Becoming a Smart News Consumer: Chandran Sankaran Of Gigafact On How To Spot Disinformation, Fake News, And Conspiracy Theories
An Interview With David Leichner
Go local. Don’t get stuck in national stories that get lots of airtime and dominate public discourse. Look at the realities of what’s happening in your state, your county, your town, your neighborhood. There are many local newsrooms, and you can find some here.
In an era where information is abundant yet misinformation is rampant, the ability to discern fact from fiction has never been more crucial. The spread of disinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories can have profound impacts on our elections, healthcare systems, and national security, influencing public opinion and decision-making on critical issues. As news consumers, how do we develop the skills to navigate this complex information landscape? As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Chandran Sankaran, Founder and CEO of Gigafact.
Chandran Sankaran provides overall guidance and direction for the development of Gigafact. He has also founded Repustar, an incubator of technologies to strengthen societal immune systems against online misinformation. He is a judge for the annual Mirror Awards for excellence in media industry reporting. Sankaran has previously been a successful software entrepreneur, having built two companies that helped change how corporations manage their supply chains and financial management processes. He graduated from Yale University with a Master’s degree in Computer Science. He received an undergraduate engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras where he was the recipient of the Governor’s Medal. Sankaran is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and has lived and worked across continents.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you. Can you tell us a bit about how you grew up?
I grew up in Bangalore, India in the 1960s and 70s when it was a smaller, sleepier place than it is today. It wasn’t yet a global center for software and outsourcing. This was during a period when India was still building its infrastructure for what would later be the basis of its economic boom. I grew up on a small lane with nine homes in the heart of the city, and we were out on the street playing with the kids in the neighborhood until my 6 p.m. curfew when I had to be at my desk doing homework. I attended a protestant missionary school, with mainly Anglo-Indian teachers, echoes of the recently concluded period of the British in India. We all spoke English and a couple of Indian languages, and conversation at home was a happy mix. My friends’ group was highly secular, and their families hailed from different parts of India, having all ended up for different reasons in a city known for good weather and a cosmopolitan life.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
Here’s an interesting one. During my life in the commercial software world, when I was trying hard to win a prospective customer’s business, a very senior executive from that company responded to my outreach and gave me a 15 minute time slot for a meeting.
This was very exciting except… this was pre-Zoom, and I lived in San Francisco and this company was in New York state! I would have to fly across the country, rent a car from JFK, drive a couple of hours, stay in a hotel for a night, do my meeting and then fly back — all for a 15 minute meeting, with no guarantee of any sort of outcome.
This unusual experience really forced me to think about those 15 minutes and how I wanted to use them. How should I organize my ideas? What should I ask for? Why did this person only give me 15 minutes when he knew I was coming from the other end of the country?
This meeting shaped the way I think about communication, and the executive I met in that short meeting shaped my views of leadership. (And yes, that very short meeting helped us win that business and much more!)
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
I helped create and launch the tech-forward nonprofit Gigafact two years ago. Gigafact is catalyzing a network of local, nonpartisan news sources to deliver facts that respond to swirling claims and confusions their communities are experiencing online. We have more than a dozen newsrooms across the US on the platform today. Our ambition is to become a network of hundreds of great sources across the world, each helping consumers in their moment of need. Collectively, these sources help rebuild trust and forge resilience against misinformation.
Ok, thank you. Let’s now move on to our main topic. For the benefit of our readers can you tell us a bit why you are an authority on the subject of countering disinformation, fake news, and conspiracy theories?
After a career in software for large companies, I turned my attention to the global information disorder problem (misinformation, fake news, etc).
I ran a series of surveys across America to learn how people from different backgrounds viewed facts, fact-checking, and how they approached whether a news article was accurate or not. I wrote about my early journey into the fact-checking space in this blog piece.
I started an incubator that built technologies to advance consumer resilience to fake information that conducted a number of efforts on X (then Twitter). We had a chance to study how information spreads within that platform, and opportunities to test consumer engagement with fact-forward tools.
We founded Gigafact as a nonprofit in 2022 to accelerate the ability for high quality local news sources to fact-check claims online in their communities. We are building AI tools to help these newsrooms.
It’s hard to claim any sort of authority over this vast and fast moving new arena, but I’ve been immersed in these questions for the last five years and have interacted with many bright minds on these subjects, so I’m glad to point to resources that can be helpful.
This may seem obvious but it is helpful to articulate it. Can you tell us a bit why disinformation and fake news is so harmful for our society? Can you share some examples?
A poorly functioning news and information system is like a pervasive rot in society’s floorboards. Any attempt to cooperate and solve important societal problems is rapidly undermined by our inability to agree about the reality of the world we live in.
