by: Donald H. Marks, physician-scientist

Reason, ethics, health justice, 3rd generation Veteran

Following is my personal and ever-updating list of Red Flags🚩, Dog Whistles🛷, Buzzwords, Hot Button⏺️ words and meaningless caricatures that will drive toxic algorithms to heat and twist 2022 2024 elections 🗳☑ and trigger hatred😡 on social media. Don't let lies manipulate your reasoned judgment.

The list of hateful buzzwords and dog-whistles. 

• Great Replacement theory - GRT : die juden werden uns nicht ersetzen

• The Antisemitic Left, the Squad: Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna Pressley.

• BLM, CRT, Reparations

• Open-border policy, Immigration reform, Title 42, http://bit.ly/3D4ovTj ,

• Gun Control,  2A, Urban gun violence, Universal background checks, Constitutional carry 

• Vaccine passports

• Right to choose, Pro Life, abortion, bounty, killing unborn babies.

• The Woke, cancel culture

• George Soros - the "ultimate dog whistle"

• The Groomers, unspecified and by implication only. 

• Election fraud, stolen election.

Your suggestions to add to my list are welcome.

General discussion on dog whistles, hot button terms.

A logical fallacy, as listed in the following illustration, is an error in reasoning that renders an argument invalid. The above (incomplete) list of Red Flags, Dog Whistles, Buzzwords, Hot Button words will be used by toxic algorithms to heat and twist 2022 midterm & 2024 presidential elections🗳☑ and trigger hatred on social media.

Take Action

If you encounter hate speech or completely false information on social media, you Can and Should report. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and others provide easy click options to report and remove false and hateful posts. 

Background readings 

Logical fallacies https://1drv.ms/u/s!AkCvKP13dHomjexOSgmzcREkKeAcyQ?e=YRfkO1

Power Of Words - How Words Affect Our Lives & Behavior | Goop

How Facebook’s algorithms promote hate and drive toxic content - Alternet.org

"Jews will not replace us!": Antisemitism, Interbreeding and Immigration in Historical Context, by Andrew S. Winston, 2021. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/804146/pdf

The immigration debate, explained in 14 buzzwords http://bit.ly/3D4ovTj

                                                                                                        The turmoil that swirls beneath

Fact-checking☑️ tools help  to verify information. Luckily, there are a lot of free fact-checking tools that you can use easily. Besides, there are dedicated fact-checking organizations and sites to detect fake🤥 news and verify important  information.

personal blog https://bit.ly/3LEgTv5

(Google docs https://bit.ly/3N7Rivt)

There are some useful online fact-checking tools out there that you can use for free. In this post, we will take you through the process step by step. It will be better if you check out those tools while reading the post simultaneously. This way you will learn much faster.

Crosscheck everything

This is not exactly a tool, but, this is the first rule of fact-checking. Crosschecking means verifying information by using different methods or sources. Double check everything. You may even consider checking your information triple or quadruple times, because that’s pretty much a standard procedure for fact-checking nowadays.

And, how to do that? Well, get to the original source. Say, a screenshot of a tweet you may find suspicious. To ease the situation, you can directly go to the Twitter handle to see if that tweet actually exists. There are options in Twitter search system, to look for older stuff. We will get to it in the later part of the article.

You can always crosscheck almost everything with the help of the search engines. We will focus on Google as a search engine in our article. Few days back, AFP Fact Check uploaded a series of tutorial videos on how to do individual fact-checking. We will cite those videos a lot, but, there will be more to that for you.

Google search

Speaking of Google, it can be a great fact-checking tool itself, if you know how to use it, utilize its features perfectly. Anyone with a good editing skill can alter a photo in such a manner that it can quite be impossible to realize that the photo is photoshopped. To verify the content of an image, you can take help from Google.

If it’s about a location, like if you want to find out the location associated with the image in question is true, you can search the location on google. This will give you an idea, although it can be obscure. For example, a photo claims to be taken in Kabul, Afghanistan; you can google for the place to see how Kabul looks like. To be more specific, if the photo is taken in a rural area, you can search for “rural kabul” and have an idea how the rural Kabul looks like.

Another excellent source for authenticating an image is flags. Photos with flags are easier to work with, you will have to write down the flag description and color in Google. The results will meet your satisfaction. Or, if not, you can directly search for the flags of all countries. It’s no big deal, because the number of countries around the world is quite countable, isn’t it?

