniques to identify credible sources (including how to quickly read an article in a scientific journal) and encourages listeners to engage with community perspectives to counteract digital polarization. 00:00 Introduction 00:13 The Problem of Online Misinformation 01:47 The Role of Social Media Algorithms 02:22 The Impact of Inflammatory Content 05:53 The Psychology Behind Viral Content 07:11 Media Sites and Political Content 07:59 The Importance of Balanced Takes 08:56 Capitalism and Content Creation 10:58 The For You Page and Personalized Feeds 14:38 The SIFT Method for Fact-Checking 24:14 Rapid Fire Tips for Evaluating Information 26:09 Conclusion Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s new book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now! To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody, or subscribe to her newsletter by visiting www.lizmoody.com. If you like this episode, check out Ask The Doctor: Stress Edition—Exactly How to Identify and Eliminate Stress In Your Life with Dr. Samantha Boardman. This episode is sponsored by: Seed: go to seed.com/lizmoody and use code LIZMOODY for 25% off your first month. Shopify: sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at shopify.com/lizm. Manukora: head to manukora.com/lizmoody to get $25 off your Starter Kit. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. Formerly the Healthier Together Podcast. This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 273. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Hello, friends, and welcome to the Liz Moody podcast, where every week we're sharing real science,
real stories, and realistic tools that actually level up every part of your life.
I am your host, Liz Moody, and I am a best-selling author and longtime journalist.
Today, we are going to be getting into a problem plaguing wellness and the world at large,
how to tell what is true and what is not online.
We live in a world where quite literally anyone can upload any video or write something and post it,
and it's incredibly hard to validate whether the information in that content is reliable or not.
Across the internet and other media sources, there are different forces at play,
trying to manipulate our understanding of the truth for votes to make money to get clicks and views.
And then on top of all of that, there's AI-generated images and videos which have gotten frighteningly realistic
and make the truth even harder to find.
In this episode, I'm going to share some really simple techniques that anyone can use to quickly validate information
that you come across on the internet.
I've worked in just about every aspect of media over the last 20 years, from traditional
print and online media to running a newsroom at a startup to writing books published by major
publishers, which go through a very intense vetting and fact-checking process.
And for the last five years, I've been a full-time content creator, both on social media,
where I've gotten insider access to contacts at TikTok and meta and with my podcast,
where I've gotten to interview, vet, and fact-check best in field experts.
This episode is going to be an amalgamation of my own experiences and what the world's leading experts in media literacy recommend.
I want to talk about some of the problems that are leading to the proliferation of misinformation first, because there's some really interesting stuff going on that I think a lot of people aren't aware of.
Let's start with how social media algorithms work.
The more engagement that a post has, whether that be watchtime, shares, comments, or likes, the more that post is then pushed out by these.
algorithms to other people and the more similar content is pushed to you. On the surface,
this makes sense. The people developing the apps want to suss out which content is interesting
and to whom. So if people are showing that they are interested by engaging with a piece of content,
then the algorithm is like, oh, other people, especially other people like you, will also likely
engage and thus stay on our app longer. But it leads to a huge problem that I have had a front
RoCseat to as an online content creator, which is that the most engaging content is the most
inflammatory content. Posts go viral because they spark an argument in the comments or because
people disagree enough to leave a comment in the first place. My most viral post recently is a clip
from the Vivian two episode of the podcast. I made Vivian tackle all of your trickiest financial
issues. And in the clip, she says that she doesn't believe couples should split rent 50-50
if they are not making the same amount of money, that the amount that the amount that each
person pay should be based on how much they earn. The clip immediately struck a nerve with people
because it's different from a lot of the traditional advice on that subject. But the reason,
the reason that it went super viral, it has, I think, almost 5 million views now is because it made
people angry. Men, particularly, the vast majority of comments on that post, particularly once it
reached people outside of the people actually following my account, are from men who are really
really angry about the idea of a woman taking advantage of them. This is despite the fact, by the way,
that both Vivian and myself, the only two women in the video, out-earn our partners, and despite
the fact that gender is never actually mentioned in the video. But those men being angry enough
to comment is what told the algorithm that people were engaged with the post, which means that the
algorithm pushed out to more people, especially people that the algorithm would group similarly. Essentially,
men likely to be angered by this type of content.
The incentivization of inflammatory content via engagement is even happening at the comment level.
If you leave a comment with like a heart emoji or one that says, oh my gosh, so interesting,
nobody is going to engage with it.
