21-05-2025
Ecolution talks disinformation, fake news and fact vs opinion
In this episode of Ecolution, RTÉ's climate podcast for young people, we take on the scurge of disinformation.
On the show your host Evy speaks to the organisations at the Voices International Festival of Journalism in Zagreb who are fighting fake news on all fronts. Plus, we talk lies and misinformation with our brain trust from 3rd class at Stepaside ETNS.
Listen to the Ecolution podcast on RTÉ, Apple or Spotify now. And, watch our panel discuss disinformation and fake news on RTÉ Kids YouTube up top.
Once you're online there can be a big divide between what's a fact and what is nothing but opinion. A fact is backed up by research and science. An opinion is nothing but a feeling people have about a subject. And can be informed by other people. Or by only finding your news online.
People say no news is good news. But over the past year it seems we've been bombarded with news that seems confusing, scary, hard to decipher and yet impossible to ignore. Information that claims the climate crisis is a hoax. Or that having a more sustainable place to live is a conspiracy built to control people. And lots of people want to listen. Because the bigger and louder the story, the more it spreads.
Disinformation is false information. Information that is not true but that is being shared as if it's a fact. And these "alternative facts" are offered to intentionally mislead people. Sometimes by people in positions of real power. The rise of deepfake videos and AI generated images that seem totally real has made the line between fact and fiction even more blurry. Children and adults alike can be caught out. And when big social media companies are removing the people they once employed to check facts, that online space becomes a place where disinformation grows.
When we're trying to work out if a statement is true or false we use lots of different senses. It depends on who is saying it. Their tone of voice. How they build their sentences, and then what kind of body language they use to help them explain. And, for all of that, there's still a chance that there is more behind what people say than we can know. And, when we see something online, even more of these signals are either missing, or impossible to read.
Increasingly, we get most of our information about climate and news online. The key to making sense of it is to become more Media Literate. Media literacy is all about how we consume content - from TikTok to TV, to news articles online, and how we learn to ask the right questions of ourselves when we see something that doesn't seem right.