At its most basic level, having fundamentally different views of what’s real and what’s not, divides us and turns us into warring tribes. Who won the presidential election in 2020? Thirty percent of the country believes Trump did, and that Biden ‘stole’ the presidency. The other 70% believes the election of Biden was absolutely legitimate. This split view of a basic reality means that it’s no longer about whether you believe Trump or Biden — or someone else — will take the country in the right direction. Rather, the question becomes about the legitimacy of our election processes, and whether our style of democracy can continue to work in America.
Similarly at the policy level, misinformation and a broken information system causes a distrust of data coming from institutions we have tasked to mind these matters for us. Do vaccines have dangerous side effects that outweigh the public health benefits? Is human-caused climate-change real or imagined? A deep divide in whether something is fact or fiction makes it difficult for us humans to cooperate, and these difficulties are eagerly exploited by political and economic forces. Solutions to big problems fall right through the rotted floorboards even before they have a chance to be born.
(I’m framing these factual examples as questions even though I, and probably most of you, have absolute certainty about the answers to them, to highlight that there are large numbers of people who hold precisely the opposite view due to the current broken information ecosystem).
Why do you think this has become such a huge problem in recent years?
While there are several reasons, here are three drivers of this problem that are worth considering:
- The cost to produce credible-looking news reports has dropped dramatically. It used to be that you needed a printing press and trucks that distributed newspapers. Now, anyone can do it and get it in circulation, without any obligation to meet professional standards to accurately report on the happenings in the world. Imagine if anyone could claim to be a tax accountant or a doctor or a building contractor, and we had no basis to discern who actually has the skills. That’s roughly where we are.
- Social media and digital communication platforms are configured to allow all ideas to find sympathizers very easily and quickly regardless of their merit. And on the receiving end of a firehose of information, people are forced to rely on intuition to sort out what’s real and what’s not, and it turns out that the power of intuition is vastly overstated for this task.
- Content is privileged on digital media not by its accuracy, but by its engagement and virality, powered by advertising models that pay for clicks and eyeballs. Accurate, carefully developed content has negative commercial value in the default setting of how the internet works.
How does one distinguish between credible news sources and those that are prone to spreading disinformation?
Good Sources:
- Are really transparent about who owns or finances their work. They have clearly articulated practices of editorial independence that resist pressure from funders.
- Subject themselves to external scrutiny and publicly align with the standards and code of ethics of external professional bodies such as SPJ, IFCN and INN.
- Follow a process for self correction and retraction when they make errors, update content when the facts change, offer context to what they are reporting, have rules about not having misleading headlines, etc., and say these things on their sites.
- Work hard to keep the reporting of news at arm’s length from the opinion of the newsroom editorial staff. (I think it should be a football field length, not an arm)
- Cite other Good Sources that follow principles like the ones above.
There are several other markers of quality, but this is a start.
What exactly is the problem with conspiracy theories? Why can’t a conspiracy be true?
Conspiracies really do exist of course. Watergate was a conspiracy led by a sitting president to undermine his opposition. In general though, conspiracies, when they are real, fall apart under pressure because it is very hard to orchestrate widespread deception for a sustained period of time (except in highly autocratic states).
Let’s take the moon landing. There are conspiracy theories that it was faked and it never happened. Now, is it possible that the whole thing is a conspiracy? Yes, but in order for this conspiracy theory to be true, it would mean that there was a large scale cooperation to defraud the public between radio and TV stations that beamed images and sounds in July 1969, NASA and all the families of those people who must have been in on this scheme, as well as every scientist and museum that has handled or analyzed a piece of moon rock, every book and movie on the subject that must have concocted its research, and every supplier that pretended to build a part of a rocket ship that never existed.
Humans fail at much smaller projects. Pulling off this epic deception for apparently for no good reason seems far-fetched perhaps?
People given to this style of thinking can perceive conspiracy in the smallest things. Giving air time to conspiratorial thinking dilutes our understanding of reality and weakens our information immune systems.
What psychological factors contribute to the belief in and spread of conspiracy theories?
I’m no expert in the psychology of conspiracy thinking, but there are some great resources out there. Here’s a handbook that may help, and here’s a video of a noted scholar teaching a class about climate change and conspiratorial thinking.
From my readings and conversations, it seems clear there have always been conspiracists among us. The difference now is that the internet allows them to be connected and feed off each other, and appeal to others who may not be fully formed conspiratorialists, but who are willing converts, disenchanted as they are with how the systems of government have worked for them. Our digital information environment, which is designed to create echo chambers easily, prevents people from hearing other viewpoints, and accelerates these vulnerable groups down the rabbit hole of conspiracy thinking.
Lots of smart people are prone to conspiracy thinking, and there have been some studies that show that those who think highly of their own intuition are even more vulnerable.
Can you give us a few ways to identify or spot fake news and disinformation? If you can please give us some examples.
Content rarely has good visual markers of accuracy any more — so it’s not easy to spot unless it’s the most obvious photoshopped image.
