'Oh Really?' The Art of Calling Out Baloney

'Oh, Really?' The Art of Calling Out Baloney

[00:00:00] On Wednesday, April the second, 2025, a young man was murdered at a high school track meet in Frisco, Texas. He was a twin brother, he was a football player, and the alleged killer was also a student, a high school student. In the wake of his son's death, the father of the deceased pleaded online. That his son's death not become a vehicle for demonizing a group of people or a person.

And he pleaded with people not to spread misinformation about his son's death, or the alleged killer. And that statement underscores a reality of life online and life in real life and life in person is that disinformation as well as [00:01:00] misinformation are quick to spread in the wake of tragic events, but also other important events.

And just in general, I'm reading a book right now called The Defectors by Paola Ramos, and in it she talks about how disinformation and misinformation permeate the Latino American community. And drive their decisions when voting and supporting political candidates Already, I have seen online multiple discussion boards and live discussion panels about the murder case and people throwing out theories and opinions, and none of these people were there, by the way.

They're just going based on what they read online and instead of waiting to see what the investigation yields and if there would be, uh, charges or trial or, or things of that nature, people are already going in. They're going [00:02:00] in on the deceased, his family. They're going in on the alleged killer. They're making it about race.

They're making it about race in the criminal justice system and on and on. And what do you think drives. People's conclusions about things they hardly know or things that they have long held as beliefs. You guessed it. Disinformation and this information, I've got some explaining to do.

Let's get into it.

 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back for another episode of Ayana Explains It all, the podcast, bridging [00:03:00] the gap between current events and human behavior. I am your host, your black Muslim lady lawyer, Ayana Arak here coming to you prerecorded from the state of Ohio, northeast Ohio I'm trying to get out in my garden and do some gardening, but the frost is literally scaring the plants back into the ground. Ayana explains it all. Is the podcast bridging the gap between current events and human behavior.

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And I do mean everything. Don't you underestimate me. Okay.

It is Sunday, April 6th, 2025. I've been celebrating Ramadan for the last 30 days, and it has left [00:05:00] us, and now I'm back to being bad on the internet. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Kidding.

But, I've been reading this book called The Defectors by Paola Ramos, and it is all about how. People in the Latin American community have defected from the long supported Democratic party to the Republican, but not just Republican, the MAGA Republican party. It's very eye-opening, my goodness gracious.

But once she got to this section about disinformation and misinformation, I was like, yes ma'am. That right there, because I have been spending time in them, TikTok streets, as they call them, on various TikTok lives, listening to people talk, but also participating myself. Hey, and let me tell you something, the amount of misinformation and then that nasty old [00:06:00] on purpose to trick you, disinformation, that is spewed and spread.

Every day. Every minute of every day will blow your mind. Blow your mind. If you are someone who you're not really susceptible to this, like everyone can be susceptible to misinformation, but disinformation is something else entirely. It is. They're not the same thing. But I can sometimes fall prey to misinformation.

Sometimes people get things wrong. I get things wrong. Believe it or not, I can explain everything, but I don't know everything. But the amount of this, I don't even wanna call it garbage, that would be beneath garbage. But the amount of this incorrect and sometimes purposely manipulated information that is spewed and spread online is, it's just remarkable.

Especially when facts are also available in the same space that lies are available [00:07:00] in, if you google a story. You can also find the truth about that story if you doubt the truth of the story. But however, I guess I should start by defining misinformation, right? And this definition comes from britannica.com.

You know, Britannica, encyclopedia Britannica they're more than just an encyclopedia now, and this is not an ad, but I find them fascinating. I love information. I'm a nerd, little bit of a geek. I am a big time nerd. I love to read, I love to, uh, get into deep dives into different topics and whatnot, but it says that misinformation is the inadvertent spread of false information without intent to harm.

While disinformation is false information designed to mislead others and is deliberately spread with the intent to confuse fact and fiction. [00:08:00] So disinformation is deliberate intended to confuse fact and fiction and misinformation is false information spread without intent to harm. It's innocent. You probably picked up a story somewhere, and even though it wasn't true, you didn't know it wasn't true, but you posted it online, like we see this a lot on, I.

Probably Facebook and Instagram the most when we talk about people's relationships. So and so is getting a divorce. So and so cheated on their spouse. So-and-so got a baby outta wedlock. So and so said this about their husband or wife. And it turns out that the story is not true, but it's made its way around the world a hundred times and is reposted on every blog and people are going into their hair salons and barbershops and into their little WhatsApp group chats talking about who's getting divorced and who cheated on who and who's having a baby and who's, who went to some award show with this person and who's showing leg and boob and [00:09:00] butt and all this nonsense.

And then when the stories are revealed to not be true, people don't care as much about that. Because they've already got the lie into their head. They've already made up their mind about the person that the lie was told about. They've already moved on to something else. Whereas disinformation is the rumors that people start in order to hurt someone's reputation, to harm someone's reputation, or perhaps just to get their rocks off.

There are people who actually get a rise. They get dopamine from making up lies and watching the lies spread, and seeing who's gonna believe the lies and seeing what blogs are gonna pick up this story and have their name out there in the news. Those people get sued quite a bit.

That's where those defamation lawsuits come into play. It's one thing if you made a mistake, it's another thing if you just flat out lied and spread the story.

 [00:10:00] One thing I've noticed online is that there is a lot of Google doctoring, doctor Google, where people are literally providing medical advice to others online or diagnosing a. People online, you're reading something or you watch a video and you go, oh, that person is bipolar.

They have all the symptoms. Or that person has dementia. Like people will watch a video of Donald Trump or Joe Biden and go, they have dementia. Suddenly everybody's able to diagnose what dementia is. It's incredible. We, it's incredible. All these doctors, no one went to me medical school, people just Google symptoms of whatever disorder they think it is, and they go, oh, I have all those symptoms.

I have cancer. I have A-D-A-D-H-D. And I actually have A-D-H-D-I was diagnosed by an [00:11:00] actual doctor. And a DHD is one of those that people swear up and down everybody has, or every symptom of this disorder is something that everyone does, and then therefore, no one has it at all because everyone's doing those things.

