The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

A few years ago a little-known animal species suddenly made headlines. The charming but elusive Tree Octopus became the focal point of Internet scrutiny.

If you’ve never heard of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus, take a few minutes to learn more about it on this website, devoted to saving the endangered species.

You can also watch this brief video for more about the creatures:

Source Reliability

If you’re starting to get the feeling that something’s not quite adding up here, you’re on the right track. The Tree Octopus website is a hoax, although a beautifully done one. There is no such creature (unfortunately).

It’s easy to assume that “digital natives”–people who have grown up using the Internet–are naturally web-savvy. However, a 2011 U.S. Department of Education study that used the Tree Octopus website as a focal point revealed that students who encountered this website completely fell for it. According to an NBC news story by Scott Beaulieu, “In fact, not only did the students believe that the tree octopus was real, they actually refused to believe researchers when they told them the creature was fake.”^[1]

While this is a relatively harmless example of a joke website, it helps to demonstrate that anyone can say anything they want on the Internet. If you have paid even the slightest attention to politics since 2016, you will have a particularly heightened sense of how dangerous real “fake news” can be in our society, and what a potent charge it is to allege that any given story is or isn’t fake. Here’s one brief (and lightly edited) excerpt from a CBS 60 Minutes episode from March 2017 on “Fake News”:

“To get an idea of who reads fake news we turned to the Trade Desk, the Internet advertising firm that helps companies steer clear of fraudulent sites. Jeff Green is the CEO.

Jeff Green: So the first thing that we found out is that it is definitely a phenomenon that affects both sides.

Scott Pelley: Liberals and Conservatives.

Jeff Green: There is no question they’re both affected.

One fake story Green examined claimed that the Congress was plotting to overthrow then-President Trump. He was surprised to learn that right-leaning fake news overwhelmingly attracted readers in their 40s and 50s. And he also found fake-news readers on the left were more likely to be affluent and college-educated.

Jeff Green: That shocked me.

Scott Pelley: Why?

Jeff Green: I think I thought the same way that many Americans perhaps think, [which] is that fake news was a phenomenon that only tricked the uneducated. Not true. Just not. The data shows it’s just not true.

Green’s analysis showed fake news consumers tend to stay in what he calls “Internet echo chambers,” reading similar articles rather than reaching for legitimate news.

Jeff Green: What is most concerning is the amount of influence that they seem to have because the people that spend time in those echo chambers are the ones that vote.

After the election, Facebook and Twitter recognized the threat to their credibility and changed their programs to make it harder for fakes to proliferate. Both companies declined to be interviewed.”^[2]

The ability to evaluate what you’re looking at is crucial: a good-looking website can be very convincing, regardless of what it says. Such slickness makes irresponsible use of the principles we emphasize here in the INTD 106 modules on grammar and documentation: when writers pay attention to detail in content and form, readers are inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt that the argument itself is careful and accurate. Of course, such trust can be lost if the accuracy is only cosmetic, but a reader has to work a little harder to see beyond a slick surface. The more you research, the more you’ll see that sometimes the least professional-looking websites offer the most credible information, and the most professional-looking websites can be full of biased, misleading, or outright wrong information. To help you hone these important skills of evaluation, Milne Library has an extensive Research Guide titled “Decoding Fake News” and also hosts a GOLD workshop (Geneseo Opportunities for Leadership Development) called Fake News, Bias, and Perspective: How to Sort Fact From Fiction.

Both the Research Guide and the GOLD workshop touch on the important idea of confirmation bias, which is related to what the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker calls “the curse of knowledge” (we discuss that idea in the Writing Process module of INTD 106). Essentially, both confirmation bias and the curse of knowledge remind us how difficult it is to get beyond–or imagine a reader who comes from outside–what we already know.

There are no hard and fast rules when it comes to resource reliability.  Each new source has to be evaluated on its own merit, and this module will offer you a set of tools to help you do just that.

In this module, you’ll learn about tips and techniques to enable you to find, analyze, integrate, and document sources in your research. These are skills that will be reinforced in your writing-intensive and research-intensive courses, and Milne Library has several lovely Research Instruction Librarians.