But if you leave a comment that is funny, which often comes from being disparaging or an argument
about why the video is in fact wrong, you're far more likely to have your comment liked or
commented on, which will make your comment show up higher for other people. So this is pinging our
brain's reward systems. It's making us want to leave those inflammatory comments. And also,
it is making those comments show up first when people open the comments on a post so that
anyone scrolling thinks that an inflammatory reaction is the expected reaction, which incites more
people to get angry and leave more comments and so on. This whole system is so important to be
aware of for two reasons. One, it means that a lot of what is showing up in your social media feeds
is there because it was inflammatory enough to antagonize a lot of people, which signaled interest
to the algorithm, which made it push it out enough to land on your feed. So simply by scrolling,
you are often seeing this really highly charged content. And two, it really incentivizes creators
to put out inflammatory content. People are really quickly building accounts with millions of
followers by maximizing the algorithmic preference for inflammatory content, and it is happening from
all angles. In the wellness world, particularly, I see people sharing incredibly fear-mongering
and often deeply inaccurate content on one side, and because that is inflammatory, it goes viral,
and all of the sudden, it feels impossible to eat healthy. Truly, if everything on the internet
were true, there would literally be nothing left to eat that would not be hurting you in some way.
Psychologically, people love content that goes against common accepted knowledge because it makes
them feel like they're in the know.
They're privy to information no one else is sharing with us.
And they can then share that secret insider knowledge with their friends and their family and
they can say, I told you, it's killing you.
And they can feel like the hero, like they're really helping them.
But on the other side, there's a different kind of inflammatory content that I don't think we
talk about enough, which are these takedown videos that people do where they put a video,
behind them up on a green screen and they share all of the reasons why that video is wrong
and why anything that we want to put in our bodies is perfectly fine. Our human psychology
loves getting to see someone proved wrong. It makes this type of video where you have another
reel, you have another TikTok behind you and you refute everything in that video so, so popular.
And then on top of that, we love to have confirmation that we can consume all of the foods that we
most crave, which we crave largely because they were engineered by scientists to be hyper-crapeable.
This is also a form of insider info, albeit on the other side. We can send that post to our friends
and our family and we can say, I told you, it's fine, you were freaking out about nothing,
boosting shares, and amplifying the content to new audiences. A similar version of this is also
happening with media sites. I worked in media. I am well aware of how much of our job success was
dependent on the amount of clicks and views that our articles got, so we were very incentivized
to create titles and pieces that evoked intense emotions, of which fear is a very low-hanging fruit.
This is because media sites in the U.S. are dependent on ad revenue, which is dependent on clicks
and views.
You can see how this would play out in political content, too.
The most fringe ideas on both sides are the ones inciting people to share and to leave
comments, and so are often the ones that content creators and traditional media cover,
because they depend on those things to keep their business afloat.
And you know what doesn't incite people to share or to leave an incensed comment or to even
click or view a piece in the first place? A nuanced, balanced take. A take that says there's a lot
wrong with our system and there's value in trusting experts in science. A take that says eating
some processed food isn't going to kill you, but the data around the rise of diabetes and
pre-diabetes is alarming, that there's a ton of research that shows the health benefits of whole
foods. And we have a huge problem with the accessibility and affordability of those foods in this
country. That there's a lot that many of us have in common in terms of what we want for this
country to feel safe to have opportunities. And by the way, I want to take a second to clarify this
because I find it incredibly frustrating. The health crises that are going on in this country aren't because
anyone has an insidious plot to kill people. This is something that I see a lot on the conspiracy
theory side, this idea that our government is out to intentionally harm us in some way. No, we just live
in a capitalist system. If you want to come back to the reason why mostly anything is happening,
it's typically because people are trying to make more money. The social media sites with the algorithms
pushing out inflammatory content aren't trying to divide us because they want to stoke a civil war.
No, it's because this is the content that engages us, and the longer we're engaged, the more money they make.
The election cycle in this country involves billions of dollars.
And a Supreme Court case called Citizens United, which was ruled in 2010, made it so that corporations spending money on political campaigns is considered free speech.
This overturned decades of campaign finance law, and it created this world where lobbyists can spend millions of dollars influencing politicians on behalf of their corporations.
which politicians almost universally need to take because they are constantly on a campaign cycle
and dollars spent on advertising directly results in winning campaigns.
Or it's simply ineptitude, lack of progress, or failing infrastructure.
I heard a podcast recently where someone was saying that the government is putting hormones in
the water to feminize us as a population.
So let's explore that.
Yes, there are higher levels of hormones in our municipal water systems because hormones from
birth control, cosmetic ingredients, and industrial runoff end up in our water supply. The amounts
of these hormones have gone up at a rate that wastewater treatment tools are not able to keep up
with in a cost-effective manner. It's just not a problem that our water systems were designed to deal with.