But there was a study in Britannica . It says that self diagnosing for mental health conditions such as a DHD, autism burden, borderline personality disorder, and dissociative identity disorder, which is also called multiple personalities, and OCD is nearly always ill advised. So self diagnosing for mental health conditions is nearly always ill advised.

A new study published in the POS one has concluded that less than 50%, less than 50% of the content found on TikTok under the ADHD hashtag is accurate. Less than 50%. [00:12:00] This underlines the danger of relying on social media for medical advice. And the reason people tend to do this is because, at least in the United States, healthcare is expensive.

It's very expensive. We wanna get a neuropsych test, which can be the way A DHD is diagnosed, or autism is diagnosed, but it can also be diagnosed. In your primary care physician's office? Honestly, a lot of people doing telehealth, getting a DHD diagnoses and running with a bottle of Xanax or Ritalin or whatever it is they're Adderall.

Adderall, i I don't take a stimulant. I take a non stimulant. Stimulants are not for me. I don't do those addicting medications, although give me four ibuprofen when, the certain time of the month and get the hell outta my way. So people run to the internet, social media for help with things because they're feeling lost and they're afraid to talk to [00:13:00] a doctor or they can't afford to.

I know in the uk, because they have socialized medicine, you have to wait sometimes months. To get an evaluation, especially for a mental disorder. And maybe you don't have months, maybe you've been suffering for so long and you just want the agony of what you're going through, the turmoil to stop. But you have to be tested before you can get a prescription.

And so you turn to the internet, you pop in A DHD into a hashtag or a DH ADHD symptoms or life with A DHD, and you see a video of a person and they're, um, reenacting people. Do a lot of these reenactments of what I go through in a day as a person with A DHD or how I experience life, how I experience relationships as a person with A DHD.

And you're watching these things and you go, oh my God. I do those things. I do [00:14:00] all of those things. And I also suspect that I have a DHD. I have a DHD, that's it. I have it.

They start spiraling because they think they have this disorder. And then you find yourself at the end of your rope literally holding on by the minuscule thread, and suddenly you're panicking and you want, and you need help get help before you get to that point. And the internet can only give you suspicions of what might be going on.

 And again, that's what comes from life on the internet. You get suspicions about everything. You get suspicions about yourself, suspicions about other people, other groups of people, what's going on in the world, because you can't be everywhere. You can't see everything.

Obviously, you're not all knowing, you're not all seeing like God. So you just get little glimpses from these stories that you see online or from the stories that are shared in your group chats or from videos. On YouTube you get [00:15:00] glimpses, so you can only suspect that this is what's happening.

But what you see often plays into your deeply held beliefs, and so it just confirms what you believe about a particular group. Or about a particular country or religion or a gender or an occupation. Like all lawyers are lawyers, right? And because you saw some stories where lawyers were doing bad things and lying.

Yep. There you go. I'm never trusting a lawyer. Trust us, please.

But so misinformation spreads quickly, particularly on social media. Due to several factors, and that includes the viral nature of social media. Social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram X, Reddit are designed to facilitate rapid sharing with algorithms, prioritizing, engaging, or emotionally charged [00:16:00] content. They put the hot stuff at the top of the page. They push the hot stories, especially if it's something political or something having to do with a celebrity.

Those are the things you're gonna see. And because you're looking at that and you're sharing that and more people are looking at it and sharing it, that story is going to stay at the top of your feed and then you're gonna go to another social media platform and that story is going to be there. Also.

Have you noticed that if you look at a story on any meta platform that follows you throughout those platforms, but also if you Google a story or Google a person's name or a place, that same information will show up as soon as you open Instagram or Facebook. Like I could, I Googled something about, I don't even know, I think it was Nat King Cole or something, and then I open up Instagram and [00:17:00] there's stories about black people in jazz.

I said, why am I seeing this? Why am I, oh, because I Googled Nat King Cole. Okay. That doesn't mean I wanna see stories in Instagram about black people in jazz. I just wanted to know something about Nat King Cole. But now my algorithm is showing me stories about blacks in music. It's you're not exactly reading my mind.

You're just reading something that I looked at a particular time and thinking, oh I must want to know more from your silly little platform about this. No. If I wanted, I would've asked. They assume that this is what you wanna know. And so they'll feed you those stories. And people often look at their algorithms and they're like, why do I keep seeing number one, stories from the same people?

Posts from the same people, but also stories about if you're shopping for a particular [00:18:00] item, say underwear. You click on an ad in one of those social media platforms, every ad until you click on something else or search from something else is going to be about that particular item.

It's going to be about stores that sell it. It's going to be about Facebook trying to get you to buy from one of their advertisers, selling it in the app. It's gonna be about types of underwear and bras and undershirts and whatnot. And you're like, I just wanted I wanted just, I just wanted to buy a new pair of underwear I didn't want to see for the rest of my life.

Adds about underwear. It's insane. But one of the things Paola Ramos points to in her book, again, the book is called The Defectors. It says that. Dependence on smartphones and social media for news during hard times. [00:19:00] It's, she says that people especially depend on smartphone and social media for news during hard times, like the COVID-19 pandemic and wars or conflicts.

But this is especially true for ethnic groups from other countries. When they come to the us, oftentimes the only information they can get about what's going on at home is through social media or from stories that are circulated throughout their group chats. Now, WhatsApp is really good for people sharing stories that are not fact checked, and for people believing wild conspiracy theories.

About others and about countries and about conflicts and voting and politics in other countries it's remarkable how people do not bother to stop and check to make sure that the information, number one, they're reading is correct. But number two, that they're sharing is correct. [00:20:00] People do not bother to stop and check to see if the information is correct.

And there are so many different ways you can, you could verify something, you could look in a book looking at, you can look in a textbook even, but you can also, I know everybody says Google it. Google it. But Google is as full of misinformation and disinformation as it is full of correct information.

And nowadays people are using AI like chat, GPT as their Google. Hey chat, GPT tell me about the war of 1812. And it spits out a bunch of information. Now it might be correct. It might be true information, or it might be false. Sometimes chat, GPT gets things incorrect. It does. It just does. And sometimes it uses sources from Google or other search engines as the source of the information that it's [00:21:00] giving you.