Google Maps, Google Street View

Location in a photo can be examined with the help of Google Maps, if the image contains, say, a shop sign, street sign etc. Zoom in to read the signs, and then search the texts on Google. Google will bring results with the location of that shop or street. Then, search for the location on Google Map. Your next step is to use the Google Street View option. Google takes photos of cities, towns, places, streets for its Maps, and the photos are regularly updated. With the exact location, you will see photos of those signs, or shops.

Google Translator

A photo can have foreign languages in it. If the writings are written in English alphabets, Google Translator can easily translate them. This greatly works for street signs, placards, shop names.

If the writing on the photo is in foreign alphabets, Google Translator still can help. There is a camera function in Translator. If you focus the camera on the text, translators will translate it in English.

Google Reverse Image Search

Fake images can be debunked with the help of google reverse image searching. We discussed the process in one of our early posts, but will wrap it up here once again.

In your desktop browser, you will find an “image” icon on the upper right corner. Clicking on it will take you to a new search page that is dedicated to image-searching. Or you can directly go to https://images.google.com/ to access the page. There, in the search box, you can upload your image that you want to look for, and the results will show you the same images consisting of different pages.

Going through the results holding the similar image, you will see if the image is old, being misrepresented, fictitious, or edited etc. Note that you can use this feature in any of the other browsers. As search results may vary from one search engine to another, you can always go for several options if one does not provide results to your satisfaction,

TinEye

You don’t really have to entirely rely on Google for reverse image searching. TinEye is another useful and easy-to-use reverse image search tool. This free tool also recognizes if a photo is altered and has expertise in computer vision, pattern recognition, neural networks, and machine learning.

InVID-WeVerify

Verifying videos may sound difficult first, but, with the right tool, you can do that too. InVid-WeVerify is a browser extension, with a low size of only 4 megabyte, which you need to plug inton in your browser.

After installing as an extension in your browser, open it. The homepage will show multiple options including Keyframes. Click on Keyframes tool, the next page will have a box where you have to paste the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of the video you are trying to verify. Press enter and it may take some time to process the video, depends on your internet speed, video quality, or length etc. When done, the page will show you all the important frames from the video and then you can do reverse search on Google with those still photos.

InVid-WeVerify offers some other tools like Magnifier, Twitter Search, Metadata extraction etc. Magnifier helps you to look closely on an image. Twitter advanced search will provide detailed results based on tweets. Metadata extraction is another interesting fact-checking tool.

Metadata Extraction Tools

Metadata provides information about other data. The metadata extraction we are going to discuss here is image metadata. If we take a photo with our phone, some other data will be encoded in that photo without our knowledge. These data include device model; camera features like aspect ratio, shutter speed etc; date and time of the photo taken; GPS coordinates etc.

Metadata extractor tools like InVid-WeVerify, Metapicz or Jeffrey's Image Metadata Viewer will render you these data. And, how to use them? With the GPS coordinates, you can find the exact location of the photo taken. And, the date and time will make sure if the photo is old or not. Device models can also be useful, like if a photo of destroyed plane debris says it’s about Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 but, metadata extraction result lebels the device as iPhone 12 Pro, then you are pretty sure the photo caption is lying.

The drawbacks of metadata extraction is you need the original file. Photos from social-media won’t do any good because the metadata is manipulated then. And, if the device’s location system is turned off, the result won’t show GPS coordinates.

Youtube DataViewer

This tool is developed by Amnesty International. After posting the YouTube video link on the search box of Youtube DataViewer, the results will be containing the video id, upload date and time and thumbnails from the video. You can reverse search each of the thumbnails by clicking on them. This tool is easy to use with a simple user interface.

Advanced search on Facebook, Twitter

Searching things on social media has its own dilemma. Most of the time you will find out what you are looking for but you have to go through a gigantic amount of information. Facebook’s search system has been improved by time though. You can filter out your search results from different categories like posts, videos, photos, profiles time, posts you’ve seen or not etc.

Same goes for Twitter. But, Twitter has a better platform for this. TweetDeck is a search tool of Twitter which allows users to create various columns based on different criterias at a time. If you search for the Olympics, it will create a whole new column just to show the tweets talking about the Olympics. And, you can ask for more search query in different columns in a row.