It is not a conspiracy theory. It is not insidious. But it's a real problem that needs to be addressed
and by pushing it to this extreme place by saying the government is trying to feminize us,
it can actually make it harder to get people to recognize that this type of toxicity is a real
problem, which makes a real solution less likely to happen.
Sorry, I get very worked up about that because it frustrates me so much.
Okay, the last social media thing that I want to address is that it is called a for you page
for a reason.
Our feeds are showing us this highly personalized feed of course.
content, and that is usually content that's eliciting a strong reaction in you. It is what's making
you stop and watch, comment or share, and often that strong reaction is based in outrage or fear.
And it's the self-reinforcing cycle, and it's honestly terrifying because it creates this
false individual reality that we end up living in. For instance, I am scared of flying,
so you can bet that I will watch every single plane crash or emergency video that comes across
my feed. So my algorithm is like, ooh, this content keeps her engaged on our app. So it feeds me more.
I just got one this morning about turbulence injuring a bunch of people on a flight, and it terrified me.
So I get this curated feed that gives me a false sense that these airline incidents are happening
far more frequently than they actually are. I have checked the actual statistics on this because I was so
scared, and I had to, if I ever wanted to fly again. So my feed has completely skewed my sense
of objective reality. I've had a ton of friends run into this when they get pregnant. They
engage with a few posts about scary outcomes for pregnancy because how can you not when you see
that information come across your feed? And then their feed starts to be filled with them.
And then they have this sense that these wildly rare events aren't rare at all and they're terrified.
sheerly by scrolling on social media, we are actually becoming less informed about the state of
reality because we are getting served this wildly skewed content.
A really, really good action step, and we're going to get into a ton more action steps
in this episode, but a really, really good one would be to spend significantly less time
getting information on social media.
And at the very, very minimum, remind yourself that your algorithm does not represent
unbiased reality. And make sure that you're mixing in other news sources, other content sources,
and real life interaction. And what a lot of people don't know is this bias, it's happening
on Google too and on chat GPT. These algorithms are trained on our prior searches.
This is so important to realize. They are not exclusively trying to give you objective truth.
They are trying to give you the answer that you want. You can do a test that lets you see Google's
bias super easily yourself. Just Google two sides of an issue. I just did it. I searched
processed food bad for you and I got a bunch of links about how processed food is bad for me,
how it's raising my inflammation levels and cancer risks because Google wants me to get these
search results that I am looking for. And then I searched processed food good for me.
And I got served a bunch of articles about how processed food can be part of a healthy diet.
This is happening on chat GPT2. You can just ask it. It will explain that it inserts bias based
on your questions and responses, even while it tries to stay objective, which honestly,
thank you, chat.
I appreciate that from an honesty perspective.
I say all of this just to highlight how easy it is to be led astray in the current online
world.
And again, it is not insidious.
Google is just trying to give me the search results that I am asking for.
Meta is trying to make money because that is the goal of a for-profit company.
Politicians are trying to please their donors so they can keep.
their jobs because we've set up a system that makes money a key part of election cycles.
All right, we're going to take a quick break to hear from the amazing sponsors who help
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masterclass.com slash Liz Moody. A key step in knowing what's true and what's not is to be a little
suspicious of most of what you run across online and to not take things as true based on their face
value. You have to do a little digging. And for that,
One of my favorite, favorite processes is developed by Mike Caulfield, who is a research scientist at the University of Washington Center for an informed public where he studies the spread of online rumors and misinformation.
This is a four-step process.
It's shockingly fast to use.
Once you get the hang of it, you can fact-check most things in minutes.
It's called sift, and that stands for stop, that's S, I investigate the source, F, find better coverage, and T trace claims, quotes, and media.
So first, we stop.
Before we write an inflammatory comment and feed into that vicious cycle of the algorithm,
before we share the content and potentially spread misinformation, as tempting as it is to be
the one in the no person, we stop.
We pause and then we move on to I, investigate the source.
Who created the content that we're looking at?
One of my favorite tips for this is from a book that Mike Caulfield wrote with Sam Weinberg,
who is a psychologist and he's a professor emeritus at Stanford.
and it's called lateral reading, which means searching for what other sources are saying about the
source that you are getting information from. So if you find an article on Google from, let's say,
the Daily Mail, you would Google the Daily Mail and Daily Mail trustworthy, and you would see
what comes up. And what comes up, as a matter of fact, is a Wikipedia article that says,
the Daily Mail has been criticized for its unreliability, its printing of sensationalist and
inaccurate scare stories about science and medical research.
and for instances of plagiarism and copyright infringement.