It just makes it easier for you to have all of those sources lined up right in front of your face, and sometimes it just makes shit up to appease you. Oh, you wanted to know about this. Here's what I think you should know about this. That's the other thing. It's telling you what it thinks you should know, and it's like quick and dirty sometimes, and you have to be very specific if you want more specific information, but it's telling you what it thinks you want to know or you ought to know, or what you should share about this particular topic.

Again, it is up to the person to verify that the information they are reading is correct. And how many people are doing that? How many people are doing that? Because facts ruin arguments. Facts ruin biases. They ruin your prejudice. They ruin the point that you wanna make about something. They ruin that Gotcha.

We always try to go, gotcha. When we're [00:22:00] having debates and arguments with people and we use these little tidbits of information that we learned about a particular topic or a politician or a celebrity, or your mama. Or your daddy, and when it turns out to be false, then that just, that deflates the balloon, doesn't it?

It takes all of the excitement out of the argument.

Paola Ramos goes on to say that overexposed to high volumes of disinformation and misinformation through the channels they use, especially WhatsApp. These these mediums, these stories that they're sharing over the mediums gives people a sense of intimacy, privacy, and comfort. But it also makes them vulnerable to deception because as I said, there are no fact checkers.

Sometimes people share a YouTube video that's not verified, and now Facebook is no longer safe for sharing information due to their removal of certain fact checking. Tools. Remember when Mark [00:23:00] Zuckerberg announced this? I don't know. I don't think they reversed this. See, now I gotta check. Ooh, let me check.

I feel like I read that they were rolling back. This when he announced that he was going to allow users to be fact-checkers for stories, and he was going to remove the actually hired fact-checkers for his agency for meta. Let me see, Facebook. I'm just gonna Google here. Facebook fact checker

face. Oh no. Here's a story from ProPublica and it says, Facebook boast viral content as it drops. Fact checking. Now let me read beyond the headlines here. It doesn't say anything about reversing this, but it says. Hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as president users spread a false claim on Facebook that immigration and customs enforcement was paying a bounty for reports of undocumented people.

Now I remember this and I remember thinking, now that actually sounds [00:24:00] plausible, but at the same time I'm dubious. I'm dubious about anything that I read online. I have to not that I'm suspicious of everything, but anything that sounds extreme, it probably is not true. But it says this spring, which I guess is now meta plans to stop working with fact checkers in the US to label false or misleading content.

The comp the company said on January 7th. And if a post, like the one about ice goes viral, the pages that spread, it could earn a cash bonus. Meta, CEO Mark Zuckerberg also said in January that the company was removing or dialing back automated systems that reduced the spread of false information at the same time.

Meta is revamping a program that has paid bonuses to creators for content based on views and engagement. You know what that means? Potentially [00:25:00] pouring accelerant on the kind of false posts it once policed. The new Facebook content monetization program is currently invite only, but meta plans to make it widely available this year.

Wow. It says the upshot, a likely resurgence of incendiary false stories on Facebook, AKA disinformation, some of them funded by meta according to former professional Facebook hoaxster, and a former meta data scientist who worked on trust and safety. Ooh, goodness gracious. So be prepared to be confronted with lots of disinformation.

On Facebook in the near future. And you know who's sharing information on Facebook, it's your aunties, your uncles, your grandma, your elderly parents. It's those people who spend hours on Facebook just sharing and resharing whatever they see. They believe everything that [00:26:00] they see. And you know what?

I feel so bad sometimes correcting people because it's like it shatters their dreams. And I don't wanna break nobody's heart, but when I have to say, no, this isn't true, or No, this didn't happen, and they go, oh I was just reading what's what was on the paper. Listen, you can read what's on the paper, but you also have to make sure what is written on the paper is true.

I don't think we've ever lived in an age where everything we ran was true. We've never lived in an age where everything we read is true. So why is it that when you see something on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and X, do you take it as verified, true, trusted?

I should believe this. Why? Why? It is because you are looking for [00:27:00] something that is going to keep you warm at night, that is going to connect you to things that you've known, things that you grew up with. People, places, beliefs that are so buried, so part of you that to lose them would need to lose yourself.

And the point that Paola Ramos makes in her book is that Latinos need to feel connected to their home. They need to feel connected to their culture. They need to feel connected to, especially their religious culture. They need to feel connected to they have beliefs about politics and politicians, and for some reason this is how they stay connected.

It's by sharing these stories over and over and over. But there is no accounting for if the stories are true or [00:28:00] manipulated or if someone just made a mistake. There's no accounting for it. But the same thing is true of black communities, white communities, other ethnic communities, other cultural communities.

In fact, misinformation and disinformation. They're now driving. They're now driving legislative policy. They're driving executive policy. What do you think is the reason behind why immigrants are treated with disdain in this country in the United States, to the point where the president is telling ICE agents to go out and round up every immigrant who is here on a green card or a student visa, or someone who's applying for asylum, or someone who looks like they might belong to a Venezuelan gang or someone who just inadvertently overstayed their [00:29:00] visa, round them up in the back, round them up, send them to El Salvador because of prejudice and misinformation and disinformation purposely.

Spread about number one, immigrants being dangerous. We hear this all the time. My God, just because someone is from another country, they're dangerous. Oh, we have to fear foreigners now. But also that they are social welfare siphons. They're all just coming over here to take our jobs and take our welfare and take our food stamps, but also that they are criminals.

They're coming over here to rape us and kill us and murder us. But another lie that is spread often and circulated even by people who know this is not true, is that the US has open borders. We do not have open borders. We do not have open [00:30:00] borders. We do not have open borders. What we have is a system of immigration that allows people to come into this country.

Whether it is for a visit for business, for a job, for marriage, for temporary work, then there are those people who find a way in all on their own. They have to sneak into the country because we do not have open borders. We don't. We have heavily policed borders, we have checkpoints, we have ports of entry.

You ever been to Canada? If you're from the United States, have you ever been to Canada? Are you able to just walk your ass into Canada? No, you're not. Are you able to just waltz your ass back from Canada into the us? No, you're not. And you know why? Because we do not have open borders. I. We don't, [00:31:00] even if you came here on a boat that's not an open border, honey.

