In this Plutopia News Network podcast, author and social media expert Dave Evans discusses the nature and spread of online misinformation and introduces Does It Square?, an AI-assisted fact-checking tool designed to help users pause, evaluate claims, and ground conversations in shared facts. Evans explains that misinformation is often “half true,” built on a factual core but extended with unsupported interpretations that exploit emotion, division, and engagement-driven social media algorithms. Drawing on his long experience with social media’s evolution, he argues that ad-driven platforms amplify outrage and reinforce echo chambers, while bots and click farms further accelerate false narratives for profit. Rather than declaring content simply true or false, Does It Square focuses on linguistic analysis — identifying emotionally charged, authoritarian, or intuition-based language — to encourage media literacy, reflection, and more constructive dialogue in a polarized information environment.
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Dave Evans:
One of the more interesting facts about misinformation is that it’s generally about half-true. In developing Does It Square?, one of the first scales that I implemented was how true, how false is this? And what I found was everything was basically 50% right, because really good information starts with some kind of fact that everyone agrees, “this is a fact .” But then it extends that in a way that either the data or the methodology doesn’t support. It makes some kind of unfounded claim. It makes no references to anything that supports those extensions or those interpretations or anything like that. So you’re left with — okay, if this underlying fact is true and here’s the interpretation of it, wow, I mean, I guess that’s, you know, true. Well, not really.