In February 2017, the English Wikipedia banned the use of the Daily Mail as a reliable source.
You will find an all-sides media bias rating that's quite a bit to the right, which does not mean that it's inherently inaccurate,
but it's really helpful information to have as you look at what they are covering and how.
Also, by the way, despite most of us being told growing up not to cite our school essays with Wikipedia,
it's actually a shockingly good source.
It's not perfect, but it doesn't suffer from a lot of the issues that we talked about earlier.
It's free to use and it doesn't rely on any ad revenue, so it doesn't have to be inflammatory
for clicks and views.
Also, while it is true that anyone can edit Wikipedia pages, that's the entire model of
Wikipedia, those edits are then reviewed by thousands of people.
So the edits that stick often reflect consensus.
And then also Wikipedia locks more controversial pages so that only select
editors can work on them. Also, I have a really cool trick for you. There are three vertical dots
next to each search result on Google. If you're like me, you likely never noticed them before,
but they are a great resource for lateral reading. Click them on any of your search results,
and Google will tell you if your results are personalized to you. Remember, they are still biased,
even if they are not personalized because Google is trying to give you what you want based on what
you've searched, but this way you know if your previous searches are taken into account.
It'll also have a section called About the Source, where it shares a bit of information
about what that site is, and then you can click for more and you get a whole list of results
about that page.
On social media, I investigate a source by Googling a person's name.
What are their credentials?
Why are they talking about the subject matter?
I give their page a quick skim, and then I also see who they follow and who follows them,
which is not foolproof.
I certainly follow people that I wouldn't want to be.
be associated with simply so I can keep up with what they're saying and be able to respond to
it or rebut it. But it can give a really nice general sense. Next, you want to find better coverage,
the F and SIFT. I find this in T, which we'll get into in a second, to be the most helpful parts of
using SIFT for social media, but it works for traditional media as well. Basically, if you see an
Instagram post that makes a claim or an article that makes a claim, you want to find other
reputable sources making the same claim and you can check whether they're reputable by investigating the
source are I. This is where scientific consensus comes into play. Science inherently disagrees with
itself. It is part of the process and how the field in general moves forward, which I feel like we're
not necessarily taught in school, and it's why there's a lot of distrust for the important work that
scientists are doing. People will see something disproven later and be like, see, don't trust science
when, in fact, that is literally how the system was designed to work. The scientific community is
constantly retesting hypotheses and reevaluating results as new data is identified. But in general,
if there is widespread agreement amongst reputable scientists, it's a good indicator that something
is tending towards true or our best representation of truth. Even though there are very real
conflicts of interest, it becomes increasingly difficult to span an entire community. A corporation
will pay for one or more studies, but if those studies confirm information,
in 85 other studies from 85 other research institutions, the information gleaned from it is likely
pretty true. Around 97% of scientists agree, for instance, that man-made global warming is real,
which is likely an indicator that there is some truth there. While scientific consensus
is not perfect, it's a really good place to start. And then the T is something that all
journalists are taught from the get-go. Trace, claims, quotes, and media, which,
just means go back to the original source. If you see an image online, reverse image search it.
There are so many images being passed off as current news and you can quickly see that they are from
years ago. If someone is quoting someone, go back to wherever the quote was initially said.
Look at the context. If someone is making a claim, find the original source for the information
the claim is based on. If it's from a study, there are a few quick things that I do to quickly
validate how trustworthy that study is, which I will share right now. The first is to check what
journal it's in. There are a few journals that have really rigorous standards, including peer review,
which is part of the scientific process at work like we talked about earlier, and they tend to
be more trustworthy. Journals like Cell, Nature, The Lancet, BMJ, Science. It'll say the journal
that a study was published in at the very top, and then if you don't recognize the journal,
you can use the lateral reading method that we talked about earlier, and you can Google it,
and you can see what other sources are saying about it.
Many reputable journals also ask for any conflict of interest to be submitted, and that will
often preclude it from being published at all.
And if it is published, it'll call out the funding source in the study's disclosure,
so I always look for that.
And as I read the study, I'm kind of trying to suss out where funding likely came from.
I also look at the sample size.
In general, a larger sample size indicates more reliable.
liable results. I'll also go back to the I in sift, investigate the source, i.e. the authors of the
study. I'll give their names a quick Google to see if any red flags come up, what research institutions
they're affiliated with, and how they're generally thought of in the scientific community. Honestly,
though, even finding out if there is a study at all puts you light years ahead of the pack. There was a
recent TikTok that went viral where someone claimed that all of the studies on sleep were done on men.
