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Evaluating Information: the Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning

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Evaluating Information: the Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning

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The oft-referenced Stanford research that discovered that students are shockingly ill-equipped to discern between real and "fake news." (2016)

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Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning

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Over the last year and a half, the Stanford History Education Group has prototyped, field tested, and validated a bank of assessments that tap civic online reasoning-the ability to judge the credi...

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Stanford: An 2020 update of the original study on students' abilities to identify credible sources.

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Educating for Misunderstanding: How Approaches to Teaching Digital Literacy Make Students Susceptible to Scammers, Rogues, Bad Actors, and Hate Mongers

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Introduction
 Russian troll farms sow disinformation. Fake news runs amok on social media. Bots impersonate real people. Real people assume false identities. How do we know what's true? The onl...

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"Students Have Dismaying Inability to Tell Fake News"

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"Students Have Dismaying Inability to Tell Fake News"

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NPR reports on the findings of the 2016 Stanford Study.

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If the children are the future, the future might be very ill-informed.

That's one implication of a new study from Stanford researchers that evaluated students' ability to assess information sources and described the results as "dismaying," "bleak" and "[a] threat to democracy."

As content creators and social media platforms grapple with the fake news crisis, the study highlights the other side of the equation: What it looks like when readers are duped.

The researchers at Stanford's Graduate School of Education have spent more than a year evaluating how well students across the country can evaluate online sources of information.

Middle school, high school and college students in 12 states were asked to evaluate the information presented in tweets, comments and articles. More than 7,800 student responses were collected.

In exercise after exercise, the researchers were "shocked" - their word, not ours - by how many students failed to effectively evaluate the credibility of that information.

The students displayed a "stunning and dismaying consistency" in their responses, the researchers wrote, getting duped again and again. They weren't looking for high-level analysis of data but just a "reasonable bar" of, for instance, telling fake accounts from real ones, activist groups from neutral sources and ads from articles.

More than 80 percent of middle schoolers believed that 'sponsored content' was a real news story.

"Many assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally savvy about what they find there," the researchers wrote. "Our work shows the opposite."

A professional appearance and polished "About" section could easily persuade students that a site was neutral and authoritative, the study found, and young people tended to credulously accept information as presented even without supporting evidence or citations.

The research was divided by age group and used 15 different assessments. Here's a sample of some of the results:
Most middle school students can't tell native ads from articles.
The researchers showed hundreds of middle schoolers a Slate home page that included a traditional ad and a "native ad" - a paid story branded as "sponsored content" - as well as Slate articles.

Most students could identify the traditional ad, but more than 80 percent of them believed that the "sponsored content" article was a real news story.

"Some students even mentioned that it was sponsored content but still believed that it was a news article," the researchers wrote, suggesting the students don't know what "sponsored content" means.
Most high school students accept photographs as presented, without verifying them.
The researchers showed high school students a photograph of strange-looking flowers, posted on the image hosting site Imgur by a user named "pleasegoogleShakerAamerpleasegoogleDavidKelly. The caption read "Fukushima Nuclear Flowers: Not much more to say, this is what happens when flowers get nuclear birth defects."

Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford University and the lead author of the study, spoke to NPR on Tuesday.

"The photograph had no attribution. There was nothing that indicated that it was from anywhere," he said. "We asked students, 'Does this photograph provide proof that the kind of nuclear disaster caused these aberrations in nature?' And we found that over 80 percent of the high school students that we gave this to had an extremely difficult time making that determination.

"They didn't ask where it came from. They didn't verify it. They simply accepted the picture as fact."
Many high school students couldn't tell a real and fake news source apart on Facebook.

They didn't ask where it came from. They didn't verify it. They simply accepted the picture as fact.

One assessment presented two posts announcing Donald Trump's candidacy for president - one from the actual Fox News account, with a blue checkmark indicating it was verified, and one from an account that looked like Fox News.

"Only a quarter of the students recognized and explained the significance of the blue checkmark, a Stanford press release noted. "And over 30 percent of students argued that the fake account was more trustworthy."
Most college students didn't suspect potential bias in a tweet from an activist group.
The researchers sent undergraduate students a link to a tweet by MoveOn about gun owners' feelings on background checks, citing a survey by Public Policy Polling.

They asked students to evaluate the tweet and say why it might or might not be a good data source.

More than 30 percent of students thought a fake Fox News account was more trustworthy than the real one.

"Only a few students noted that the tweet was based on a poll conducted by a professional polling firm," which might make it a good source, the researchers wrote.

At the same time, less than a third of students cited the political agenda of MoveOn.org as a reason it might be a flawed source.

And more than half of the students didn't even click on the link within the tweet before evaluating the usefulness of the data.
Most Stanfordstudents couldn't identify the difference between a mainstream and fringe source.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, which publishes the journal Pediatrics, has more than 65,000 members and has been around since 1930.

Less than a third of students thought MoveOn.org has a political agenda that might justify skepticism about its data on gun owners.

The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) split from AAP in 2002, over objections to parenting by same-sex couples. ACPeds claims homosexuality is linked to pedophilia. It's classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which estimates that ACPeds has about 200 members.

In an article in Education Week, Wineburg and his colleague Sarah McGrew explain that they directed Stanford undergrads to articles on both organizations' sites. The students spent up to 10 minutes evaluating them, and were free to click links or Google anything they liked.

"More than half concluded that the article from the American College of Pediatricians ... was 'more reliable,' " the researchers wrote. "Even students who preferred the entry from the American Academy of Pediatrics never uncovered the differences between the two groups."

You can see in-depth examples of some of the exercises - including sample responses - at the study's executive summary.

The project began before the recent uproar over the prevalence of fake news online. But its relevance is immediately clear.

Wineburg told NPR on Tuesday that the study demonstrates that U.S. classrooms haven't caught up to the way information is influencing kids daily.

"What we see is a rash of fake news going on that people pass on without thinking," he said. "And we really can't blame young people because we've never taught them to do otherwise."

In fact, as Wineburg and McGrew wrote in Education Week, some schools have filters directing students to valid sources, which doesn't give them practice learning to evaluate sources for themselves.

The solution, they write, is to teach students - or, really, all Internet users - to read like fact checkers.

That means not just reading "vertically," on a single page or source, but looking for other sources - as well as not taking "About" pages as evidence of neutrality, and not assuming Google ranks results by reliability.

"The kinds of duties that used to be the responsibility of editors, of librarians now fall on the shoulders of anyone who uses a screen to become informed about the world," Wineburg told NPR. "And so the response is not to take away these rights from ordinary citizens but to teach them how to thoughtfully engage in information seeking and evaluating in a cacophonous democracy."

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Students Have 'Dismaying' Inability To Tell Fake News From Real, Study Finds

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Stanford researchers assessed students from middle school to college and found they struggled to distinguish ads from articles, neutral sources from biased ones and fake accounts from real ones.

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"Fake news" portal site from Gale: access news & journal articles, media links, reference sources & curated web links.

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OXNARD UHSD Online Resources (Resources)

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A brief introduction to the SIFT strategy for determining credible sources, by its originator, Mike Caulfield (WA State University)

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Don’t believe what you see – digging deeper for the truth – Linking Learning

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How can students get better at sorting truth from fiction from everything in between? At applying their attention to the things that matter? At amplifying better treatments of issues, and avoiding …

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"It’s not the web it used to be and our traditional approaches to teaching about it no longer make sense." New strategies & links to resources from School Library Journal.

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A new study from the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG): Educating for Misunderstanding: How Approaches to Teaching Digital Literacy Make Students Susceptible to Scammers, Rogues, Bad Actors, and Hate Mongers, reveals some of the issues.

Researchers studied 263 college students at a large East Coast state university and presented them with two tasks.