Weather Underground

Weather Underground website will provide the weather of any place in the past. There are two boxes to fill up; one for the desired location and the other will take the date entry. Now, if you have the rough idea of the location and date of an image, you can search for the weather at that time of the place. Then see if the search result makes sense with the weather condition shown in the photo.

Wayback Machine

If you are looking for an older version of a webpage, you can use Wayback Machine. This tool keeps all of the old versions of a website or a page. Pages that might have possibilities to be taken down later on for authenticity issues, can be archived on this site for later use. Another handy tool for this operation is http://archive.is/.

Specialized websites

Specialized websites are the kind of websites that focus on only one specific item. It can be anything, from firearms to toys.  For example, http://www.worldlicenseplates.com/ is a website that has photos of vehicle license-plates from every country of the world. Internet Movie Firearms Database is all about weapons and firearms used in films. There are similar specialized websites on military uniforms, road signs, even manhole covers!

Google Fact Check Tools

Google Fact Check Tools aim to facilitate the work of fact-checking. Consisting of two tools, Fact Check Explorer and Fact Check Markup Tool, the tools bring results of fake news and fact-checks on searched-topics.

Best fact-checking tools for journalists

Journalists are the frontline fighters against fake news. Their consistent hard work is bringing the truth to us. They have to do fact-checking for their own news story. There are several fact-checking organizations, fact-checking sites created by journalists and the media outlets. Here is a short description of these tools and sites. Anybody can use these resources for verifying information.

FactCheck.org

A nonprofit organization, FactCheck.org was created in 2004 with a team of professional journalists. It’s a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania. The mission of this organization is to monitor the factual accuracy of the comments by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases.

Fact Checker

The Washington Post has a remarkable history of investigative journalism. Those glorious days of Pentagon Papers, and Watergate investigation will always be remembered vividly in the arena of journalism. The Post’s got its own fact-checking site, Fact Checker. Award-winning journalist Glenn Kessler has been the editor and chief writer of The Fact Checker since 2011.

PolitiFact

PolitiFact is a project by The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, created in 2007. It has a unique system to rate the accuracy of information. The Truth-O-Meter has six ratings. They are True, Mostly True, Half True, Mostly False, False, and Pants On Fire. While False means the statement is inaccurate, the Pants On Fire rating means the statement is not only inaccurate, but also makes a ridiculous claim. The Poynter Institute, a nonprofit school for journalists acquired PolitiFact in 2018.

Snopes

Snopes is another popular fact-checking website. Relatively old, Snopes was launched in 18994. And it started with debunking urban legends, hoaxes, and folklore. Owned by Snopes Media Group, Snopes is not only the oldest but also the largest fact-checking site on the Internet.

Reuters Fact Check

Reuters is One of the prominent news agencies of our time. Reuters Fact Check unit is under the supervision of the agency’s editorial department.

Additional information 

Reliable news sources used by Donald Harvey Marks   http://bit.ly/3kECPvr    

Fake News: Everything You Need to Know, by Donald Harvey Marks

http://bit.ly/345cj95

Best Online Free Fact-Checking Tools (this article), by Donald Harvey Marks

http://bit.ly/3H97I44

Fact-Checking: The Ways We Can Fight Fake News,  by Donald Harvey Marks

http://bit.ly/3qudEyX

Infodemic: the epidemic of information, by Donald Harvey Marks

http://bit.ly/3fV7BgN

The Curious Case of Deepfakes, by Donald Harvey Marks

http://bit.ly/3GZJdXh

Fake News:

Everything You Need to Know 

by Donald H. Marks, physician scientist

Reason, ethics, health justice, 3rd generation Veteran

Before we dive into my thoughts on dissecting fake news, let’s first talk about what exactly we mean by fake news. The idea of news varies from person to person, because what you consider as news might not have any news value to others. But, for the sake of our discussion, we can say that news is information about events you look at everyday in media sources, the newspapers or televisions, that happen near you, or around the world. Even recognizing a solid, truthful source of news can be difficult. People often reach for the MSM of their country - in the USA, that might be Fox news or CNN, in England it might be BBC. To be helpful, but without introducing bias, I offer my own discussion of trusted news and info sources : http://bit.ly/3G8rCMW

Just like everything else, news contains its own evil seeds; the kind of news that gives the appearance of useful information but really only serves a different purpose. When news is not real, is  distorted, doctored in a way that misleads people, creating confusion, it is called fake news.

