# Filtering My Email and Fake News ### My Rules ![](https://i.imgur.com/WTrfe72.png) I practiced with your example rule, sorting NU News, and made an additional rule to sort the notifications I get from a website called Packback, which I use in another class because it sends very frequent notifications. ### Reading Response The FS article, [“How Filter Bubbles Distort Reality: Everything You Need to Know”](https://fs.blog/filter-bubbles/) reminds us that, “fish don’t know they are in water.” Similarly, we, as consumers of media, do not know when we are in a filter bubble, receiving incorrect information, or sharing it. Therefore, understanding what “fake news” is and how to protect yourself from it through media literacy, is an extremely important skill. Each of the readings discusses different dangers of the internet and how to deal with them. The first reading [“Understanding Information Disorder”](https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/understanding-information-disorder/) by Claire Wardle defines misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation and differentiates between them as broad concepts and specific types. She also acknowledges that “fake news” is a term that has been weaponized by politics to attack journalists, and therefore refers to this phenomenon as Information Disorder. Misinformation is when false information is spread unknowingly, malinformation is genuine information that is spread to cause harm, and disinformation is intentionally false information spread to cause harm. There are seven specific types of mis/disinformation, satire, false connection, misleading content, false content, imposter content, manipulated content, and fabricated content, each having different motives and effects. In my opinion, manipulated content is the most dangerous, when genuine information or imagery is manipulated to deceive or cause harm. This type of disinformation can go unnoticed because it is based on real ideas, concepts, or events, therefore making it difficult to debunk. In combination with this spread of incorrect information, filter bubbles contribute to our false sense of reality on the internet. A filter bubble is the result of algorithms that dictate what we encounter online. Thus, only showing us content that we should like and isolating us from any cognitive dissonance. This leads to echo chambers, when we assume that everyone thinks like us and forget to consider other perspectives, and the more extreme version, groupthink, when a group of people temporarily experience a loss of the ability to think in a rational or moral manner because of communal reinforcement. They can be dangerous because they allow us to live in ignorant bliss, or as the FS article states it is “autopropaganda indoctrinating us with our own ideas.” These seemingly intense statements can be seen in real life examples, Brexit being one of them. Older people were more likely to vote for the UK to leave the European Union but because they were not as active online as the younger generations, filter bubbles were created within said younger generations through social media, leading them to the false assumption that the majority of the population did not want the UK to leave the EU. Nonetheless this phenomenon can be seen on a much smaller scale in everyday life. I, for example, notice when I search for something I then get related ads on my browser or on social media later in the day. I also understand that the politically related information on my social media feeds is, for the most part, one-sided because I only interact with the information I agree with. Overall, it is arguable that we all live in a filter buble that we are unaware of, until we are made aware of it and take action against it. In order to counteract these dangers of the internet FS recommends using ad blockers, purposly tring to read a variety of news and media sources for new perspectives, switching our focus from entertainment to education when online, using incognito boriwng and clearing serach histories, and deleting browser cookies. In addition to this, however, Dhana Boyd in her article [“Did Media Literacy Backfire?”](https://points.datasociety.net/did-media-literacy-backfire-7418c084d88d#.d46kox6e1) argues that undertsdning media literacy could also be a solution. With proper education and experience we can use the internet to find accurate information and stay away from misinformation.