The first asked students to evaluate the trustworthiness of a news story from a satirical website. Two-thirds of the students failed to recognize the article as satire. The few who left the article to investigate the S eattle Tr ibune's website found the clear disclaimer:

The Seattle Tribune is a news and entertainment satire web publication. . . .All news articles contained within The Seattle Tribune are fictional and presumably satirical.

The second task asked students to evaluate the credibility of an article on the Minimumwage.com website. Though the cloaked site claims to sponsor nonpartisan research, a quick search of its parent organization, the Employment Policies Institute, reveals connections between the Institute and a professional restaurant industry lobbyist with clear interest in maintaining a lower minimum wage.

Relating to the cloaked site task, the study noted that 85% of the college students neglected to explore beyond the site to investigate its trustworthiness, relying solely on the information the site itself offered. While 45% of the college students did reject the site, they "based their judgment on irrelevant features, like the site's top-level domain . . . Only seven students out of 138 connected minimumwage.com to the public relations firm of Berman and Company"

Educating for Misunderstanding reveals that at the university level:

Students struggled. They employed inefficient strategies that made them vulnerable to forces, whether satirical or malevolent, that threaten informed citizenship.

Overall, the study concluded that students:

Focused exclusively on the website or prompt, rarely consulting the broader web.

Trusted how a site presented itself on its About page

Applied out-of-date and in some cases incorrect strategies (such as accepting or rejecting a site because of its top-level domain)

Attributed undue weight to easily manipulated signals of credibility-such as an organization's non-profit status, its links to authoritative sources, or "look" (p. 3)

So, what do we do?

Well before they reach the university, it's time to put down the checklists and the score cards. And it's beyond time to lose the artificial hoax sites. In many cases the students failed using approaches we've promoted.

Alarmingly, students' approach was consistent with guidelines that can be found on many college and university websites. Sometimes these materials are just plain wrong. Sometimes they are incomplete. Sometimes they are so inconsistent that they offer scant guidance for navigating the treacherous terrain of today's internet. Educational institutions must do a better job helping students become discerning consumers of digital information.

Educating for Misunderstanding, as well as other recent work by SHEG and Mike Caulfield, reveal that traditional digital literacy tools-guidelines like the CRAAP test- simply do not work when faced with a web filled with hoaxes and deep fakes and cloaked sites and source hackers and scammers.

In fact, the old tools do more harm than good. Using top level domains, About pages, and update frequency as binary heuristics for authority are dangerous practices to promote. Believing in the inherent trustworthiness of .orgs; noting a site's attractive design and lack of typos; and celebrating the inclusion of footnotes are ineffective strategies for fact checking.

Sometimes, you've got to leave the page. All the careful reading and spotting of clues won't work when the answer is not on the page itself-when the page, or the image, is professional designed to deceive. You need to use tools like reverse image searching, triangulation and seeking original sources.

When confronted with dubious claims, Caulfield's SIFT (The Four Moves) suggests students:

Check for previous work: Look around to see if someone else has already fact-checked the claim or provided a synthesis of research.

Go upstream to the source: Go "upstream" to the source of the claim. Most web content is not original. Get to the original source to understand the trustworthiness of the informatio n.

Read laterally: Once you get to the source of a claim, read what other people say about the source (publication, author, etc.). The truth is in the network.

Circle back: If you get lost, hit dead ends, or find yourself going down an increasingly confusing rabbit hole, back up and start over knowing what you know now. You're likely to take a more informed path with different search terms and better decisions.

Michael Caulfield's Four Moves & A Habit

In a landscape filled with information landmines, strategies like lateral reading are critical. Educating for Misunderstanding warns:

The basic assumptions of the CRAAP test are rooted in an analog age: Websites are like print texts. The best way to evaluate them is to read them carefully. But websites are not variations of print documents. The internet operates by wholly different rules.

Isn't it time to ditch the checklists and offer our kiddos wholly different tools?
Resources and References Civic Online Reasoning website Stanford History Education Group website
Wineburg, Sam, Joel Breakstone, Nadav Ziv, and Mark Smith. (2020). "Educating for Misunderstanding: How Approaches to Teaching Digital Literacy Make Students Susceptible to Scammers, Rogues, Bad Actors, and Hate Mongers" (Working Paper A-21322, Stanford History Education Group, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 2020). https://purl.stanford.edu/mf412bt5333.

Wineburg, Sam and Sarah McGrew. (2019). Lateral Reading and the Nature of Expertise: Reading Less and Learning More When Evaluating Digital Information. Teachers College Record, 121(11), n11. Preprint available.

Caulfield, Michael. (2019). Check, Please! Starter Course.

Caulfield, Michael. (2017). Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers

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Enough with the CRAAP: We're just not doing it right - NeverEndingSearch

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A new study from the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG): Educating for Misunderstanding: How Approaches to Teaching Digital Literacy Make Students Susceptible to Scammers, Rogues, Bad Actors, and Hate Mongers, reveals some of the issues. Researchers studied 263 college students at a large East Coast state university and presented them with two tasks.

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"Truth, Truthiness, Triangulation: a Toolkit..."

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"Truth, Truthiness, Triangulation: a Toolkit..."

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With numerous links to portal sites, lessons, fact-checking tools and other resources (School Library Journal)

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We were guaranteed a free press, We were not guaranteed a neutral or a true press. We can celebrate the journalistic freedom to publish without interference from the state. We can also celebrate our freedom to share multiple stories through multiple lenses.

But it has always been up to the reader or viewer to make the reliability and credibility decisions. It is up to the reader or viewer to negotiate truth.

News literacy is complicated. In our attempts to discern truth, we are confounded by a 24/7 news cycle. News hits us across media platforms and devices, in a landscape populated by all degrees of professional journalists and citizen journalists and satirists and hoaxers and folks paid or personally moved to write intentionally fake news. All of this is compounded by the glories and the drawbacks of user-generated content, citizen journalism, and a world of new news choices.

Professional journalists themselves face new practical and ethical challenges relating to anonymity, privacy and safety, as well as reliability in their attempts to verify sources of breaking news from social media and user-generated content in all media formats. (The Verification Handbooks are a wonderful lens into this complicated process.) The Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics lists four guiding principles; the first of which is seek truth and report it.

Even news that is vetted by editors and publishers sometimes emerges from that process a bit processed, perhaps leaning in a particular direction.

And word choice itself is connected to truth. Over the course of the last decade we've seen professional news organizations and governments struggle with the politics and potential loadedness of words, notably terrorist and illegal immigrant. (See the AP Stylebook Blog and Reuters Handbook of Journalism.)
On news literacy
In its glossary, Stony Brook University's Center for News Literacy defines news literacy as:

The ability to use critical thinking skills to judge the reliability and credibility of news reports, whether they come via print, television or the Internet.

Our kids need new types of filters. Beyond larger notions of information literacy, I see the case for a specific focus on news literacy. Not as a lesson of good vs. bad. Not as an attempt to pitch traditional media against social media or peer review against popular publication. Not through the examination of hoaky hoax sites. And certainly not as a one-of, checklist type of lesson for a 9th grade social studies teacher in September.

We need to teach the important lessons of everyday civics for new consumption and production landscapes. These lessons involve sustained critical thinking, a practice to engage in regularly as we read and view and inquire with learners of all ages acros s disciplines.

A recent Stanford Graduate School of Education report, Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Literacy assessed the news literacy of students from middle school through college.

Students were asked to perform such tasks as: determine the trustworthiness of tweets, distinguish between news articles and opinion columns, identify ads on a news website, compare and evaluate posts from a newspaper's comment section, identify the blue checkmark that distinguishes a verified Facebook account from a fake one, consider the relative strength of evidence presented by two posters in a Facebook exchange, decide whether or not to trust a photo on a photo-sharing website, determine whether a website can be trusted in an open web search, search to verify a claim about a controversial issue, assess the reliability of a partisan website, identify the strengths and weaknesses of an online video. (p. 6) (Note: Most of these tasks could authentically be taught in our libraries during the natural course of any inquiry project.)