What is fake news?

In a general sense, fake news is false news. The news stories that are fabricated, have no authentic or reliable sources, with an intention to deceive people to take advantage of something, while manipulating the mass opinion are known as fake news. For background purposes, I list my own trusted news sources http://bit.ly/3kECPvr 

It can be hard to find out the origin of  fake news. But, it does not take much time for false fake inaccurate misleading news to spread out everywhere, thanks to social media. Many times,  fake news is created intentionally, mostly to gain interest in political, economical concerns, or to raise the heat for certain issues.

Types of fake news

Fake news can be divided into several types, based on its traits. Fake news is another burning question in the era of infodemics, when information is so dangerous that it can even cost lives. Following are my thoughts on the new concept of Infodemic: the epidemic of information. 

http://bit.ly/3fV7BgN

The problem of misinformation and disinformation is also associated with fake news. Misinformation is when the mistake is not intentional, when information is false due to technical error, or a lack of adequate background research or fact checking. But disinformation comes with harmful intentions, and it is one of the key ingredients of fake news. To be helpful, without introducing bias, I offer a short discussion of fact checking http://bit.ly/3qudEyX

Some types of fake news in addition to on MSM, facebook or Twitter, are given below.

• Clickbait: Internet based contents that are created in a way to attract audiences and make them click on it. Sensational headlines, images are used in clickbait contents.

• Propaganda:  Biassed, false, misleading information that is spread intentionally to support specific ideology.

• Satire/Parody: These sorts of contents are not originally considered as fake news because they are created for entertainment purposes, but, sometimes these might work as fake news; like if somebody happens to believe  a satire for real, that satire then functions as fake news. Take for example article on The Onion website.

• Sloppy journalism: This is basically bad journalism. When a reporter fails to take care of important characteristics of news, including the editor insisting on checking background facts and accuracy, the reader / news consumer / you will be fed with false information.

• Misleading headlines: The news may turn out to be alright, but, sometimes the headline does the damage.

• Biased/Slanted news: People usually love to watch or hear what they want to. So, when somebody sees something that totally agrees with their belief, they might even not want to think about its authenticity. Thus, fake news can easily take over them.

• Advertorial: An advertorial is an advertising that is published in the structure of a news. Hence, it can often be misunderstood as news, while the main purpose of such contents is to let the consumers know about the products.

The origin

The term 'fake news' first got people’s attention during the 2016 US election cycle. Some of us possibly got acquainted with the phrase at that time but the history of fake news goes far far behind.

Fake news can be traced back to the early 15th century. In 1440, German printer Johannes Gutenberg invented his printing press that helped flourish the newspaper business at a mass scale. With news, fake news was also inevitable.

At that time, journalism was apparently a new concept, and there were no standard ethics of how to collect news. It was only in the 17th century, when people started caring about fact-checking.

Donald Trump was not the first (former) American president to have a problem with fake news. The second president of the United States, John Adams once wrote that the press had propagated more new error than ever before.

There have been war propagandas in the history of every war. Even during the American Revolutionary War, leaders like Benjamin Franklin promoted propaganda for their political cause. Hitler’s regime had its own propaganda ministry to enforce Nazi ideology during the second world war. 

Not to forget that, the allied powers also used similar methods in their favor.

Trump, US election, and fake news

It was Hillary Clinton, who first mentioned the phrase 'fake news' in 2016, according to BBC. Later on, in January 2017, Donald Trump said ‘you’re fake news’ to a CNN reporter while meeting the press. He then constantly brought up those words on Twitter.

The term FakeNews became a mainstream buzzword during the US election 2016. It devoured the social media, mostly because it earned people a huge sum of money by advertising revenue. Here is my list of Red Flags, Dog whistles, Buzzwords, Hot button words that IMO will be used to effect the 2022 midterm and 2024 presidential elections and trigger hatred on social media. https://bit.ly/3CojW5J

In mid-2016, some teenagers from a Macedonian town started sharing fake news about Donald Trump and the US election on social media. They had fake news websites dedicated to this. The only reason they did such a malicious job was money. They were getting a lot of cash from social media advertising systems, and since sensational news gets much attention and eventually cash, they could not resist doing this.