It's not.

But that's a lie. That's spread. It's it spread so well. It, even when you know that it isn't true, you have to stop and think. Wait a minute. Don't we have open borders? I think no, we don't have open, we don't have open borders. Sometimes you hear something enough that you start to believe it's true, right?

You hear a rumor so much that you start to believe it's true because it's a story that's always been told. Nevermind that the story isn't true like that. Christopher Columbus lie, honey. Now that was disinformation. That was disinformation. They wanted a hero so badly for the Italian people that they made Christopher Columbus Day and made Christopher Columbus the hero.

And then when you, as people say, no, you research, [00:32:00] you found out that he was an ain shit genocidal maniac, who enslaved people in the West Indies stole all the resources, but he was also an idiot. But he also liked to kill people, and he definitely did not discover the United States of America. He made it to the New World, the West Indies.

But when you're a kid and you're in elementary school, they gotta tell you something about this place, right? They gotta tell you something about how this is formed without, putting in the scary bits. They gotta leave the scary bits out, because it's scary. The formation of the United States was scary as fuck, but you can't tell little kids that.

You can't tell them about a bloody revolutionary war and about the horrors of American slavery. You can't tell them that shit. No. Hopefully their parents [00:33:00] have discussed it with them. But sure, I thought Columbus discovered America because that's what they teach you at school.

And I thought, oh, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. And we love these presidents because these are our founding fathers. I didn't know that they were some motherfuckers, by the way. I swear a lot some episodes it's bad.

I try to bleep things.

So if it bothers you I'm sorry. I don't know what to tell you. This is just who I am. You're here because you love who I am. You like who I am. Remember that?

But yeah. So they gotta tell the kids something. So they make up these flowery stories about the Nina, the Punta, and the Santa Maria, and they came over from the New World, from Spain, Christopher Columbus in 1492, sell the ocean glue, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And here's, they're like, oh, I wanna be an explorer and I wanna be like, I wanna be like Lewis and Clark, and I wanna be, I wanna discover the Mississippi River, discover the Mississippi River.

We discover shit. [00:34:00] They discovered nothing or the first Thanksgiving. Oh, it was the Pilgrims and the Indians and they shared corn and pheasant and they exchanged blankets. They don't tell you that the blankets contain diseases. And so the Native Americans would get smallpox from the Pilgrims grms.

And they sat at a big table with a cornucopia and they exchanged stories about what they're grateful for. Because they spoke the same language.

No, they did not speak the same language. How were they talking to each other? God dang it. But these are the things they have to tell you just to move you along to first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade. They just tell them whatever to move them along. And by the way, what you're taught in schools, that curriculum that you're taught is set by your state.

The federal government has nothing to do with that. Nothing at all [00:35:00] whatsoever. The state that you live in sets the curriculum that goes to the school systems, and then the school systems decide when and how they're going to teach you what they've been pre-approved by the state to teach you. So in a way, yes, you are being controlled.

This is why it's important to verify information, and I'm not saying go and find your own version of events, right? There are people who I, and I listen. People will fault me for doing this because I do this to myself. People will say Ayana, why are you listening to this stuff if it's crazy and it's false and it drives you crazy?

But there are people who insist that their version of history is the correct version and that the version we learned in school, in college, or that we read in books is false. But the information they read in their books is true. And I [00:36:00] listen to these people talk and I listen intently because I wanna understand why they think what they learned is the truth, or what they read is the truth.

But what everyone else read is not true. And there really is no distinction except they believe what they believe, period. Or they think that the authors of their books are more trustworthy than the authors of the books that you read or I read. Or so and like for instance, we know that the father of Black American history, like the teaching of Black American history in the United States is Carter g Woodson.

There are people who insist that Carter g Woodson was a paid for white supremacist, loving black person who was sent to confound and confuse us, and that the real father of black history is someone else. [00:37:00] And that his, I can't even remember the person's name because I'm too stunned by this revelation, but I've heard it many times.

But that the real father of black history is someone else, and his information is to be believed over Carter g Woodson. And whatever is held in the National Archives, the National Archives is where the United States keeps all of their important documents and such. The original documents that they find, declaration of Independence, the Constitution and blah, blah, blah.

Some things are kept in the Smithsonian. Some things are kept in the national archives, like the papers of the presidents and their books and things. But those things are false. Those things in the museums are false. But this stuff over here, the stuff that these people, these the people who know more than you now, they know more than you what they learned and read in their books is true.

And they're here to [00:38:00] school you and they're gonna school the hell outta you too. When you bring up something, bring up anything, bring up a fact about black history, for instance. I. I can't even think one of the facts of Black American history is that blacks were brought from Africa, particularly West Africa, to the West Indies, to the Americas, but they were also brought from West Africa directly into the territories of the United States.

There are people who will tell you that shit did not happen. We're the slave ships. How come no one has ever found any slave ships when we know that slave ships have been recovered? And there are pieces of these things and pictures taken of divers finding these things and that some of these relics are held in museums, and some of these relics are still at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean because it would be too much.

I don't even know. [00:39:00] Money or hassle or time or, it would probably result in the disintegration of the piece to bring it to the surface. So it's essentially a living museum down there. Like the Titanic is still in the Atlantic Ocean. You can't bring it up, can't bring up the Titanic. You don't have the means, the resources, whatever.

But the fact that you cannot bring it up from the Atlantic Ocean, does that mean that it never sank? That it never existed, that it was a figment of someone's imagination? No. No. And we have stories from actual survivors of the Titanic, but we also have stories from actual American slaves. We have stories from slaves and they will, they tell you where they came from, they tell you how they got to the us, they tell you what language they spoke, where their people are from.

They tell you about their journey to the United States. They tell you about the [00:40:00] plantations they lived on. They tell you about the treatment they received. They tell you about how they gained their freedom or how maybe they were dying in slavery or who their family members are, how many kids they had or they served, what jobs they did.

Are you telling me those people are lying? Or perhaps those people are made up too?

What's disinformation and what's misinformation? What's true and what's false? If there's always some alternative fact, what exactly is the truth? I choose to believe the stories. The stories that are written by the people who were there. Some things you verify against other things and then there's the consensus by historians.