The Executive Summary shared disturbing results:

By high school, we would hope that students reading about gun laws would notice that a chart came from a gun owners' political action committee. And, in 2016, we would hope college students, who spend hours each day online, would look beyond a .org URL and ask who's behind a site that presents only one side of a contentious issue. But in every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students' lack of preparation . . .

Never have we had so much information at our fingertips. Whether this bounty will make us smarter and better informed or more ignorant and narrow-minded will depend on our awareness of this problem and our educational response to it. At present, we worry that democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish. (pp. 5-6)

I see a serious need for librarians to build a few seaworthy arks from the news media flood to aid students in discerning credibility, reliability, and bias in context of their information needs and the context of the text itself. I can see us introducing the broad notion of triangulation to children for whom the word may be difficult to say.
What's going on? Fake news
In the weeks leading up to the election we were drawn to stories about Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump and WikiLeaks' confirmation that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS.

Fake news is not new. But its potential for virality is and our awareness of it is newly awakened. Some suggested it played a role in the outcome of the election. Google and Facebook both announced that they would try to eliminate fake news from appearing in their result lists and newsfeeds by blocking fake news sources from using their ad networks.

This video TEDEd by Damon Brown offers a student-friendly explanation as well as strategies for analyzing news sources:

And fake news is but one flavor of news that is less than accurate. It is but one bucket into which readers and viewers should sort types of truthiness.

Fake news itself comes in a variety of flavors:

Pure fake news sites use fabricated stories to lure traffic, encourage clicks (click bait), influence or profit using intentionally deceptive, but highly intriguing, often sensational information.

Hoax sites also share false information with the intention to trick readers/viewers

Satirical sites present news with a comical, often exaggerated spin

Born digital images and edited images alter and often misrepresent visual reality

In addition, sometimes journalists just get things wrong. Their sources they choose to interview may not offer truth or a full picture. Stories reported in process lack the wisdom of hindsight and may be missing full context.
Post-truth or truthiness
Oxford Dictionaries recently announced post-truth as its 2016 international Word of the Year. Oxford defines the word as relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

It is well worth noting that the concept is not new. Oxford traces post-truth's history from a peripheral term simmering for at least a decade to its dramatic spike this year: in the context of the Brexit referendum in the UK and the presidential election in the US, and becoming associated overwhelmingly with a particu lar noun, in the phrase "post-truth politics."

Back in 2005, Stephen Colbert introduced the Word truthiness, now defined by Wikipedia as a quality characterizing a "truth" that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

While we need to reject the notion of relying solely on from-the-gut verification systems, it is important to recognize that we are not always looking at a binary situation.

Credibility decisions are complicated. Most news is not simply fake or true. News from traditional sources can be suspect as well. Professional journalists engage in rigorous fact-checking and adhere to sets of professional ethics, but they are not entirely immune to bias or agenda or the pressures of a deadline. A single story may tell a part of a larger story at the moment of its publishing. Of course, traditional newspapers feature writing of all sorts-straight reporting, editorials, features, columns, advertisements and comments in their digital versions. Several traditional news sources are to various degrees either right or left leaning. While some admit their bias, others do not.

It is impossible to dismiss the complication that our political news consumption habits have shifted. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit and Tumblr played huge roles in disseminating political information during the past election season. A May 2016 Pew Research Center study found that a majority of U.S. adults - 62% - get news on social media, and 18% do so often. In terms of the total population, this translates to social media news reaching 67% of U.S. adults. The two-thirds of Facebook users who get news there, then, amount to 44% of the general population. Consider this results of this report in the context of with the decline of the newspaper industry also documented by recent Pew Research Center data.

Some Rules of thumb:

Check About and About me pages: Clicking on or investigate authors names to consider their credentials in context should be a regular part of the research journey. (See other tricks below.)

Interrogate urls: We see quite a bit of domain manipulation these days. For instance, what looks like an .edu domain, followed by .co or "lo" is likely a fake or deceptive site. If you are you seeing a slightly variant version of a well-known URL, do a little investigating.

Suspect the sensational: When we see something posted that looks sensational, it is even more important to be skeptical. Exaggerated and provocative headlines with excessive use of capital letters or emotional language are serious red flags.

Go back to the source: When an article mentions a study, if you can, go directly to the source and check its bona fides as well.

Go back to the story again (and again): When was the story written? What is its context? Breaking news will continue to break. Early reports are built from limited information so you'll want to watch a story grow into a fuller picture.

Think outside the reliability box: The old checklist-type tools we used to evaluate websites do not necessarily work. ACRL's Framework reminds us that the notion of reliability can be fluid. Experts know how to seek authoritative voices but also recognize that unlikely voices can be authoritative, depending on need. On Twitter's 10th birthday this year, Poynter, the respected journalism portal, listed 10 Twitter How Tos -guides for using Twitter for journalism from its own archive. Students can benefit from these tips too.

Triangulate: Try to verify or corroborate the information in multiple sources, including traditional media and library databases. You can begin to rule out the hoaxes by checking out sites like the nonprofit, nonpartisan FactCheck.org, or popular sites like Snopes or Hoax-Slayer.

What exactly are you reading?: Even when you find yourself in a traditional news site, identify what type of writing you are reading. Is it news reporting, or a feature story, or an editorial, or work by a guest blogger, or a review, or an op-ed or a disguised ad, or a comment?

Check your own search attitude and biases: Is your search language biased in any way? Are you paying more attention to the information that confirms your own beliefs and ignoring evidence that does not?

Use a little energy: Have you simply satisficed or have you done your due diligence in seeking and validating the best possible sources across media sources?

Stop before you forward (or use): When you see a widely shared or forwarded link, be suspicious of a hoax or a fake story. Can you verify the information outside of the social media platform on which you discovered it?

Be suspicious of pictures!: Not all photographs tell truth or unfiltered truth. Images are normally edited or process, but sometimes they are digitally manipulated. Some are born digital. A Google reverse image search can help discover the source of an image and its possible variations.

Remember Time Magazine's darkening of the OJ mugshot?

Remember Sandy?

Infographics are carefully constructed visual media messages. The data, the evidence, the sources, and the arguments they present beg careful deconstruction, scrutiny and analysis. (See my post.)
Some news literacy vocabulary to introduce in talking about credibility:

cloaked sites appear unbiased and professional but actually advocate on behalf of an organization or cause while concealing their true sources of funding and purpose.

confirmation bias: the tendency to believe information is credible if it conforms to the reader's/viewer's existing belief system, or not credible if it does not conform

container collapse: my own term for our trouble discerning the original information container, format or information type-blog, book, pamphlet, government document, chapter, magazine, newspaper, journal, or section of the newspaper or magazine or journal-once publishing cues are removed and every source looks like a digital page or a printout.

content farm or content mill: a company that employs a staff of freelance writers to create content designed to satisfy search engine retrieval algorithms with the goal of attracting views and advertising revenue.

In news media an echo chamber is a metaphorical description of a situation in which information, ideas, or beliefs are amplified or reinforced by transmission and repetition inside an "enclosed" system, where different or competing views are censored, disallowed, or otherwise underrepresentedecho chamber: "." (Wikipedia)

fact checking: the act of verifying assertions either prior to publication or after dissemination of the content

filter bubble: When search tools present with the stories we are likely to click on or share based on our past activity, potentially affirming our biases, we need may be experiencing what Eli Pariser calls a filter bubble,

herding phenomenon: as more journalists begin to cover a story, even more journalists are likely to join the herd, imitating the angle the story initially took rather than developing alternate or original approaches or angles.

native advertising: paid, sponsored content designed to look like the legitimate content produced by the media outlet

satisficing: a portmanteau of the words satisfy and suffice introduced by Herbert Simon in 1956 to refer to the tendency of people, bounded by time limitations, to select good enough information over optimal information

sockpuppet: an online identify created to pose as a party unaffiliated with the media puppeteer in order to deceive.

triangulation or cross verification: Researchers establish validity by using several research methods and by analyzing and examining multiple perspectives and sources in the hope that diverse viewpoints will can shed greater light on a topic.

virality: the rapid circulation of media from one user to another. When we forward sensational stories, often from social media without checking their credibility in other sources, we increase their virality.

