- [Interviewer] Do you have a cellphone on you?

- I do, yeah, I do.

(rhythmic music) - My mom said, "How did it go?"

- I think one of the biggest divides this country has to do with where people get information from.

- [Interviewer] what types of news sources do you consume on your phone?

- I've been very into Reddit lately.

- The Wall Street Journal, print edition - Twitter and Reddit.

(upbeat music) - How does the media, which is what I study, how does that sort of perpetrate and amplify some of the divides that we see, especially across that political spectrum where so many issues related to race and identity sort of thrive?

- I think social media, either people encourage conversation or discourage it.

- It's never really pretty to read those arguments online, whether it be Twitter or Instagram, Facebook.

I do think it contributes to just polarization in general.

- [Interviewer] Have you ever seen anything online that turned out to not be true?

- Oh yeah.

- The COVID vaccine, there was a lot of misinformation going around about that.

- Can you get micro chipped by Bill Gates and the vaccine or some crazy thing.

- We need to do a little bit better about filtering what we read and what we don't.

- There's lots of different dimensions to misinformation and disinformation and fake news.

For the most part it's news that is meant to mislead.

- As I got to college, we start to learn about how framing works and how they can put anything out there and shape it the way they want to.

- There's always been rumors and misinformation that circulate.

Part of the difference today is that we're just much more aware of it because we have a digital record of just how far that rumor has spread.

- Don't trust the first thing you read.

- In the age of social media and digitization, we need to be diligent about doing the work ourselves, doing the research ourselves, taking the extra step.

- Historians value, going back to original texts and original sources and not necessarily taking those as truth, but understanding the context in which they were created.

- I use a lot of the sources that I have from my major and minor.

And if I don't use things for my classes, I end up looking things online by myself.

- If you don't feel strongly that there's a source out there that you can trust for information, it can be really disorienting.

- With social media.

I'd like to have security in what I'm seeing.

So if that means I need to go out and do the research and know for myself to be sure, that's okay.

People don't have my standards, that's also okay.

- It's important to take every news article with a grain of sand because it's very easy to skew things.

- I'm more concerned actually, when it comes to the students with what comes along with the kind of generalized skepticism about everything they see.

If that's the attitude you take, it becomes really hard to convince people to trust reliable information and sources of information that are actually doing a really decent job of trying to pin down what is the truth of what actually happened?

- There really is an art of reading the newspaper and understanding that we have to separate opinions from facts and that's the job of the reader.

- You know, what gives me the most hope is really talking to my students and the way that I see that they're both curious about these kinds of topics and interested and really open to hearing different perspectives than the ones that they maybe are surrounded with every day.

- And we've seen as sort of polarization, not just of opinions, but a polarization of the media that people use to form their opinions.

- I think you have to really look at a diverse number of sources when it comes to things.

- I make a point to follow a lot of different opinions on Twitter specifically.

- I think it's really important to turn the channel every once in a while.

No one news segment can get everything.

So the more that you're able to access those news sources and news outlets, the more you're able to be informed about a particular story in a way that other people are not.

- We can only interact with so many different types of people and only know about so many things happening in the world.

We rely on others to do that kind of verifying and confirming of information.

- I think we are in a space right now where people don't know what is true and they don't know what is fake and everything becomes debatable.

Everything becomes a source of debate.

Every fact becomes a potential opinion and no resolution.

I think that that's exactly where we are right now.

I do think there's a way out by learning more, by trusting information, by verifying information and by respecting other people's perspectives and knowing that they're different than fact.