There are still people who believe that the Holocaust never happened

there are people who believe that, and I know this to be true, right? Not every black person in the United States is the descendant of slaves, but [00:41:00] because you're not the descendants of slaves does not mean that your people weren't at one time on the continent of Africa. There are black people who came from Africa who were not slaves or there are descendants.

Yeah. Oh my God. Believe it or not, believe it or not, but it's just remarkable. And I listen to these people talk and I'm just like, how are you not dead yet? Because your brain, it smells like it's rotting.

One of the things Ola Ramos points out in her book is that we are often glued to our screens. We're glued to TV screens and telephone screens, and we become overexposed to myths, dangerous information in a technological environment that doesn't have the mechanisms to monitor falsehoods. And we see this a lot on social media, but there's also deceiving talking points that are pushed out through online echo [00:42:00] chambers.

And social media tends to make us vulnerable to misleading information.

And what else? What are some myths that are circulating currently? One that you might hear a lot about is election fraud. Every time someone loses it's the result of fraud. Right now we have, we know that there was proven interference in the 20 was it 2016 election by Russian operatives. That was proven.

Now how far that went so far, the extent of it. We know that it was to push misinformation and disinformation through social media, especially what was at the time. Twitter, there were literal people, bots, whatever paid to stir up trouble amongst different groups of liberal Democrat posters. Accounts.

There were [00:43:00] people paid to post false stories about political candidates. Hillary Clinton Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. There were people who were paid to make comments that were inflammatory when they saw a positive story about these people. And we know that some of that was paid for by another country, Russia, to be exact.

And there are people who still deny that. Even though we've, we went through a whole impeachment trial that talked about it. Even though this information is widely available, it's widely available people, there are still people who deny it. But that denial is not from nowhere. That denial is purposeful.

That denial is because even when presented with facts, because someone has a long held belief, the facts cannot sway them. [00:44:00] The facts do not sway them. The facts will never sway them. So when we're on these online chats and these debates and things, and we're throwing facts at people who are telling lies, they're not the facts are not getting through.

Facts are not getting through. And you know why? Because you have to tell, you have to teach people what to believe. You cannot just throw facts at them. You have to teach them what to believe, and that becomes their belief, and that becomes their long held belief. And so they will believe facts about a situation.

They will believe the facts about something. They will believe the facts about history. They will not believe the misinformation and the disinformation because they have been not programmed, but they've been taught how to discern lies from truth. They've been taught. The version of events, for instance, about World War II and the Nagasaki bombings and the Holocaust, [00:45:00] and the formation of the United Nations and all this other stuff, they are not taught.

The conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories are so popular on the internet. My God, people live in an alternate fucking reality, and it's very dangerous. Conspiracy theories are the hallmark of a delusional disorder, and I ain't diagnosed with nobody, okay? I'm just saying people who believe that shit tend to have a delusional disorder.

There are people who only believe conspiracies about things, about situations only believe the alternative, the alternate the alternative. Is it alternative or alternate? Or alternate?

They only believe the alternative facts. They only believe the other version of events. Like this year Donald Trump declassified the documents about JFK's assassination, and there were people who were looking for something juicy in it, and it didn't show anything new, just people's opinions about [00:46:00] things, because people are still looking for that.

Gotcha. Was really behind it. It wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald, it was this group of people and it was Cuba and it was, some kind of radical liberal group or something, or what, whatever. The government's not gonna tell you the truth. They wanna hide things.

They wanna cover up things. They're never gonna tell you the truth because if they told you the truth, which I mean, they don't always tell you the truth. Sometimes they tell you nothing, but it doesn't matter what they tell you. You're going to believe what you want. You are, you're going to believe what you want.

Why is that? Why is that? Because your beliefs are what keep you warm at night. These things make you feel comfortable about the life that you're living. They confirm your bias. They align with what you were taught as a child about certain people in situations. But [00:47:00] also the United States as Paola Ram Paola Ramos points out.

The United States has a problem with misogyny, sexism, and racism. And a lot of these, a lot of misinformation and disinformation shared feeds into those factions, or a lot of the misinformation and disinformation shared, are born out of those factions. Because these issues already exist in our society and we're victims of them, we then become victims of the stories that are born out of these factions.

And if we're not doing anything about sexism and racism and mono and misogyny, then these stories are gonna continue to happen, and they're going to continue to affect the daily lives of people. We are becoming victims of false narratives, false versions of events, false. We're victims of rumors.

What are some things that people believe about blacks? What are some things that people believe about Chinese people [00:48:00] or about transgender people, gay people, Muslims? What are some things that people believe about Muslims that are totally not true at all? And why? Because xenophobia is a problem, because xenophobia is a problem in the United States, and these stories come out of that xenophobia.

But because people have so long, for so long, believed that this particular group of people is, inhumane or not human or so different from them that they're not even that they are aliens or that they are some kind of strange being. How do you convince someone who is racist, that a black person is equal to them?

How do you convince someone who is racist against blacks, that a black person is equal to them? How do you convince a misogynist that a trans woman is a [00:49:00] woman? As Paella Ramos points out in her book, how do you convince someone who is sexist, that women who is sexist against women, that women deserve equal pay in the workforce?

1. How do you convince someone who thinks that Islam is the devil's religion, that Muslims are just people who believe in the same God that they do? Have you ever Muslims trying to convince Christians that we believe in the same God? We worship the same God? Ugh. Blows their mind? No, I can't believe it. I don't believe it.

I thought you all worshiped. Do you worship Muhammad or someone named Ella? And just you hang your head and Sha and shake your head with your forehead in your palm for a minute. What the fuck are you talking about? And then even though you explain it to people, they still don't get [00:50:00] it because they have for so long believed that what you are saying is not true or they've never even heard what you're saying before.

They know what they know about you, and that's it. It takes years to deprogram people. It's not gonna be done in a few minutes. It's not gonna be done in a few minutes of you throwing information at them facts at them on the internet. It's just not, I don't even try to bury people with facts.

You can't. You can be persuasive in other ways, but people are going to believe what they believe, which is really a damn shame if your beliefs are so tightly held that even with when presented with new information, you, belief doesn't change. You have a problem, you have a problem, you have a problem.