Resources for a post truth teaching toolkit:

ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Authority Is Constructed and Contextual: Though aimed at university students, this important document reframes the way we consider authority and is well worth examining with high school students and faculty. The Framework recommends the following student dispositions:Learners who are developing their information literate abilities

develop and maintain an open mind when encountering varied and sometimes conflicting perspectives;

motivate themselves to find authoritative sources, recognizing that authority may be conferred or manifested in unexpected ways;

develop awareness of the importance of assessing content with a skeptical stance and with a self-awareness of their own biases and worldview;

question traditional notions of granting authority and recognize the value of diverse ideas and worldviews;

are conscious that maintaining these attitudes and actions requires frequent self-evaluation.

False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and Satirical "News" Sources: a dynamic Google Doc filled with tips from Melissa Zimdars, Assistant Professor of Communication and Media at Merrimack College.

The Center for News Literacy from Stony Brook University's School of Journalism, offers an impressive Digital Resources Center that includes

Ripped from the Headlines: Fresh news literacy lessons, based on the latest news, ready to use in class

Course Pack: organized around eight major concepts, the 14-module curriculum takes students from the first information revolution of Johannes Gutenberg's printing press to the Digital Age of Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook. Each lesson stands alone or can easily be integrated into your program. Don't miss the very useful new Glossary.

Get a Global View: Instructional resources from the Center's international partners

DIY News Literacy Lessons: Inspiration and lessons templates for creating your own instruction around news literacy concepts.

News Literacy Project: Begun by an LA Times investigative reporter and supported by several newspapers and news organizations, the NLP is an innovative national education program that equips middle school and high school students with the tools to be smart, active consumers of news and information and engaged, informed citizens. Don't miss the four modules, lessons and Check Tool in the Checkology Virtual Classroom.

NewseumED: Learning tools on media literacy. Don't miss the Resources for Promoting Dialogue Post Election and Today's Front Pages

Center for Media Literacy: Dedicated to leadership, education and professional development, the pioneering CML offers a free Global OnRamp (in multiple languages) built around its research-based framework and five key questions for deconstructing and constructing media.

Media Education Lab: Teaching Resources: The University of Rhode Island's Harrington School of Communication and Media offers a wealth of resources. Don't miss Mind Over Media, a crowdsourced website that contains diverse examples of contemporary propaganda on a wide range of social, political, economic and environmental topics, as well as the six-lesson CCSS-aligned high school curriculum unit on contemporary propaganda.

Frank Baker's Media Literacy Clearinghouse: Don't miss the Media's Role in Politics

Verification Handbook for Investigative Reporting: Aimed at professional journalists, but very useful for high school, this companion to the Verification Handbook for Emergency Coverage, which addresses breaking news, provides the fundamentals of online search and research techniques for investigations and takes a deeper into techniques for user generated content investigations

Time For Kids shares a video News Matters in which 6th graders discuss what they are learning about critical thinking and the news. critically about the information they come across.

Project CORA: Community of Online Research Assignments an open access resource for faculty and librarians

Fake News vs. Real News: Determining the Reliability of Sources NYTimes Learning Network

SchoolJournalism.org: News, Journalism and Media Literacy: This rich portal, administered by the Reynolds High School Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, contains a wealth of resources and suggested tools for teachers of journalism and the rest of us. Check out the interdisciplinary News Literacy Model Curriculum and Lesson Plans as well as the Six Principles of News Literacy

Teaching Information Literacy Now, from SLJ Librarian of the Year finalist, Laura Gardner

Fake 'News' in a 'Post-truth' World from reflection from Professor Judi Moreillon who shares: Fake "news" and a "post-truth" world call all school librarians to step up and lead

Resources for building a news literacy toolkit

FactCheck.org: Annenberg Public Policy Center's nonpartisan, nonprofit "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. Check out the post That Chain E-Mail Your Friend Sent to You is (Likely) Bogus. Seriously, for its Key Characteristics of Bogusness and the Viral Spiral page for claims previously checked

Washington Post's Fact Checker: The purpose of this Web site, and an accompanying column in the Sunday print edition of The Washington Post, is to "truth squad" the statements of political figures regarding issues of great importance, be they national, international or local.

PolitiFact.com: a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others who speak up in American politics, run by editors and reporters from the Tampa Bay Times. (Note: I discovered their truth-o-meter after I created the little image for this post.)

Snopes: Since way back in the 90s, Snopes has been dispelling urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.

Hoax-Slayer: Australian Brett Christensen has been debunking email and social media hoaxes and spam since 2003

Craig Silverman's BuzzFeed blog: The founding editor for BuzzFeed, Canada has been writing for many years for a variety of publications on media accuracy and verification issues.

Whois Lookup: This tool allows you to investigate the domain behind a website

CRAAP Test: Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy, Purpose posted by the Meriam Library, California State University, Chico.

Kathy Schrock's 5W's of Website Evaluation

Does This Website Smell Funny to You? Amy Gillespie's FART test posted in Knowledge Quest will grab middle schoolers' attention

Evaluating Sources Using the RADAR Framework: RADAR stands for relevance, authority, date, relevance, rationale. Mandalios, J. (2013). RADAR: An approach for helping students evaluate Internet sources. Journal of Information Science, 39(4), 470-478.

Previous NeverEnding Search posts: Other favorite resources:

Abilock, Debbie. (2012). True-or not?. Educational Leadership, 69(6), 70-74. Debbie shares her quick and dirty rules of thumb-digital reading strategies, in fact-that will intrigue students, spark their curiosity, and serve as sensible entry points to more sophisticated analyses of ideas. Don't miss the section on Weighing Truths in Wikipedia.

Stanford History Education Group. (2016). Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Literacy.

Stebbins, Leslie F. (2015). Finding Reliable Information Online: Adventures of an Information Sleuth. Rowman & Littlefield.

Stevenson, Sara. (2016). Information Literacy Lessons Crucial in a Post Truth World. Knowledge Quest.
And finally . . .
Nurturing information literate, responsible, active citizens is what librarians do. There are no guarantees of truth from any source. We teach students to be discerning consumers of information. We teach them to deconstruct media messages and construct their own messages. We teach them to interrogate their sources. As the landscape continues to shift, librarians must update our own skill sets and toolkits to guide students in navigating a growingly nuanced universe of news. We must also examine and recognize our own biases so that we are open to contrary and conflicting ideas. This is our banner to wave, our curriculum to co-teach.

Of course, following the paths I've described for critical vetting of the news is work!

This is a new landscape from the one we taught in even five years ago. We need new compasses for navigation.

I do not believe we can stem the tide of fake news and truthiness and political memes and viral rumors and quick rushes to judgment. I do believe that together we can build a few arks.

Welcome to the brave new world of truth.

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Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a "post-truth" world - NeverEndingSearch

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We were guaranteed a free press, We were not guaranteed a neutral or a true press. We can celebrate the journalistic freedom to publish without interference from the state. We can also celebrate our freedom to share multiple stories through multiple lenses. But it has always been up to the reader or viewer to make [...]

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"Why Can't a Generation that  Grew Up Online Spot Misinformation?"

