Describe what you do in five words or less:

Write about culture and technology.





What makes a ‘trusted’ source? 

What makes a source trustworthy objectively is a dedication to telling the truth above all, to transparency, to citing sources, and to correcting any and all errors when they occur.

What makes a person trust a given source? Often that depends on the person's relationship to the source – be it a tech platform, a news organization, or a person – and the way it makes them feel.

The human brain is biased to believe information that feels familiar, which it translates as truth, which causes a huge problem when trying to disentangle the feeling of trust from the objective reality of truth.





How do you fact check information? 

Start with the sources. If the information is citing a source, go there and investigate how the information was gathered and analyzed and verified.

If the information has been presented with no sourcing, then you must seek out the source yourself and do the same analysis.

If no source for the claim can be found, you've stumbled on a piece of information that is either untrue or at the very least unproven.





Going beyond headlines: why should we? 

By their brevity, headlines are terrible at conveying nuance, and though nuance can at times be boring, it is essential when trying to understand something completely.

This brevity can also create misleading reductive takeaways. Headlines act to frame the entire story for readers, and often headlines are the only thing people will read or remember.

​But it's imperative to realize that headlines are very frequently not written by the writer of an article, so in a way they are a form of the game of telephone, one person interpreting another person's conclusions. 





Tips for spotting fake news? 

Whenever a piece of information is presented without any source, be wary.

When the only source is hearsay of some kind, aka "many people are saying" or "I heard someone say," be wary.

True information is verifiable and can be traced to primary sources.




​
What's your favourite verb? 

To gesticulate

True information is verifiable and can be traced to primary sources.

​–Emily Dreyfuss
proactivecitizen.org​