And I, I can't tell you how dangerous it is to have that particular problem, because the lies that you're believing, the lies that you're buying, the lies that you're [00:51:00] circulating and sharing. Are going to become the things that other people believe about what you're talking about. That's a very dangerous game to play.

It's very dangerous, but people often, online, they spend their times in echo chamber, so they don't have to be challenged at all. There's no one to challenge you when you're in an echo chamber. This is where people are exposed to content that aligns with their existing beliefs, but there's also a lack of critical thinking and source checking.

People don't check sources at all for nothing. There is one particular social media account on TikTok, and I've seen them on X as well, and. Whoever is in charge of this account literally makes up news stories, just makes them up and they're just the worst. But they sound, when you read the story, it's believable because things like this have [00:52:00] happened, right?

But then when you go to Google, the names of the actors in the story, the names of the victim or the perpetrator or the city that the story happened in, you can't find any information about it. That's because it never happened. That's because it's made up. But by the time you one person get around to doing this, I do it immediately.

But the story has already been spread a thousand, 2000, 10,000 times over, and people believe it. As soon as they see it, they believe it. As soon as they see it, they believe it. I don't know why, but I don't do that. I don't believe anything that I see online. If it happened right in front of my face, fine.

But if I see a news story online, I Google the fuck and I better see a reliable source. I better see it. I will look for gravestones. I will look for obituaries.

I'm an attorney. I deal in [00:53:00] facts for goodness sakes. I don't deal in lies. I deal with how to ding someone's credibility. I deal with how to expose someone as a fraud. I deal with how to make my argument stronger by using facts, using things that actually happened. I can't work with a lie. I destroy lies.

It bothers me that people are comfortable with believing and sharing lies. It bothers me because you are saying to the people that you're talking to, they're not worthy of knowing the truth, or they're too stupid to understand the truth, so you'll just tell them a lie to pacify them, or because a lie is consistent with what they've always been told, and you want them to just feel safe, so you'll tell them this lie.

Have you ever heard when people lie, they say I didn't want you. I didn't. I didn't wanna hurt you. [00:54:00] I didn't wanna hurt you, so I didn't tell you the truth, the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard. What? I didn't wanna hurt you, so I lied to you. A lie is hurtful even if the person you're telling the lie to doesn't know that they're being lied to, please.

People are dazzled by memes and catchy headlines and fabricated news stories. People are easily influenced. They're influencers everywhere. Now, damn. People even influence about their own religious practice. People wanna be content creators and influencers so badly that they lie about the lives that they're leading.

They lie about the things that they know, the things that they've done, the places they've been, but we believe it. What point of reference do we have? What choice do we have? But you have to understand that you're being lied to. Like when people promote products online, they're doing it because they've been pre paid to do a review, [00:55:00] and instead of being honest about the product that they used.

Five stars. Five outta five would recommend. I use this every day. Now. This is my go-to product now. This is bay. This is booed. I love this. I love this face cream. I love this foot cream. I love this. This cooking pot. I love this bow. I love this dress. I love these shoes. Anytime I see Amazon reviews and they're five out of five in a row within the same timeframe, I know it's bullshit.

I know it is. I know these people were paid to do this. Even if you're paid to promote a product, if the product doesn't work for you, it's okay to say that. And some products take a while to show if they're going to be effective or not. And how are you not giving it time to work to see if it'll work before you're already online going, oh my God, this is the best thing ever.

You [00:56:00] guys better run to the store and buy this out. I already bought five of them. This is amazing you guys. I smell I don't know, I smell like angels. I smell like a garden full of roses. And I've just gotten stopped on the streets so many times and people want to know what is that scent you're wearing, girl?

And I tell them, and I'm sure I'm not gonna gate keep this. I am not going to gate keep this. Now, me being who I am, a natural born skeptic,

I'm gonna Google that product and look at the reviews from other places. Most of the time the reviews align with what I'm thinking. Yeah, this person was paid to do this and maybe it doesn't work as well as they say. And it's okay to doubt what people are saying. It's okay to find out for yourself.

And hey, maybe you buy a product and you try it and it doesn't work for you. [00:57:00] That's why stores have return policies. Keep your receipt, darling. But one of the most glaring examples of misinformation disinformation, conspiracy theories, of course, is the COVID-19 pandemic. And I know I'm tired of talking about this, but this is one of the best examples.

If you are looking for an example, this is the one, so much misinformation, number one. Was spread about COVID-19, about the virus itself and about treatment for the virus. But also people were falsely claiming that 5G technology was somehow linked to the spread of the virus. 5G technology. I have a 5G phone.

What I've never had before is coronavirus, thank God.

But these, the misinformation gains traction because it's sensational. And when you're already scared and you're looking at these headlines and you just get even more scared and, oh my God, the aliens are [00:58:00] coming. But it, it aligns with fears about the unknown such as the rapid spread of a virus. New technologies.

I think by next year they'll probably have six G and six G will be what's causing people's feet to fall off into the water and they're washing up on the shores of Long Island or something. But social media plays a big role in this. Posts claiming to explain the supposed link between something like 5G and COVID-19 went viral and they reached millions of people and who's making money off of that?

Yeah. People are making money off of those clicks when you click on a link to a story, advertisers are giving money to the social media platform, number one. But also the people who write the stories, the people who promote the stories, they're making money too. And no one is making money off of whether the story is true or not.

If I see a story and somebody [00:59:00] asks me to post a story and they'll give me a hundred dollars, if it's not true, I am posting it. There are people who go, okay, I'll post it without regard for the truth, the veracity of it, but the consequences of it are very real. The story may be false, but the consequences are real.

The lies, the false claims about whatever contributed to coronavirus and the spread of it and treatment for it became how people decided to attack. Attack others, right? Like Asians, when someone gets on tv, a certain someone gets on TV and calls it the China virus. Chinese people who are not Chinese, but they are, they look Asian, they're attacked.

And then what happens? The government has to come up with legislation to protect these people, and it's an anti-Asian hate crime. Bill. It is [01:00:00] insane. It's insane. It's all because people believed that Chinese people were the source of the virus. Now, maybe China was right, but these Chinese people living over here and running their businesses and minding their business were not the source of the disease.