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"Why Can't a Generation that  Grew Up Online Spot Misinformation?"

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LA Times, 2020: references the Stanford Study and includes links to relevant websites

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The 2020 election has once again demonstrated how easy it is to spread misinformation online. And universities across the U.S. are failing in teaching students how to identify it. Many colleges offer students guides to evaluate the trustworthiness of websites. But too many of them base their advice on a report from 1998. That's nine years before the first iPhone, and 18 years before Russian interference sparked an urgent discussion on how we interpret information online.

There's something deeply wrong with using advice on the internet of 20 years ago to teach students how they should interact with the internet of today. That demands 21st century skills.

In a report released last month that we co-authored for the Stanford History Education Group, we saw what happens when educators provide students with outdated advice. Most of the 263 college students we tested floundered when trying to discern fact from fiction online.

Students viewed a post of a "news story" from the Seattle Tribune, a satirical site whose masthead proudly proclaimed that "any resemblance to the truth is purely coincidental." Two-thirds failed to identify the story as satirical.

On another task, students examined a site offering "nonpartisan" research that argued against raising the minimum wage. The site is actually run by a PR firm that also represents the restaurant industry. Nine in 10 students never made that connection.

Why are intelligent students falling for misinformation they could easily identify with a quick search? It's not that they lacked strategies. It's that the strategies deployed were forged during the internet's Paleolithic era. To students' detriment, many of these strategies remain prominent on colleges' and universities' guides for web credibility.

Students displayed an almost religious faith in the meaning of domains - particularly dot-orgs. "Reliable sources have .org at the end of the URL," said one sophomore. Numerous college internet guides suggest that dot-orgs are credible because they are restricted to nonprofits. That's just plain wrong. Anyone can purchase or acquire a dot-org, including for-profit companies such as Craigslist and hate groups such as Stormfront.

Students similarly turned to a site's "About" page to determine credibility. One prominent university says an About page can "help determine a mission, point of view, or agenda." A media outlet tells readers to be skeptical if the About page's language is "melodramatic and seems overblown." But dispassionate language is just as dangerous when it confers legitimacy on a shady site. Students should be told that, like Instagram profiles, About pages present curated portraits of how people and organizations want to be perceived.

One of the most common tools for teaching web credibility is called the CRAAP test (standing for Currency, Relevance, Authority, Accuracy and Purpose), popularized by a librarian at Cal State Chico. Versions of it are used by universities across the United States, including at other schools in the Cal State and University of California systems.

The CRAAP test assumes that websites are like print texts - the best way to evaluate them is to read them carefully. Except skilled web searchers do the opposite. When professional fact-checkers land on an unfamiliar site, their first move is to leave it by opening new tabs and checking other sources.

There's good news too. Our study shows that students who followed the same method as professional fact-checkers upped their chances for success. They learned that the Seattle Tribunewas fake news and discovered that the "nonpartisan" Employment Policies Institute was managed by a PR firm that also represents the restaurant industry and opposes raising the minimum wage.

Some institutions, including Rowan University and the University of Louisville, are creating materials based on what fact-checkers do. Their lesson plans equip students with strategies to be intelligent digital consumers. And even modest interventions - in one case just 150 minutes in two college classes - can lead to marked improvements.

We're in the midst of an infodemic that imperils our students' ability to make informed decisions. Changing course will require multiple tactics. First and foremost, we need to cut the CRAAP and stop teaching ineffective strategies. We need to create a menu of regularly updated courses that teach students how to recognize misinformation, empowering them to be engaged and thoughtful citizens.

Additionally, we need to work together across departments and specializations rather than mainly putting this challenge on the shoulders of college librarians. Overhauling a 20th century curriculum for a digital 21st century requires a group effort.

Doctors who develop a patient's treatment plan without considering medical advances are negligent. And universities are derelict when they teach or provide source evaluation strategies without considering how today's internet functions.

Because when anti-vaccine content goes mainstream, when Holocaust deniers peddle digital pseudo-histories, and when issues such as gerrymandering and police brutality are litigated online, no one can afford to shelter in place.
Sam Wineburg is a professor of education at Stanford University. His latest book is "Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone.)" Nadav Ziv is a junior majoring in international relations at Stanford.

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Op-Ed: Why can't a generation that grew up online spot the misinformation in front of them?

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The 2020 election has once again demonstrated how easy it is to spread misinformation online. And universities across the U.S. are failing in teaching students how to identify it. Many colleges offer students guides to evaluate the trustworthiness of websites. But too many of them base their advice on a report from 1998.

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A brief article which discusses the motivations behind those who create fakes on social media. School Library Journal. 2020

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Strategies to help students determine determine whether a video has been altered include analyzing what motivates people to create fakes in the first place.

Last year, a viral video featured the opening credits of Full House with all of the sitcom actors' faces replaced with actor Nick Offerman's face. The video, which utilizes deep fake technology to create these face swaps, is funny, at least in part because we are all in on the joke. As viewers, we know that Offerman didn't play all of the roles on this popular TV show from more three decades ago.

But what happens when we're not all in on the joke? How do we know when videos that look plausible have been manipulated to deceive or manipulate the viewer? More importantly, how do we teach today's learners fact from fiction in a world where seeing is no longer believing?

What is a deep fake?

The term deep fake refers to a video that has been edited using software to replace the person in the original video with someone else in a way that makes the video look authentic. Initially, these videos primarily targeted celebrities. But as the technology has grown more advanced, deep fakes have become a focus of U.S. intelligence efforts to curb misinformation and disinformation. Even former President Obama loaned his likeness to support efforts to inform Americans of the growing threat.

Currently, the software and skill set required to create really convincing deep fakes remains limited to a relatively small group of people. But as with all information, social media has sped up its democratization. Indeed, TikTok and Snapchat, two of the most popular social media among young people, recently integrated deep-fake technology that allows users to swap faces within each app in order to easily create their own deep fakes. Additionally, YouTube has usurped all other social media in popularity, making the medium of video, a large and ubiquitous part of our information diets.

According to KQED's Above The Noise, there remain some digital "tells" that offer clues to a video's authenticity:

Look for the mugshot More primitive deep fake software results in video in which the person is either facing forward or directly to one side-like a mug shot photo.

The eyes (and teeth) have it There are some areas of the face that some deep fake software continues to struggle with, including the teeth and eyes. Eyes often naturally change shape as the face moves, and teeth may not appear to line up properly all the time. If eyes and teeth appear static, it can signal a crack in a video's credibility.

A bad spray tan Blotchy patches or uneven skin tone can be a sign that something is amiss.

Bad lip syncing If the mouth and voice don't quite match up, there could be a problem.

Suspicious shadows This is harder to detect, but in manipulated videos shadows in the background may not match the size/shape of the people supposedly creating the shadows.

It's important to remember that these clues alone do not mean that a video has been altered. What's more, as deep fake technology becomes more advanced, and access to those advances become more readily available, savvy digital detectives will have to look for other clues to determine whether a video is credible.

The WHOA! test

Whether working with a group of fifth graders or a room full of their teachers and librarians, we often nudge learners to ask themselves whether or not a video passes the "WHOA!" test. It's simple: If a post, article, or video makes you say "WHOA!" because it's upsetting, outrageous, or too good to be true, that feeling indicates a need to investigate further.

Extreme emotional reactions to the news, and other information, should be a signal to RESIST the urge to share-although our instinct is often to do the exact opposite. When we let emotion take the wheel, we make poor choices about passing on information.

Read:It's Time To Go Mobile While Teaching Media Literacy

Videos are especially good at triggering emotional responses, in part because we often view video as irrefutable evidence of truth. Also, video has elements that aren't present in text or still images-movement, vocal inflection, and music-all evoke meaning, emotion, and bias in our brains. Even those who lean towards healthy skepticism when consuming information online can be tempted to let down their guard when viewing a video. We have been trained to believe that seeing is believing.

