Who Can You Trust? Crash Course Navigating Digital Information #4

In which John Green teaches you how to assess the sources of information you find on the internet. The growing suspicion of expertise is a growing problem on the internet, and it can be very difficult to figure out which sources are authoritative. In this episode John offers some strategies to help you identify credible sources and take into account a source's point of view.

Special thanks to our partners from MediaWise who helped create this series:
The Poynter Institute

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Eric Prestemon, Sam Buck, Mark Brouwer, Naman Goel, Patrick Wiener II, Nathan Catchings, Efrain R. Pedroza, Brandon Westmoreland, dorsey, Indika Siriwardena, James Hughes, Kenneth F Penttinen, Trevin Beattie, Satya Ridhima Parvathaneni, Erika & Alexa Saur, Glenn Elliott, Justin Zingsheim, Jessica Wode, Kathrin Benoit, Tom Trval, Jason Saslow, Nathan Taylor, Brian Thomas Gossett, Khaled El Shalakany, SR Foxley, Yasenia Cruz, Eric Koslow, Caleb Weeks, Tim Curwick, D.A. Noe, Shawn Arnold, Malcolm Callis, Advait Shinde, William McGraw, Andrei Krishkevich, Rachel Bright, Jirat, Ian Dundore
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Want to find Crash Course elsewhere on the internet?

[AntiComposite]

As a Wikipedia editor, I have to say it isn’t all black and white. It’s also kinda light blue.

[RangerRuby]

This Crash Course course is so different from all the others. It shows you how to learn and check your work, and is not teaching a specific subject. It reminds me of Crash Course Study Skills which is still one of my favorite courses and I can already see this one coming into my top 3!

[winwinwin]

*_Thank you CrashCourse for the informative discussions._*

*_I'm a Chinese freedom advocate and I used to naively believe that the internet age means more transparency, more empowerment of the ordinary people. As I believed that the internet would make it harder for authoritarian regimes and big businesses to silence individuals and keep the dictators’ dirt under the carpet._*

*_However, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime’s success in total internet surveillance means that Chinese individuals’ voices are not better heard. On the contrary, the CCP regime has used anonymity on the internet to make the world a more opaque, less transparent, more dangerous place._*

*_Use YouTube as an example, the ratio of Chinese language videos critical of the CCP's human rights record & expansionist agenda vs CCP's own propaganda videos (disguised as "casual YouTuber's account") is about 1 to 100. Some CCP's misinformation accounts on YouTube upload a new video every few minutes, and upload the same misinformation video under different sensational titles to several accounts within the same hour, in order to achieve the “drowning dissenting voices” effect, with great success. The CCP also use some of the methods such as phantom clicks, computer generated likes/dislikes, fake comments, concerted malicious reporting against legitimate videos/comments, etc. to to boost its own propaganda videos’ view counts and cheat YouTube's algorithms._*

*_The CCP's aim is to eventually create confusion, sow social division and mistrust in all liberal democracies by massaging the idea that “democracy is hypocritical, full of dark secrets, and hidden discrimination, your vote is useless” into its audience’s head. (At this stage its focus is Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia… some of its neighbouring democratic “test laboratory”). So for anyone who loves freedom and cares about the survival of the liberal democratic ideal, we must think about how to protect our fragile liberty and democracy in this dangerous times.  We need to protect democracy using technological, legislative, political means. We need to do it with a great sense of urgency._*

[katherinelynch]

0:42 -- thank you, John Green, I now know exactly what I want to do with my life. I'm going to become an expert on climate science, read every book published from June 1837 to January 1901, and join the Illuminati.

[stormelemental]

3:34 To some degree, but not others. One of the problems with, 'Trust this person, they are an expert.' is that expertise is limited in scope. Your neighbor probably has a much better idea about how to grow vegetables in a garden setting in your particular slice of Indiana than a random Agronomist would. Agronomy is not gardening.

My background is in food science. I know more than a random person on the street about the meat industry. I know less about the meat industry than someone without academic credentials who has worked in that industry. You should trust me, unless you know that you know more than I do.

I knew more about the baltic crusades than my professor of medieval history. She had credentials that would incline someone to trust her over me if we disagreed. I was just a STEM undergrad. Why should anyone trust me? Isn't she an expert? Yes, in her field. Her field was medieval French and English literature, specifically Norman literature. She was an expert on it. She had done extensive research. She had not done any research on the medieval baltic as it transitioned from a mostly pagan frontier into a catholic crusader state. It was not her field.

[agerardi]

"Generally speaking, those who work professionally in a field or have done a lot of work in it are better equipped than, you know, random people off the street." - A good thought when dealing with our current political system.

[Clif]

Empathy? Absolutely.
There is no personal truth, only personal perspective. Read news with a mind toward why they wrote it.

[joelcrow]

Thank you crash course! This is an invaluable civil service, teaching us skills to circumvent the mind control attempts of fake news and social media that is literally being used (like a weapon) to brainwash and control people. Education like this empowers us to be independent thinking citizens, who question (and verify) before we react.

[moonblaze]

Love this series. I want to show it to my grandparents but they're deaf. Are these videos going to get any official captions at some point?

[fateyes]

Also beware groupthink. If more than half the people around you agree with you constantly, it's time to start meeting new people.

[lorrainecampbell]

Thank you for this series. As a high school teacher in the online forum, this is tremendously valuable (among the dozens of other Crash Course videos I hijacked -- with proper attribution!).

[oakland]

This Digital Information about Navigating Digital Information has led me to better Navigate Digital Information, including but not limited to this Digital Information.

[pauljames]

This should be a mandatory video to watch in the US XD

[OriginsOfSkye]

As soon as you said where the term think-tank comes from i looked it up because that seemed neat but even just the first couple of results seem to state that the term think-tank predates the existence of combat tanks by several decades at least. Do you have some source to back up this claim? Or did you include that fact on purpose just to see if we'd do our homework this time. In which case, did I do good? Do I get a gold star now?

[orangeskarmory]

Don't annotations... not exist anymore? I could have sworn I read something about Youtube removing them and people being upset about it...

I certainly haven't seen an annotation in a while, but I'm mostly on the app, and I don't think they've ever worked there.

[nsytr]

Instead of focusing on trust, build your ability to judge arguments.

[megeaton]

Don't know if anybody will see this from my school but this will help you with your tracker. Question 1 and 2's answer: 1:29. Then Question 3 is 2:20

[kjmiklautsch]

In my 31 years of life I thought a think tank was named for a person suspended in a fluid filled tank, where their needs were met by tubes a la the matrix, where their only function was to think.

[AndMe]

Can you activate the closed captions, please? This Crash Course must be fully comprehensible to everybody around the world. Thank you and great job! :-)

[PhyzerGX]

why did i get assigned homework that was to watch this video and take notes smh someone help.