Looking it up

The dying art of research in a crumbling information ecosystem

When I set out to write this post, it was going to be about deleting my Facebook account, which I will be doing this weekend. The move is long overdue. I only kept it in my 30s because my job as a social media manager or digital editor mandated I have a personal account, in order to be able to administrate the work account. Some of you may be able to relate. I’ve hung on to it the last few years mostly just out of reflex, and as a place to occasionally share my writing, like the stuff I do here. But it became glaringly obvious, even before this week’s developments, that any benefit of keeping it was heavily outweighed by its costs.

Before I go any further, this is not a plea for you to dump your Facebook account, if it’s something that actually brings you joy. We’re all going to need to hold our communities fast in the coming years, and I know that the app does serve that purpose for some. But it doesn’t for me. My networks, whether analog or digital, exist elsewhere. If you’re like me, still holding on to your Facebook account for no discernible reason other than the occasional birthday reminder, you may want to consider doing the same.

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As the parent of a toddler, I’ve started doing something again that I haven’t done in about 35 years — watching Sesame Street. One of the core lessons hammered home, episode after episode, is that when you don’t know something, you look it up.

Notably, the mechanism of exactly how to do this hasn’t really been addressed, at least in the episodes I’ve seen. When I was a young child, I would have needed to crack open an encyclopedia, or my trusty copy of The Way Things Work to find most answers. These days, we have an embarrassment of resources right at our fingertips on our devices. In the college journalism class I teach, I hammer home the importance of including a source whenever a student is referencing a particular piece of research or statistical information that they’ve pulled from somewhere else.

But where, exactly, are we supposed to look things up these days? What is a trustworthy source anymore? For a generation raised in the increasingly both content-stuffed and moderationless digital world, how does one even form a coherent media diet?

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, made sure this week that all that will be a little harder for at least the next four years, or until whatever political wind blows Mark Zuckerberg’s hydrofoil in a new direction. The company announced it was obliterating its third-party fact-checking operation in favor of the community notes-style system that has been an abject disaster over at the flaming remains of Twitter. Furthermore, Zuckerberg left no doubt of just whom he’s trying to please with this morsel of culture war nonsense.

Uh-huh.

Meanwhile, Google results are now front-loaded with AI-generated answers — something nobody asked for — which frequently cite incorrect information. Hilariously, a Google search for “Google AI results incorrect” will actually yield a Google AI Overview that admits as much. It’s like a 21st century version of the Liar paradox: if the AI Overview knows it’s wrong, how can we trust it?

For now, we’re stuck with it. That means users see a potentially incorrect, unverified answer, often followed by several ads or sponsored posts, before they might finally get to the information they’re trying to find. It’s the slow degradation of our most vital information source, the way we’ve learned to “look it up” over the last 25 years.

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I’ve long held the line against students using Wikipedia as a source for their writing in my class, as anything source-worthy from that site is generally pulled from somewhere else. But as reliable sources of information go these days, it’s actually pretty high on the list. Which is pretty clearly why it appears to be the next target from those seeking to obliterate the remaining sources of truth in our digital world.

A leaked memo from the Heritage Foundation — draftees of the now infamous Project 2025 — shows their plans to “identify and target” Wikipedia volunteer editors. This is purportedly being done in the service of “antisemitism,” though as even the Jewish publication that broke this story points out, it’s unclear exactly how that would function.

But clearly, the divide in our information systems is only continuing to grow. Those that decide to let misinformation and disinformation run amok (or, worse, twist their gears to push it forward) will continue to pull their ecosystems further and further from objective reality. We’ve seen the dangers these networks pose, but it’s clear that those in charge are at best indifferent to those results, if not entirely in favor of them. That this is all happening against the backdrop of the two terrorist attacks by deeply brain-rotted American veterans — one in New Orleans, the other in Las Vegas, our two American capitals of excess — on the first day of the year, all feels a bit over the top.

While the regular bad actors on social media were rushing to blame the usual scapegoats before all the facts were in on these attacks, it took the unnerving truth a few days to stumble into the light. The New Orleans driver was not, in fact, an immigrant, and had nothing to do with “OPEN BORDERS” as the president-elect railed against. His truck had not, in fact, crossed the border from Mexico, as Fox News reported. That nobody has bothered to correct the former of those statements is not surprising, but it’s a pretty bleak harbinger of what we all know to expect out of the next few years.

If we can’t trust statements from the White House, and we can’t trust the information on our social media networks, and we can’t trust the information given to us by our search engines, and the same technology that’s making that untrustworthy is now being employed by a national paper to introduce a bias meter to its stories, and the most widespread source of online knowledge is now under attack by reactionary ideologues…where, exactly, are we supposed to go to reliably look things up?

That’s not rhetorical — I’m actually asking. Because I’m running out of ideas to tell my students, and class starts next week. Beyond that, it will only be a matter of time before my daughter is old enough to actually follow Elmo’s direction. And when she turns to me for help, I don’t know where I’m going to send her.