People saw the power of fake news that election year. Some researches even claimed that it was fake news that helped Trump win the election. Although, it is debatable, but fake news sure had a considerable effect on that election.

Covid-19 fake news surge

Since the day Covid-19 has been deemed to be a human crisis, fake news also has been a part of it. We have seen a bunch of rumours about the pandemic, and as time flew by, the style of the rumours has changed too.

At first, it was about how normal the disease was. Then, when everybody realized that Covid-19 is not going anywhere anytime soon, the second phase of fake news started flowing. This time about the cure of coronavirus, specially home-made cures, or witchcraft, etc. Finally, now we are going through the phase of disinformation regarding the vaccination programs.

Now that it’s about life and death, one must try their best not to fall prey to fake news. It’s a shame that we have so much information now, nonetheless that’s what makes us vulnerable. 

Contribution of social media

Confirmation bias is one kind of cognitive bias that is related to people’s belief; how they don’t want to contradict with their existing ideologies. In case of information, the confirmation bias provokes people to look for, gather, process information that agrees with their prior belief, norms, ideas.

This is a reason why people don’t want to question about the information  acquire on social media. And this has something to do with social media algorithms. These algorithms collect user data, analyse them, and then show relatable contents to the users. So, users only see what they like to see, thanks to those algorithms, thus, they don’t bother inquiring about the authenticity of the news they read, and keep living in a bubble.

This is just one way how social media helps surviving fake news. These platforms are so vast that it is almost impossible to control the spreading of fake news. Big conglomerates like Facebook, and Twitter are already trying to censor fake news from their platforms, but it's devouring the Internet like wildfire. For these reasons, I personally advocate for repeal of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230(c)(1), to hold social media responsible for malicious, harmful and false posts. In one one of my related articles, listed below, I provide techniques to fight fake news, including fact-checking, black chain, and how to overcome the onset of information overload, AKA #infodemics.

I (DHM) personally advocate for 

• Repeal of the #CitizensUnited ruling by The Supremes, because businesses are not people and endless amounts of #darkmoney are harmful to democracy,

• Return of #FairnessDoctrine to all media, public and private, to enable fair and balanced reporting and opinion,

• Medicare55, expand Medicaid and negotiate all drug prices

• repeal of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Section 230(c)(1), to hold  social media responsible for malicious, harmful and false posts.

Additional information 

Reliable news sources used by Donald Harvey Marks, physician⚕ and scientist🥼            http://bit.ly/3kECPvr    

Fake News: Everything You Need to Know (this article), by Donald Harvey Marks, physician⚕ and scientist🥼 http://bit.ly/345cj95

Best Online Free Fact-Checking Tools, by Donald Harvey Marks, physician⚕ and scientist🥼

http://bit.ly/3H97I44

Red Flags, Dog whistles, Buzzwords, Hot button words that IMO will be used to effect elections and trigger hatred on social media. https://bit.ly/3CojW5J

Fact-Checking: The Ways We Can Fight Fake News, by Donald Harvey Marks, physician⚕ and scientist🥼http://bit.ly/3qudEyX

Infodemic: the epidemic of information, by Donald Harvey Marks, physician⚕ and scientist🥼

http://bit.ly/3fV7BgN

The Curious Case of Deepfakes, by Donald Harvey Marks, physician⚕ and scientist🥼

http://bit.ly/3GZJdXh

Here Are The Real Fake News Sites (forbes.com)

My Favorite and Recently read books📚, by Donald Harvey Marks, physician⚕ and scientist🥼

https://bit.ly/3ok9UxI   Also on @Goodreads

Einstein, Relativity and Relative Ethics. Does God play dice with the universe? http://bit.ly/2HC5YEN

Jonas Salk, Polio Vaccine and Vaccinating Against Hate. Remembrance of my afternoon in Paris with vaccine titan Jonas Salk http://bit.ly/2HE5bDl

What I have not told my family about the meaning of time. Personal thoughts on Longevity. http://bit.ly/2HDQDUb

Transit States. Collected poetry of DH Marks.

Paperback  https://amzn.to/2HArNEy

Kindle https://amzn.to/2YhvYva