So the best bet is to be ready to do some simple research when you encounter information that feels important and which comes from sources and pathways that you may not have already vetted. Here are some research angles:
- Vet the source — the website where the content is published. Look at the ratings for the source using the services I reference below, if they exist. If not, apply the ‘criteria for a good source’ principles above. Bad sources are like bad kitchens — the food may smell good on the plate, and you may get lucky and survive a meal, but you are more likely to fall sick.
- Do a Google search: “Is it true that…”. The results are quite good.
Find a fact-check outlet operating in your geography and see if they’ve written anything about it. This organization has a list of fact checkers.
Can you give us a few ways to identify a conspiracy theory? If you can please give us some examples.
Again I’ll refer you to the experts on this per my previous answer.
As a simple rule of thumb, it may be a yellow flag when someone starts with a complicated approach to explain something that feels quite simple. (See Occam’s Razor.) And if the person you are talking to references sinister motives that involve powerful organizations and government systems, it could be a conspiracy theory red flag…
What should one do after they have identified disinformation? Should they simply ignore it?
I’m going to address misinformation more broadly (rather than disinformation — which refers to deliberate propaganda).
In general I think it’s more important (and more effective) for all of us to support good sources and good practices rather than becoming vigilantes attempting to combat individual acts of information pollution. The ways you can do that are a) support high quality local news by subscribing to them and donations, b) report problems to the support channel of the platform where you encounter bad information, and c) support legislation that puts guardrails on social media platforms.
If there is a blatantly false claim making the rounds in a personal group whose collective health you care about — family, old school friends, etc. — I would encourage you to share accurate information from good sources and do so nicely and with humility and don’t get into a shouting match. Perhaps saying something like: “I came across this — and it seems like a good source — and it seems to point to a different answer”, or “This story seemed true to me too, but based on this fact-check, apparently it’s not…” We can make a difference in the immediate communities around us if we approach it the right way.
Can you please share your “5 Things Everyone Should Know To Become A Smart News Consumer?” (Please share a story or example for each.)
1 . Use rating services like MBFC and Ad Fontes to get a first sense of the quality of a site. These rating services don’t claim to be perfect, but they are good attempts to be critical about the information practices of digital sites.
2 . Look at the previous posts of someone who shows up often on your social media feed to see what websites they draw from, and the ratings of those using the services listed above. Assess the quality of their information diet before you consume freely what they send to you.
3 . Go local. Don’t get stuck in national stories that get lots of airtime and dominate public discourse. Look at the realities of what’s happening in your state, your county, your town, your neighborhood. There are many local newsrooms, and you can find some here.
4 . Find alternate points of view that help you get out of your own small echo chambers with services like Allsides and Ground News.
5 . Hold information lightly, and allow facts to change your mind. Be an information scientist who enjoys examining the evidence, rather than a zealot who is looking only for loyalty to your strongly held views. Here’s a writeup on this idea.
In your opinion, what role do social media platforms play in the propagation of fake news, and how can they be held accountable?
They play a massive role. Social media is now the primary news and information source for a large portion of the population. And social media is set up to deliver engaging and addictive content (since that increases their revenues) rather than accurate content that allows consumers to think and absorb ideas in a healthy manner.
To solve this problem there is no real alternative other than well-designed regulation that shifts the incentives of these platforms towards information accuracy. They need to be required to think about consumer well-being in much the same way that the car industry was forced to adopt safety glass windshields so people didn’t die from flying shards of glass in an accident. You can still buy the car you want, and go where you want and have all the freedoms you want — but you are safer while driving.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Social media and digital platforms control a significant portion of how consumers get information. They need to be incentivized to value facts and good information sourcing above popularity and virality as we discussed earlier.
Send a note to your congress person and state assembly person that you want a bill that requires the following features on social media platforms in order to protect your rights as an information consumer:
- Give you an option to not accept information or a feed from a user who has not been verified to be a real person (this would eliminate bots, AI and false personas)
- Give you the option to easily do internet research on a post that you encounter, to do a reality check, without needing to leave the thread you are on.
- Give you the option to mark whether you have checked the validity of a post before you ‘like’ or ‘forward’ it — so it informs people downstream who might receive it that it’s unverified.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
The nonprofit Gigafact
My new blog Factville
My profile on LinkedIn
This was very inspiring and informative. Thank you so much for the time you spent on this interview!
About The Interviewer: David Leichner is a veteran of the Israeli high-tech industry with significant experience in the areas of cyber and security, enterprise software and communications. At Cybellum, a leading provider of Product Security Lifecycle Management, David is responsible for creating and executing the marketing strategy and managing the global marketing team that forms the foundation for Cybellum’s product and market penetration. Prior to Cybellum, David was CMO at SQream and VP Sales and Marketing at endpoint protection vendor, Cynet. David is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Jerusalem Technology College. He holds a BA in Information Systems Management and an MBA in International Business from the City University of New York.
Becoming a Smart News Consumer: Chandran Sankaran Of Gigafact On How To Spot Disinformation, Fake… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.