ASD Libraries: Information Literacy: 1. Who's Behind the information

Research study

The Challenge That's Bigger Than Fake News
Fake news is certainly a problem. Sadly, however, it’s not our biggest. Fact-checking organizations like Snopes and PolitiFact can help us detect canards invented by enterprising Macedonian teenagers,3 but the Internet is filled with content that defies labels like “fake” or “real.” Determining who’s behind information and whether it’s worthy of our trust is more complex than a true/false dichotomy.

Common Sense

NOAA
NOAA provides Arctic information and a set of reputable indicators that describe the present state of the Arctic ecosystem and climate.

Citizen Science - Climate
Model Earth's climate using historic ship logs
Help scientists recover Arctic and worldwide weather observations made by US Navy and Coast Guard ships.
Classify over 30 years of tropical cyclone data.
Scientists at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center need your help.
The Butterfly Effect
the phenomenon known as "sensitive dependence on initial conditions." This is sometimes referred to as the butterfly effect, e.g. a butterfly flapping its wings in South America can affect the weather in Central Park. The question then arises — why does a set of completely deterministic equations exhibit this behavior? After all, scientists are often taught that small initial perturbations lead to small changes in behavior. This was clearly not the case in Lorenz's model of the weather. The answer lies in the nature of the equations; they were nonlinear equations. While they are difficult to solve, nonlinear systems are central to chaos theory and often exhibit fantastically complex and chaotic behavior.

COR Stanford Who's behind

Who's Behind the Information
Since information is always influenced by its author, analyzing who's behind the information should be a priority when evaluating online content. But too often, students attempt to evaluate information based on elements other than the source, such as the contents of a website, its appearance, or the evidence it supplies. In this lesson, students learn why the source of information is so important and practice analyzing information based on who's behind it.

Vested Interests

Front Groups
A front group is an organization that purports to represent one agenda while in reality it serves some other party or interest whose sponsorship is hidden or rarely mentioned. The front group is perhaps the most easily recognized use of the third party technique.
Think Tanks
A think tank (also called a policy institute) is an organization, institute, corporation, or group that conducts research and engages in advocacy in public policy. Many think tanks are non-profit organizations, which some countries such as the United States and Canada provide with tax exempt status. While many think tanks are funded by governments, interest groups, or businesses, some think tanks also derive income from consulting or research work related to their mandate. In some cases, think tanks are little more than public relations fronts, usually headquartered in state or national seats of government and generating self-serving scholarship that serves the advocacy goals of their industry sponsors.
Source Watch
The Center for Media and Democracy publishes SourceWatch to track corporations.
We provide well-documented information about corporate public relations (PR) campaigns, including corporate front groups, people who "front" corporate campaigns, and PR operations.

Please visit SourceWatch's sister websites EXPOSEDbyCMD, to find our investigations and original documents we release, PRWatch, to read our original reporting, and ALECexposed, to see our award-winning investigation of a corporate front group where corporate lobbyists actually vote as equals with elected legislators on "model" legislation to change our rights.

Also, please check out the in-depth research from around the world by our partner projects within SourceWatch: Coal Swarm, and FrackSwarm.