In this week’s episode, Katie and Chris tackle news media’s usage of data. Is what you read believable? How would you go about proving it? We examine some recent claims in Bloomberg and Business Insider about racial slurs on Twitter and the process for verifying that claim, extending it to the role data-savvy organizations should play in ESG and social good. Tune in to learn more!

Key points:

There is still merit to the idea of the citizen analyst, but it is more difficult to achieve in the post-factual world. People are more likely to share information without fully reading or understanding it.

If you see data being used heavily in a news story, your first step should be to validate whether or not the news source itself is trustworthy.

If you have the capability, or if you have friends or colleagues who have the capability, it might be worth commissioning your own extraction and analysis of the data to see if the news story is accurate or even close to accurate.

[podcastsponsor]

Watch the video here:

Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here.

Listen to the audio here:

Download the MP3 audio here.

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

In this week’s In-Ear Insights, can you believe what you read in the news? So this past weekend, there was a news story that I saw in I think was either Bloomberg or Business Insider saying that on Twitter in particular, the increase in the usage of various racial and and other slurs was up.

I think the new stores had 500%, since the takeover of Twitter and new under under the new management.

And as soon as I read that, I said, is that true? Like? Could we verify it? Because see, yeah, I mean, sometimes you see a lot of stuff in the news being very performative sort of click Beatty stuff.

And so I asked the question, is that true? So Katie, when you see a story in the news, particularly story where there’s a big data point as the headline, what do you think?

Oh, I mean, the news like, I usually err on the side of I don’t know that that’s true until I can see other similar or authority, authoritative sources reporting the same kind of information.

And so obviously, I saw, you know, your analysis over the weekend, Chris.

But I also saw that same analysis, being picked up by larger publications from a quote unquote, third party, Social Media Research Agency, which I had never heard of before, which isn’t just saying anything, I haven’t heard of everything.

But it was one of those, like, if t