And in fact, and this is a quote, if those studies were done on women, they would have found that the optimal range was nine to ten hours of sleep.
This language is suspicious from the get-go.
If there weren't studies done on women, how would they know that the optimal range was nine to ten hours?
But also, a quick Google shows that there have been plenty of sleep studies done on women.
They found that women do need more sleep than men.
Most studies estimate between 10 to 20 minutes more, although that will fluctuate from person to person.
and also, among other things, that women are more likely to feel tired than men, which is probably
why the TikTok caught on. Because women who were tired saw it and they were like, aha, this is why I am
feeling this way. Do we need more studies to get to the bottom of why women are feeling more tired?
Yes, 100%. Do we need more studies done on women, period? Oh my God, yes. But spreading claims that are
based on literally nothing. I believe this one was traced back to a chiropractor who was giving an
interview where he just stated his opinion does not help that very real, very important cause.
And it can stress women out even more about reaching sleep goals that are based on literally nothing.
This TikTok beget hundreds of other TikToks and Instagram reels making the same claim,
a claim that could have been easily debunked with a quick round of sift.
And that was a fairly innocuous claim about sleep.
But you can picture how dangerous that exact process would be.
Someone makes a false claim.
Other people say, oh, that sounds right.
And then they share it because it resonates.
And all of the sudden it has reached millions of people with more harmful information.
I really hope this doesn't feel intimidating or like a ton of work.
This should all be pretty fast.
We stop.
We see if this is a source that we feel like we can trust.
We see if other sources that we can trust are making the same claim.
claims, and then we do a quick search to trace any claims back to their origins.
If everyone did even one or two of these things when confronted with new information, there
would be so much less misinformation flying around the internet.
And if you don't want to do these things, that's completely fine.
Just be wary of what you blindly believe.
And please, please do not share unvalidated information.
Okay, that was a lot.
So I'm just going to leave you with a few more super quick tips, a little rapid fire round.
And number one, a tricky thing in the health world is that practitioners are seeing results far
sooner in their patient pool than large-scale peer-reviewed studies are often able to be done.
If I am trying to decide whether to trust those results without the aid of peer-reviewed studies,
I do the I in sift.
I investigate the practitioner, their training, and if other practitioners would find them
credible.
And then I always, always, always ask them to explain the mechanism of action.
If they do not know why something works in my body, what's actually going on to achieve the desired
effect, that is a huge, huge red flag for me.
Number two, I weigh the benefits and risks of different pieces of information.
If something has potential to cause harm, like eating a food that's been shown to result in
death, or trying a procedure that there's not a lot of safety evidence around, I would need to
be really desperate, really unable to address whatever health concern that I'm trying to address
in any other way before I would consider it.
If something is low risk, if I'm wondering if it would help my metabolic health to go for a walk after a meal, let's say, I'll treat myself as an end of one and I will test it on my own body.
And number three, and this is especially important around politics, please, please, please talk to real people in your community at least as often as you consume content online.
The polarizing impact that social media is having on us all is undeniable. It's well documented.
and I think that we're only at the beginning of seeing how it's impacting our brains and our
relationships and our democracy. Okay, I love you all. I hope this wasn't too much information. I hope
you were able to glean some helpful action steps, some insights into what's really going on in all
of these places. I hope it was comforting and I hope it was helpful. That is all for this episode of
the Liz Moody podcast. If you are new to the podcast, welcome. I am so glad that you're here.
Make sure that you are following the podcast on whatever platform that you like to listen on.
I know that 50% of you listening to this episode do not follow the podcast.
What is up with that?
You're making your life harder by not following.
Not only is it the best way to support the podcast, but it also makes sure that episodes show up right in your feed.
You don't have to search for them anywhere.
And trust me, you do not want to miss what we have coming up soon.
I will be delivering some incredible science, interviews,
advice every single Monday and every single Wednesday for you. Okay, I love you and I will see you for
the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast. If you loved this episode, then you should definitely
listen to the Ask the Doctor episode where I talk with Dr. Samantha Bordman. She is a stress
expert. And among many other incredible things, we discuss how to stop doom scrolling and develop
a less stressful relationship with the news. I'll link that episode for you in the show notes so you can
go and listen next. Oh, just one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast,
is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the
advice of a physician, a psychotherapist, or any other qualified professional. One of the reasons that I love
taking AG1 is because I feel a boost in energy. It is my mid-afternoon pick me up since I don't drink
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When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized,
to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually?
comes from. Most people say working out or good nutrition and yes, of course that matters. But there is a
biological foundation underneath all of that that most people are completely overlooking. I have been
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