Chinese Whispers and Fake News

I'm beginning to truly realise how incredibly difficult it is to navigate your way through the minefield of modern media and the Internet. It's rapidly becoming very problematic as new techniques for deliberate media manipulation  i.e via fake news are developing  at an increasing rate but also the more random effect of the rapid cascading of social media articles generated via Twitter and Facebook on a huge range of issues which are in many cases completely baseless.  Some are started by simple misunderstandings and spread by ignorance, but some are due to coordinated malice. The consequences are not only confusion and misunderstandings about politics, economics, science current affairs and of course climate change but incitement to racial hatred and mob "justice" and the  lynching of totally innocent people.

The problem is compounded by the apparently increasing lack of rigour being applied not only by main media outlets such as the BBS but also a range of  public institutions and even governments themselves in the assessment of the likely credibility and expertise of the source.

Example 1 :  Science/Health  - "Twenty Three times more toxic"

The paper below analyses in some detail how a completely baseless claim about passive smoking being "23 times more toxic in cars" came to find it's way into mainstream media such as The Times/ /being referenced in scientific papers i.e peer reviewed papers  that underpin the scientific establishment / various medical journals and used to support specific public health policies.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2871202/

Example 2  :Foreign Policy - UK invasion of Iran & the Dodgy Dossier 

The claim the Saddam Hussein had WMD in sufficient quantities and with the ability to use them in very short timescales was it appears partly based on work by a graduate student Mr Ibrahim al-Marashi for his thesis, " Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation". We all now know the WMDs claims were false but how on earth was the work of a graduate student and an openly Anti Saddam Hussein opposition supporter and therefore certain to be biased  - seen as an acceptable source for a foreign policy resulting in a war that destroyed hundreds of thousands of peoples lives and cost billions of pounds. His article was originally written for the Middle East review of International Affairs (MERIA) edited by Barry Rubin (now deceased), an American born Israeli and again highly unlikely to provide a fair and balanced view point on anything to do with Iraq as evidenced below

https://web.archive.org/web/20051023050337/http://meria.idc.ac.il/british-govt-plagiarizes-meria.html

http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/analysis/rubin-reports/why-the-mass-media-cant-report-honestly-on-israel/2013/11/05/

1. Never simply assume that because it's presented by the mainstream media e.g TV that its factually based, true or objective . 
2. Be sceptical, about what you read from pretty much anywhere 
3. Try and identify the likely vested interests behind any article whether it be e.g anti-alcohol campaigners, environmental activists, large companies ,  
4. Think Where's the Money? - The "root of all evil " is probably the 1st thing to think aboout i.e "How is what I'm reading being funded and by who and why. It's seems to me to be increasingly rare for articles to be published purely to be informative and its a tragedy that the taxpayer funded BBC, supposedly, free from such biases has become primarily a vehicle for promoting the "de-facto" UK establishment consensus whether it be about health politics climate change or anything else.

This uncontrolled and rapid dissemination of unverified information funding it's way into the scientific literature combined with as in AGW Groupthink and the end justifies the means zealotry if e.g  the AGW lobby and their increasingly strenuous attempts to suppress any debate or opposing views  constitutes an existential threat  to  the scientific process as a whole.