They were not the source of the virus. So why don't you leave them the fuck alone? But you can't because this already feeds into your prejudice about foreign people, especially Chinese people, especially Asians, but also your fear of the unknown and fear of the other. You're already believing it. So of course they made a virus that's killing everyone.

Oh, it makes sense now. Of course they did. And without bothering to stop and think maybe that doesn't make sense. Maybe they're conflating China and Chinese people, and maybe it was one particular person in a lab [01:01:00] or something that accidentally or on purpose released the virus, but we shouldn't make an entire group of people responsible for what one person did.

You don't make an entire race of people responsible for the actions of one person. You don't even know if that's how it happened anyway. You don't know. You don't know. Just like we don't blame, but people do. We don't blame all Russians for the actions of Vladimir Putin. Putin. We don't blame all Russians because some Russians interfered in a US election.

We don't start throwing like soup cans at them.

And I know you don't blame all police for the actions of one police, but you blame the ones who don't try to stop those police.

But that's a different kind of matter because that's something that you can actually change by voting. By voting at your local level and your state level. There are ways you can root out bad [01:02:00] actors in law enforcement versus just plainly, not mistrusting pol not trusting the police plainly, not dealing with the police plainly, just being like, fuck, police all of them.

Fuck 'em all. They're all terrible. I hate 'em all. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

If you have a belief, if you have a belief, I don't know, maybe try to change your environment, but sometimes you can't, right? Because what you believe is actually not true. I. What you believe is just some bullshit you were taught and you haven't bothered to investigate. You haven't bothered to find out if this is what's actually happening or if this is what actually happened in her book.

Pale Ramos talks about how misinformation has the ability to exploit our deepest cultural vulnerabilities, and it exacerbates our desire to seek messages and stories that are not accurate, but are rather, but rather [01:03:00] are familial and persuasive. Familial and persuasive. And she mentions all of the myths that are circulating about immigrants, but that are also circulating about members of the L-G-B-T-Q community that are circulating about people of different religions that are circulating about people of different ethnicities.

And because people, sometimes people come from a different country and they've not been exposed to people of different communities and cultures and ethnicities, but they've been told things about these people, right? So they're going to look for what they've been taught to confirm what they've been taught.

People aren't looking to have the myths dispelled. People aren't looking to have their prejudice dispelled. They're looking to have it confirmed. They're looking to have it confirmed, which is wild to me. [01:04:00] It's wild to me. I went into college thinking a certain way about many groups of people, and what I discovered was actually I was wrong.

And I changed my mind. I changed my mind. I was happy to be wrong. I was happy. I'm happy when someone corrects me. I'm happy when someone tells me that what I believed about something is not true. I want to be correct. I don't wanna be right, I wanna be correct, and this is something that I feel people should seek.

When you are out there in them, TikTok, Facebook and Instagram streets, you should seek to be correct, not right. People will argue all day and night because they want to be right about something instead of wanting to be correct.

But. The misinformation that's being spread because it undermines the trust in institutions such as governments. It can be difficult for the government to deal with [01:05:00] the public. We're seeing that right now and because people believe because people have a lack of trust, for instance, black people, which I understand completely the lack of trust they have in the healthcare system because of prejudice and bias, because of experiments that were conducted on blacks in the past by doctors and the government, health institutions, there's an erosion of trust of healthcare institutions.

So black people may not wanna go to the doctor. Some black people, they don't wanna go to the doctor. They don't wanna take tests. They don't wanna, they don't wanna have things injected into them. They don't wanna take vaccines. They don't wanna expose their information to a doctor. They don't wanna share their information.

They don't want their medical information out there. Out there they'll say. Even though there are privacy laws, there's still this fear surrounding these institutions because of things we've seen or things we've been told by other family members or by members of [01:06:00] our community. But that increases the spread of diseases.

It increases the lack of health in a particular community. If you're not going to see a doctor and you have a problem such as hypertension or diabetes, but you're so scared to see a doctor because you've been taught and told by your family members that we don't see no damn doctor. You heard about the Tuskegee experiment and so you're not gonna get treatment.

You're not gonna take your medication, your maintenance medication, you're probably gonna die early. It does happen just like that. It does. It absolutely does. There are people who are scared to take medication. People who can't be bothered to see doctors, even if they have health insurance, can't be bothered.

I've had my own my own issues with having to drag certain people to the doctor to receive treatment and have to basically beat it into their heads that they need to take their maintenance medication. [01:07:00] Listen, you ain't gotta tell me twice to take medicine. You ain't gotta tell me twice. I do not care.

Give me the pill, give me all the pills, the supplements, whatever. And you know why? Because I'm in charge of this body. God gave me this body and I want it to be healthy. I wanna take care of it, and I know how I'm feeling isn't right. And I know that if I've researched this and my doctor told me this and I got a second opinion that they've said that this is the best treatment option, then that's what I'm gonna do.

There are people who know more than me about this. Guess what? I'm not always right, but I wanna be correct. So I listen to experts. I listen to people who have knowledge. I listen to people who know. I don't replace my thinking and my knowledge and what I believe with what they believe or what is the truth.

But we know that misinformation and disinformation can lead to polarization and [01:08:00] divisions such as social fragmentation, political instability as we're seeing right now in the United States of America, the political insta instability, some of it caused by misinformation. That's fueling political division that's contributing to unrest.

That has affected elections, and I won't even get into, I've discussed this so many times about how the media is used to manipulate voters and how people enjoy believing lies about political candidates because it confirms what they've always known about a particular group of people or a particular race of people like Democrats or whites or women.

But a misleading or false information about a political candidate, party, or voting system can influence people's perceptions and behavior, sometimes even leading to violence or protests, but also misinformation can damage reputations, and it can have an economic impact on [01:09:00] the stock market.

Misinformation can lead to wasted resources, whether it's money spent on ineffective treatments or time spent on debunking false claims. It can also lead to lawsuits and penalties. In some cases mis misinformation. Spreading it, like I said before, can lead to defamation lawsuits. In extreme cases, it can lead to criminal charges because somebody killed somebody based on a lie, based on a rumor.