Deep fake technology, coupled with a new information landscape where trained and citizen journalists alike compete to be first to produce the next viral account, has made the use of emotional triggers to gain clicks in the commonplace. These realities should prompt changes to media literacy instruction to include support for students learning to recognize the emotional triggers that cause us to click.

The usual suspects

One effective strategy to helping learners recognize credibility issues is to have them consider the motives of the video creators. There are a couple of profiles of potential suspects for a virtual "lineup" that can help fledgling digital detectives connect a video's clues with the possible motivation.

Motives: A desire to divide, diminish, and destroy. For trolls, it can be personal. They take pleasure in hurting others, and these attacks somehow bolster their own self-esteem. Online bullies often fall into this category. Videos posted by trolls are often intended to embarrass and humiliate others.

Tools : Personal attacks, sensational language and rage bait, playing on existing biases.

Wins: Trolls win when they get attention or make others feel bad about themselves. They win when they are able to trigger "cancel culture" and when their handiwork goes viral.

Losses: Trolls lose when their work results in crickets-silence-and/or is met with kindness.

Suspect 2: the click-chaser

Motives: Fame! The click chaser seeks your online validation. Money and influence are secondary to likes, though likes often translate into money and influence.

Tools : Potpourri! The click-chaser will use anything at their disposal, but some of their favorite tools are clickbait or rage bait, videos accompanied by titles in ALL CAPS!, and video content that plays on emotions.

Wins: The click-chaser wins when we share their content. They want to be famous-one click, like, and share at a time.

Losses: click-chasers lose when we don't click.

Jennifer LaGarde (librarygirl.net, @jenniferlagarde) and Darren Hudgins (about.me/darren_hudgins) are co-authors of Fact VS Fiction: Teaching Critical Thinking In the Age of Fake News (ISTE 2018; #FactVSFiction). LaGarde's passions include leveraging technology to help students develop authentic reading lives and meeting the needs of students living in poverty. Hudgins is the CEO of Think | Do | Thrive. He works with educators, school leaders, districts, and school organizations to build experiences promoting thought, play, and innovation.

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A Deep Dive into Deep Fakes: Media Literacy in a World Where Seeing Is no Longer Believing

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Strategies to help students determine determine whether a video has been altered include analyzing what motivates people to create fakes in the first place. Last year, a viral video featured the opening credits of Full House with all of the sitcom actors' faces replaced with actor Nick Offerman's face.

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"The Psychology of Misinformation: Why We're Vulnerable"

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"The Psychology of Misinformation: Why We're Vulnerable"

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First Draft News introduces the key psychological concepts that relate to our susceptibility to misinformation. (2020)

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The psychology of misinformation - the mental shortcuts, confusions, and illusions that encourage us to believe things that aren't true - can tell us a lot about how to prevent its harmful effects. Our psychology is what affects whether corrections work, what we should teach in media literacy courses, and why we're vulnerable to misinformation in the first place. It's also a fascinating insight into the human brain.

Though psychological concepts originate in academia, many have found their way into everyday language. Cognitive dissonance, first described in 1957, is one; confirmation bias is another. And this is part of the problem. Just as we have armchair epidemiologists, we can easily become armchair cognitive scientists, and mischaracterization of these concepts can create new forms of misinformation.

If reporters, fact checkers, researchers, technologists, and influencers working with misinformation (which, let's face it, is almost all of them) don't understand these distinctions, it isn't simply a case of mistaking an obscure academic term. It risks becoming part of the problem.

We list the major psychological concepts that relate to misinformation, its correction, and prevention. They're intended as a starting point rather than the last word - use the suggested further reading to dive deeper.
This is the first in our series on the psychology of misinformation. Read the second, "The psychology of misinformation: Why we're vulnerable", and the third, "The psychology of misinformation: How to prevent it".
Cognitive miserliness

The psychological feature that makes us most vulnerable to misinformation is that we are 'cognitive misers. We prefer to use simpler, easier ways of solving problems than ones requiring more thought and effort. We've evolved to use as little mental effort as possible.

This is part of what makes our brains so efficient: You don't want to be thinking really hard about every single thing. But it also means we don't put enough thought into things when we need to - for example, when thinking about whether something we see online is true

Dual process theory

Dual process theory is the idea that we have two basic ways of thinking: System 1, an automatic process that requires little effort; and System 2, an analytical process that requires more effort. Because we are cognitive misers, we generally will use System 1 thinking (the easy one) when we think we can get away with it.

Automatic processing creates the risk of misinformation for two reasons. First, the easier something is to process, the more likely we are to think it's true, so quick, easy judgments often feel right even when they aren't. Second, its efficiency can miss details - sometimes crucial ones. For example, you might recall something you read on the internet, but forget that it was debunked.

Heuristics

Heuristics are indicators we use to make quick judgments. We use heuristics because it's easier than conducting complex analysis, especially on the internet where there's a lot of information.

The problem with heuristics is that they often lead to incorrect conclusions. For example, you might rely on a 'social endorsement heuristic' - that someone you trust has endorsed (e.g., retweeted) a post on social media - to judge how trustworthy it is. But however much you trust that person, it's not a completely reliable indicator and could lead you to believe something that isn't true.

As our co-founder and US director Claire Wardle explains in our Essential Guide to Understanding Information Disorder , "On social media, the heuristics (the mental shortcuts we use to make sense of the world) are missing. Unlike in a newspaper where you understand what section of the paper you are looking at and see visual cues which show you're in the opinion section or the cartoon section, this isn't the case online."

What to read next: "Credibility and trust of information in online environments: The use of cognitive heuristics" by Miriam J. Metzger and Andrew J. Flanagin, published in Journal of Pragmatics , in 2013.

Cognitive dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is the negative experience that follows an encounter with information that contradicts your beliefs. This can lead people to reject credible information to alleviate the dissonance.

Confirmation bias

Confirmation bias is the tendency to believe information that confirms your existing beliefs, and to reject information that contradicts them. Disinformation actors can exploit this tendency to amplify existing beliefs.

Confirmation bias is just one of a long list of cognitive biases .

Motivated reasoning

Motivated reasoning is when people use their reasoning skills to believe what they want to believe, rather than determine the truth. The crucial point here is the idea that people's rational faculties, rather than lazy or irrational thinking, can cause misinformed belief.

Motivated reasoning is a key point of current debate in misinformation psychology. In , David Rand and Gordon Pennycook, two cognitive scientists based at the University of Virginia and MIT, respectively, argued strongly against it. Their claim is that people simply aren't being analytical enough when they encounter information. As they put it:

"One group claims that our ability to reason is hijacked by our partisan convictions: that is, we're prone to rationalization. The other group - to which the two of us belong - claims that the problem is that we often fail to exercise our critical faculties: that is, we're mentally lazy."

Rand and Pennycook are continuing to build a strong body of evidence that lazy thinking, not motivated reasoning, is the key factor in our psychological vulnerability to misinformation.

What to read next: " Why do people fall for fake news?" by Gordon Pennycook and David Rand, published in New York Times in 2019.

Pluralistic ignorance

Pluralistic ignorance is a lack of understanding about what others in society think and believe. This can make people incorrectly think others are in a majority when it comes to a political view, when it is in fact a view held by very few people. This can be made worse by rebuttals of misinformation (e.g., conspiracy theories), as they can make those views seem more popular than they really are.

A variant of this is the false consensus effect: when people overestimate how many other people share their views.

Third-person effect

The third-person effect describes the way people tend to assume misinformation affects other people more than themselves.

Nicoleta Corbu, professor of communications at the National University of Political Studies and Public Administration in Romania, recently found that there is a significant third-person effect in people's perceived ability to spot misinformation: People rate themselves as better at identifying misinformation than others. This means people can underestimate their vulnerability, and don't take appropriate actions.

