Category: Digital Literacy

Did you know that once upon a time, “fake news” was seen as a good thing?

Before 2016, the concept of “fake news” was associated with comedians like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and John Oliver under the auspices of satire.

According to Lynn Schofield Clark and Jill Dierberg (resource available only to UVic affiliates), scholars at the University of Denver, not only was satirical fake news seen as a net good to society for the way that it would captivate an audience that would not have otherwise engaged with topics such as religion (in the case of Clark & Dierberg), but the balance between information and outrageous representation was so masterful and successful that it is considered an art form in and of itself.

Of course, these days, “fake news” is associated with a particular U.S. president that has its roots in Christian fundamentalism and distorts what people accept as truth so much that it can be difficult for people to figure out what is a true fact versus what is an alternative fact, according to UVic English professor Christopher Douglas.

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One model that can help us figure out how to filter what is objective and alternate truth is the SIFT model. Let’s do it together using an article I found online:

I found an article that appears to claim that UVic and UBC are exclusively hiring black instructors. Using the SIFT method, we can figure out if this is true or not.

S: Stop 🛑

Take a moment to reflect on how you’re feeling while reading this article. Usually, you solidify formulate an opinion on an article by the end of it, after understanding the entire context of it. If you’re immediately feeling strongly about an article’s content within the first few lines, that could be a red flag.

Some example of this in the article is the emotionally charged and exclusionary language:

• “hiring professors based on race”
• “take part in race-based hiring”
• “mandating that new professor hires be black“

I: Investigate 🔎

Time to bring out that FBI cyberstalker in you: if you feel as if something is “off” or if you’re reading from a source you don’t normally hear about, try poking around the website or Google the source to see what types of coverage they offer.

In my quick research, here’s what I found about the article’s authors and source:

• Google describes the article’s site as “delivering conservative perspectives and criticizing the Liberal government’s policies under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau”
• One of the two authors of this article is an undergraduate student that doesn’t have any other work or educational experience related to journalism on their LinkedIn profile other than this site
• The other contributors on this site include:
  • A campaign communicator for the Conservative Party of Canada and the former Wildrose Party in Alberta (which later became the United Conservative Party)
  • A former writer for a right-wing news source
  • A writer that is described as Muslim, but called for the government to ban the hijab and to close all mosques after a Jihadist attack in Quebec
• This site is not a member of organizations like the Canadian Association of Broadcasters or a registered journalism organization according to the Canada Revenue Agency
• There is no other mention of them online by other organizations. The only references to it online are from themselves.

(Note: just because this site has a large amount of self-described conservatives does not mean they are untruthful; the problem begins when their political opinions seep into their seemingly “professional” news coverage, which can be seen in this article.)

F: Find better coverage 🗞️

It never hurts to find evidence of what you find online. Either what you believe will be confirmed, or you’ll be corrected in what you initially thought before.

Find coverage for the same story in other outlets of the “mainstream media”: the reason why they’re mainstream is because of their reputations and usually because of their accountability structures. Cross-reference them from the article you originally found.

I found two articles (only two!) on other sites from around the same time that this article was published that talked about either the same or similar topic:

1. “UVic job posting for Black candidates only draws backlash” by Roxanne Egan-Elliott of the Times Colonist
2. “Black Faculty Cohort Hiring Initiative to recruit more Black scholars to UBC” by Julian Forst of the Ubyssey

Based on the two articles, there are some semantic differences between them:

• The original article says that “some may find the practice [of equity-based hiring] racist and discriminatory”.
  • The Times Colonist article notes that much of the backlash on the social media site formerly known as Twitter are from users in the United States.
• The original article states that the equity-based hiring practices are an “agenda”, which can potentially suggest that these practices are either politically charged or are arbitrary.
  • The Times Colonist article states that UVic’s practices come from the university’s equity action plan.
  • The Ubyssey article notes that equity-based hiring practices for black individuals are based on UBC’s commitment to the Scarborough Charter.
• The original article declared UBC’s belief that “ecology is racist”.
  • The Ubyssey article includes the following quote: “The more we diversify our professoriate, the more we broaden and deepen the impact of the knowledges we create and disseminate through research [and the] curriculum.”