But the impact on education and knowledge is perhaps the most heavy, because misinformation, the spread of it, misinformation complicates critical thinking and critical thinking is what we need to analyze information. Misinformation makes it harder for people to develop strong, critical thinking skills as people will trust unreliable sources or become less discerning [01:10:00] about the information they consume.

Even when you encourage someone, you tell someone to read beyond the headlines. If you follow me on social media and you see me commenting on news stories, I will often go, for the love of God people please read the entire article. And people will comment the little laugh emoji because people don't read the entire article attached to a headline for.

And let me tell you something, those news sites. Even your local news sites, they are posting inflammatory headlines just to get the engagement, just to get the engagement, and you're giving it to them. You're commenting on the story because of the headline you read. I read a headline, I go right to the story.

I don't comment shit until I've read the story. I don't comment anything until I've read the story. They purposely leave out important details [01:11:00] because they know if they put those details in, you are not going to comment on the story. You're just going to read their little caption and keep it moving.

They want you to comment, they want you to click on links, clicking on links it, it doesn't do anything for me. It doesn't matter to me because I get to read the information that they're putting out. And when I read the information that's actually in the story, and then I read the caption or the headline, I'm like, wait a minute, y'all lied.

Oftentimes you will find the lie. They lie. Yes, they do. They lie. WKYC, channel three 19 Action News. When they post on Facebook a caption or a headline, sometimes they lie and they do it just to get you worked up to talk about what you saw, just to comment, to get the traffic to their page. And it is a shameful behavior.

It is shameful that news organizations do that, but that's, [01:12:00] you're not, if you're not verifying it, if you're not holding them to account for it, hey, they're just gonna keep doing it. And now they's no fact checkers on these social media sites anymore, so they can keep getting away with it. It doesn't matter how many times you report a story is false.

If there's no one there to care that it is false, then it won't be stopped. That leaves it up to you. That leaves it up to you to actually check the date of something. Check the people, the names mentioned. Check check local. When you see something from a national news agency, check the local news to see if this is what happened, to see if how they're reporting on it.

Do reverse image searches. You see a picture online of somebody you know of a couple or a person, and they look sickly. Or somebody just had a baby or somebody got married, or you see a picture of somebody and they're saying they're accusing this person of a [01:13:00] crime. Do a reverse image search on Google to check if an image has been used somewhere else or it's been altered.

If you see a picture of tornado damage or hurricane damage, sometimes that shit is not true. Sometimes that picture has been altered to make it look like there was a hurricane or a to tornado, or to make it look like it's worse or to make somebody look like they were doing something heroic During this event, people will take those images and they will use ai.

I saw this once. They had Trump in a big body of water after a hurricane and he was carrying alligators or puppies or some shit, and it was like, there, that never happened. It never happened. He don't touch water. No, I'm kidding. I kid. I kid. But if something makes you feel outraged, afraid, or extremely proud, then you need to pause.

Because [01:14:00] disinformation, remember, is often crafted to exploit emotions and bypass logic. So if you read something and you're really like, worked up about it, consider that the story was put out to make you, to get that reaction from you. The story was formulated to get that reaction from you. It's called rage baiting.

Yeah. They have a phrase for it. Rage baiting. Rage baiting is very popular when it comes to video posts, especially on TikTok. Oh, you see something really? Oh, something really racist or sexist. So it is, it happened exactly the way the video says it happened, and sometimes it's piece, the video's pieced together and sometimes people have left out important details.

But it's easy to believe something racist and sexist and misogynistic because you live in a country where racism and sexism and misogyny are systemic problems. They're systemic problems, [01:15:00] but yeah, maybe you do need to check and double check and recheck and do the reverse image search and use a trusted fact checking site, but also, check the writing style.

Sometimes these things will give themselves away in the writing the language used if there's spelling errors, if there's glitches in the video, there are those red flags in writings. Sometimes you think that real journalists won't lie to you, and most of the time they don't. But sometimes they do try to lie and manipulate.

They do.

But you also have to look for expert consensus on a particular topic or a story or historical happening is a claim backed by multiple experts or scientific bodies. If only one person is saying something shocking with no peer support, like scientific studies that people believe about let's say vaccines causing [01:16:00] autism.

If only one person is saying something shocking with no peer support, it's likely suspicious and probably false and probably created to enrage people to get people worked up. Don't allow politics and other stories, political things that you see and talk about and discuss. Don't allow these things to make you crash out.

Without verifying what's happening, what you're seeing, what you're hearing, what you're reading. Don't crash out over this shit until you know if it's true or not. And then even then, approach things calmly and rationally so you can think through a solution, think through to a solution for the problem.

You can't do that if your head is on fire. You can't. But you always have to consider when you read something or you see something. If someone is trying to manipulate your opinion, push an agenda or sell something. [01:17:00] Remember, disinformation often serves a purpose that is political, financial, or ide ideological and misinformation also serves a purpose, and that is also to manipulate. It's sometimes deliberately spread by bad actors, including extremists. Foreign governments, groups used to destabilize societies to manipulate a situation. They're both tools of manipulation, but one of them is purposeful. One of them is purposeful. It's purposely set out to enrage you, to manipulate you, whereas another can be inadvertent mistaken.

But because people are lazy about checking sources, because people are lazy about verifying information, misinformation can still do as much damage as [01:18:00] disinformation. So you have to be careful out there in them streets.

You gotta be careful.

You have to be careful because bad actors have leveraged this new information ecosystem by deliberately spreading disinformation and misinformation to influence public opinion regarding many topics, including vaccines, international affairs, political candidates, US government, and other critical topics.

Some have the intention of sowing distrust between people,

but sometimes these things lead to a rise in hate speech, hate crimes, political violence, intimidation. They present a challenge to those who are trying to affect change because you can't affect change when the people are against you because they have these long held [01:19:00] beliefs and while you've tried to get them on the side of facts and believing the truth, they simply will not budge.

So remember, be careful out there in them streets and verify, verify, verify. This has been Ayana. Explains it all. Brought to you by facts, figures, and enlightenment. Take care. [01:20:00]