Fluency

Fluency refers to how easily people process information. People are more likely to believe something to be true if they can process it fluently - it feels right, and so seems true.

This is why repetition is so powerful: if you've heard it before, you process it more easily, and therefore are more likely to believe it. Repeat it multiple times, and you increase the effect. So even if you've heard something as a debunk, the sheer repetition of the original claim can make it more familiar, fluent, and believable.

It also means that easy-to-understand information is more believable, because it's processed more fluently. As Stephan Lewandowsky and his colleagues explain:

"For example, the same statement is more likely to be judged as true when it is printed in high- rather than low-color contrast ... presented in a rhyming rather than non-rhyming form ... or delivered in a familiar rather than unfamiliar accent ... Moreover, misleading questions are less likely to be recognized as such when printed in an easy-to-read font."

Bullshit receptivity

Bullshit receptivity is about how receptive you are to information that has little interest in the truth; a meaningless cliche, for example. Bullshit is different from a lie, which intentionally contradicts the truth.

Pennycook and Rand use the concept of bullshit receptivity to examine susceptibility to false news headlines. They found that the more likely we are to accept a pseudo-profound sentence (i.e., bullshit) such as, "Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty," the more susceptible we are to false news headlines.

This provides evidence for Pennycook and Rand's broader theory that susceptibility to false news comes from insufficient analytical thinking, rather than motivated reasoning. In other words, we're too stuck in automatic System 1 thinking, and not enough in analytic System 2 thinking.
Look out for parts two and three and stay up to date with First Draft's work by becoming a subscriber and following us on Facebook and Twitter.

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The psychology of misinformation: Why we're vulnerable

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The psychology of misinformation - the mental shortcuts, confusions, and illusions that encourage us to believe things that aren't true - can tell us a lot about how to prevent its harmful effects. Our psychology is what affects whether corrections work, what we should teach in media literacy courses, and why we're vulnerable to misinformation [...]

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"From Headline to Photo: a Fake News Masterpiece"

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"From Headline to Photo: a Fake News Masterpiece"

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NY Times: profiles the 23 year-old college grad who fabricated a story that went viral claiming fraudulent votes for Hillary Clinton. (2017)

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From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece (Published 2017)

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Cameron Harris, a recent college graduate, pulled six million people into his bogus story about the discovery of fraudulent ballots for Hillary Clinton.

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First Draft News describes how  traditional broadcast media has become an outdated, top-down form of information widely disregarded in society. (2020)

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After November 3, some believers in the conspiracy theory that the US presidential election was rigged joined together, undeterred by official assurances of a fair and secure vote, to crowdsource evidence of massive fraud. They organized under hashtags like #DominionWatch, staking out election facilities in Georgia and doxxing voting-machine technicians. The ad hoc group investigation recalled the offline spillover of the QAnon-promoted #saveourchildren, which led participants to flood the hotlines of child welfare services with questionable tips about what they claimed was a vast child-trafficking conspiracy.
2020 was the year that demonstrated conclusively that effective disinformation communities are participatory and networked, while quality information distribution mechanisms remain stubbornly elitist, linear and top-down.
In trying to explain the influence of false and misleading information online, researchers and commentators frequently focus on the recommendation algorithms that emphasize emotionally resonant material over facts. Algorithms may indeed some toward conspiracy theories, but the dominant yet deeply flawed assumption that internet users are passive consumers of content needs to be discarded once and for all. We are all participants , often engaging in amateur research to satisfy our curiosity about the world.

It's critical we keep that in mind, both to understand how bad information travels, and to develop tactics to counter its spread. We need to move beyond thinking of disinformation as something broadcast by influential bad actors to unquestioning "audiences." Instead, we'd do well to remember that ideas, including false and misleading information, circulate and evolve within robust ecosystems, a form of collective sense-making by an uncertain online public.

Networks of amateur researchers can be formidable evangelists for their theories. A team of researchers led by the physicist and data scientist Neil Johnson found in a May 2020 investigation of online anti-vaccine communities that while the clusters of anti-vaccine individuals were smaller than those formed by defenders of vaccination, there were many more of them, creating more "sites for engagement" - opportunities to persuade fence-sitters. In our research into the "Great Reset" conspiracy theory, we found the content underpinning the theory had spread widely across Facebook in many local and interest-based spaces, garnering considerable opportunities to persuade the curious.
The conspiracy theory network in action
To illustrate the networked dynamics that reinforce conspiracy theories as they did around the Great Reset, we examined that theory's rise to prominence on Facebook, with an eye on the impact of the fact checks and debunks published by trusted sources in response.

We gathered 7,775 public Facebook posts that contained links and that mentioned "Great Reset" between November 16, when the conspiracy theory trended on Twitter , and December 6, and found that just a tiny fraction of the posts shared in that time included debunks or fact checks challenging the conspiracy theory.

Instead, the leading posts in our dataset advanced various aspects of the complex conspiracy theory. They warned of "globalist overlords," a "socialist coup," and an "organized criminal cabal" planning a "genocide." The most-shared URL quoted Carlson referring to the Great Reset as a "chance to impose totally unprecedented social controls on the population in order to bypass democracy and change everything." Fact checks appeared in just one per cent of the posts mentioning the Great Reset, and even then, some of the top posts linking to them came from accounts condemning the news outlets, such as in one post claiming " fake news and gaslighting ," further advancing the conspiracy theory narrative. The network of Groups and Pages, sharing these conspiracy theory URLs among one another, drove up the readership and engagement on those links, unhindered by the fact checks offered by traditional sources.

We took a look at the websites posted most often in our dataset and found that YouTube was the most popular domain, appearing in 1,945 posts - about a quarter of them - followed by BitChute, another video platform for its far-right and conspiracy theory-related content.

Top domains in public Facebook posts mentioning the "Great Reset" between November 16 and December 6, 2020

After isolating the individual YouTube videos appearing in the dataset, we found that the 20 most-viewed videos all advanced a version of the conspiracy theory narrative. Together, as of December 17 they've been viewed nearly 9 million times on the platform. The widespread sharing of YouTube and BitChute links underscores how disinformation seamlessly skips among platforms, unhindered by moderation.

Visually mapping the ecosystem of Facebook Pages and Groups posting links about the "Great Reset" and the URLs most frequently shared in the set, we were able to find further evidence of the power imbalance between the conspiracy theory and the fact checks.

In the network visualization below, Pages and Groups that frequently share links among one another are grouped more closely together. The Facebook Groups and Public Pages promoting the conspiracy theory - represented by purple dots in the diagram - form a dense cluster of highly interconnected accounts, pointing to an ad hoc network that drives up engagement figures on conspiracy theory content. Importantly, we can't conclude that the density of this network points to deliberate coordination. Rather, it suggests that like-minded Groups and Pages amplify a narrative by widely sharing, often among one another, the URLs and videos that advance it.

On the other hand, the orange dots representing fact checks and debunks spread in relatively small and isolated community clusters, remaining marginalized from the concentrated group in the center. The most frequently posted fact check - the Daily Beast's " The Biden Presidency Already Has Its First Conspiracy Theory: The Great Reset " - couldn't penetrate the core cluster of Pages and Groups championing the "Great Reset" conspiracy theory, even though its URL appeared in 37 different posts. The fact checks are having trouble keeping up.