T: Trace it back 🗺️

Put those first-year academic research skills to work by finding primary sources. In the case of this article, what do UVic and UBC say about their equity-based hiring practices? What is their intention, and is it working?

UVic

According to UVic’s data, there is a 6% gap between the proportion of visible minorities with professional backgrounds in Victoria and the amount of faculty and librarians of visible minorities at UVic.

The Equity Action Plan, which includes targeting specific under-represented demographics was constructed under the framework set by the BC Office of the Human Rights Commissioner, which is accountable to the Human Rights Code of British Columbia.

Demographic targeting was not only justified by the data and the law, but also anecdotally by UVic staff members, who desired increased diversity in staffing levels at UVic.

UBC

UBC’s data shows a 6.3% gap between the same proportions in Greater Vancouver.

Their Employment Equity Plan is part of a greater Strategic Equity and Anti-Racism Framework. Just like UVic, UBC’s Employment Equity plan is framed by the standards of the Human Rights Tribunal. Their employment equity actions are also created upon the basis of the Scarborough Charter, an anti-black racism framework for Canadian universities, of which both UVic and UBC are signatories.

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Well, what now?

Based on the research we’ve done, what can we conclude about this article? We know that it’s full of emotionally charged language designed to get a reaction out of us, that the writers have direct ties with exclusively one side of the political spectrum, that other mainstream news sites with publicly available accountability structures either aren’t reporting on this or contradict the original article’s claims, and that the primary sources state that the actions taken are justified by the books, by the numbers, and by the people.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that the original article is mostly a shock piece or otherwise non-newsworthy article.

Yet the formatting of this site and the article are both very believable, which is all the more reason why media literacy and communications are such important skills to have in the 21st century.

You can learn about the SIFT method and other methods to investigate potential misinformation from this site at the University of Chicago.

Jaywalking, littering, the “California Stop“… if I had to guess, I’d say that you’ve probably broken at least one of these laws this year already!

For those who are curious: jaywalking is illegal in BC under the Motor Vehicle Act, sec. 179(2); littering is illegal in BC under the Litter Act, sec. 3; and the rolling stop is illegal in BC under the Motor Vehicle Act, sec. 186.

But I think that one of the most easily broken laws has everything to do with copyright. In the days before Netflix and YouTube and GenAI, breaking copyright looked something like bootleg copies of movies, which usually came with an FBI pre-roll ad that looked something like this:

I cited the sections in which those other “pesky” laws are illegal in BC. Copyright law, however, isn’t as straightforward as “don’t do this” or “don’t do that”. If it was, then UVic wouldn’t need its own Copyright Office!

In my personal experience, copyright law seems to find the most tension when it comes to university textbooks and literature. As a French major, it was difficult at times for the bookstore to secure copies of required texts in French, even recently published Canadian works!

Out of necessity, we were able to secure one copy of the book and then created multiple photocopies of the entire book at Zap (while no one who worked there was looking); but according to both UVic policy and copyright law, we would have exceeded our copyright restrictions by 90%.

But if the laws are so stringent that notices like these are on our photocopiers around campus, yet methods like photocopying whole books and accessing textbooks off of “those sites” (if you know, you know) are so widespread, why hasn’t this been a larger conversation?

Of course, this hasn’t been without its attempts: from constantly pumping out newer editions of the same textbook which limits second-hand purchasing to creating digital-only modules under the guise of “innovation” in the textbook industry, it seems like companies are trying their hardest to monopolize the system.

Perhaps that’s the problem. Maybe it’s an open secret that students and instructors alike are skirting these laws both in the interest of survival and to send a message to the publishers that they’re able to read between the lines: that the “innovation” is actually greed.

At the end of the day, copyright is important for independent artists and creators to ensure that their hard work isn’t stolen by those who have nothing to lose, yet the system has time and time again favoured those who had nothing to lose in the first place.