The network of Facebook Pages and Groups sharing links about the "Great Reset"
Combating networked disinformation Note on methodology: We used CrowdTangle's API to collect 11,808 posts from Facebook groups and unverified Facebook pages that mentioned "great reset" or "greatreset" between November 16, 2020 and December 6, 2020. We then filtered for posts that included outward links to other websites and social media platforms. To understand the potential impact of fact-checks on the conspiracy theory we also identified all the URLs from reliable news organizations that debunked the conspiracy theory and ran those URLs through CrowdTangle's links endpoint to gather all the Facebook posts that shared them. These two datasets, which included a total of 7,775 posts, were then merged for analysis using Pandas and Gephi. In Gephi we re-sized the nodes based on the in-degree values in order to highlight the URLs that were most frequently shared in this set. URLs with more shares are represented by larger nodes. We used the "ForceAtlas 2" layout to bring accounts that frequently share among each other closer together.

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The "broadcast" model no longer works in an era of disinformation

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After November 3, some believers in the conspiracy theory that the US presidential election was rigged joined together, undeterred by official assurances of a fair and secure vote, to crowdsource evidence of massive fraud. They organized under hashtags like #DominionWatch, staking out election facilities in Georgia and doxxing voting-machine technicians.

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First Draft News describes the types of misinformation and why it gets created. (2017)

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This article is available also in Deutsch, Español, Français and العربية

By now we've all agreed the term "fake news" is unhelpful, but without an alternative, we're left awkwardly using air quotes whenever we utter the phrase. The reason we're struggling with a replacement is because this is about more than news, it's about the entire information ecosystem. And the term fake doesn't begin to describe the complexity of the different types of misinformation (the inadvertent sharing of false information) and disinformation (the deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false).

To understand the current information ecosystem, we need to break down three elements:

1. The different types of content that are being created and shared

2. The motivations of those who create this content

3. The ways this content is being disseminated

This matters. As Danah Boyd outlined in a recent piece, we are at war. An information war. We certainly should worry about people (including journalists) unwittingly sharing misinformation, but far more concerning are the systematic disinformation campaigns. Previous attempts to influence public opinion relied on 'one-to-many' broadcast technologies but, social networks allow 'atoms' of propaganda to be directly targeted at users who are more likely to accept and share a particular message. Once they inadvertently share a misleading or fabricated article, image, video or meme, the next person who sees it in their social feed probably trusts the original poster, and goes on to share it themselves. These 'atoms' then rocket through the information ecosystem at high speed powered by trusted peer-to-peer networks.

This is far more worrying than fake news sites created by profit driven Macedonian teenagers.

The Different Types of Mis and Disinformation

Back in November, I wrote about the different types of problematic information I saw circulate during the US election. Since then, I've been trying to refine a typology (and thank you to Global Voices for helping me to develop my definitions even further). I would argue there are seven distinct types of problematic content that sit within our information ecosystem. They sit on a scale, one that loosely measures the intent to deceive.

Why is this type of content being created?

If we're serious about developing solutions to these problems, we also need to think about who is creating these different types of content and why it is being created.

I saw Eliot Higgins present in Paris in early January, and he listed four 'Ps' which helped explain the different motivations. I've been thinking about these a great deal and using Eliot's original list have identified four additional motivations for the creation of this type of content: Poor Journalism, Parody, to Provoke or 'Punk', Passion, Partisanship, Profit, Political Influence or Power, and Propaganda.

This is a work in progress but once you start breaking these categories down and mapping them against one another you begin to see distinct patterns in terms of the types of content created for specific purposes.

Dissemination Mechanisms

Finally, we need to think about how this content is being disseminated. Some of it is being shared unwittingly by people on social media, clicking retweet without checking. Some of it is being amplified by journalists who are now under more pressure than ever to try and make sense and accurately report information emerging on the social web in real time. Some of it is being pushed out by loosely connected groups who are deliberately attempting to influence public opinion, and some of it is being disseminated as part of sophisticated disinformation campaigns, through bot networks and troll factories. (As you can see I need to work up a 3D matrix to map my graph against the different dissemination mechanisms).

As this Buzzfeed article highlights, a group of US Trump supporting teenagers have connected online to influence the French election in April. They have shared folders of sharable 'meme-shells' so even those who can't speak French can drop visuals into hashtag streams. It's now incredibly easy for loosely connected groups to mobilize, using free tools to co-ordinate private messaging.

When messaging is co-ordinated and consistent, it easily fools our brains, already exhausted and increasingly reliant on heuristics (simple psychological shortcuts) due to the overwhelming amount of information flashing before our eyes every day. When we see multiple messages about the same topic, our brains use that as a short-cut to credibility. It must be true we say - I've seen that same claim several times today.

On the night of the Inauguration attendees at the Deploraball boasted to This American Life they "memed" Trump into the White House. Listen to an excerpt.

They understand that we're much less likely to be critical of visuals. We're much less likely to be critical of information that supports our existing beliefs. And, as information overload exhausts our brains, we're much easier to influence.

What can we do?

We all play a crucial part in this ecosystem. Every time we passively accept information without double-checking, or share a post, image or video before we've verified it, we're adding to the noise and confusion. The ecosystem is now so polluted, we have to take responsibility for independently checking what we see online.

In the weeks after the US election, we saw journalists track down fake news creators. One consistent element was that creators talked about trying to create news that would fool people on the Left and how they failed. As fake news creator Jestin Coler told NPR, "We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out."

But liberal debunking primacy was short lived. Since Trump's inauguration, we're seeing both sides falling for and sharing false information.Whether it's the 'rogue' Twitter accounts that no one has been able to independently verify, the Trump executive order meme generator, users re-tweeting a post by Jill Stein's parody account desperately wanting it to be real, or claiming Vice-President Pence has deleted a tweet condemning the Muslim ban when it was still sitting on his timeline from December, the Left is showing that it is just as human as the Right. When humans are angry and fearful, their critical thinking skills diminish.

Craig Silverman was a guest on the "On The Media" radio show and talked about the need for emotional skepticism. I couldn't agree more. This isn't just about funding more news literacy projects, this is about teaching people to second guess their instinctual reactions. If you find yourself incredibly angry at a piece of content or feeling smug (because your viewpoint has been reaffirmed), take another look.

In the same way that you're told to wait 20 minutes before you reach for a second helping of food, because you need to wait for your brain to catch up with your stomach, the same is true with information. Maybe you don't need to wait 20 minutes before clicking the share button, but two minutes is probably sensible.

This is a crucial time. If we're going to truly understand the situation we find ourselves in, we need to understand the severity and we need to understand what we're fighting. Throwing the term fake news around, even with air quotes, is getting us nowhere.

If you are interested in this topic. I have created an ongoing reading list.

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This article is available also in Deutsch, Español, Français and العربية By now we've all agreed the term "fake news" is unhelpful, but without an alternative, we're left awkwardly using air quotes whenever we utter the phrase. The reason we're struggling with a replacement is because this is about more than news, it's about the entire information ecosystem.

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An AP US History teacher explains his advice for students for distinguishing credible sources. (Teen Vogue, 2016)

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In this op-ed, William Colglazier - an AP US History teacher from California who is teaching his students how to spot fake news - explains how we can do the same.
Wait, what?! Did you hear? The days of saying the Pledge of Allegiance are gone! Check it out...

Now the question is, would you click Post to Facebook? What about share or re-tweet it? I guess it depends - but not on what you might initially think. It shouldn't matter whether you agree or disagree with the Pledge, consider yourself a religious person or an atheist, whether you are a Democrat or Republican, mourner of Hillary's failed presidential bid or celebrant of Trump's impending inauguration. What takes precedence, what is paramount, is whether this story is true.

To be clear, the story is fake, but that didn't stop over two million people from sharing, commenting, liking, or reacting with a 😀 or 😡 on Facebook in the last month.

Now, maybe a fake news story about politics doesn't wow you. But a rumor (ie. fake news story) about your best friend would. As it seeps into the school hallways and your classmates' digital devices, what would you do to protect her? Mindlessly repeat it? No! Your logical first step would be to find the source of the rumor and ask, who is he? Is he essentially a reliable person or a frenemy seeking high school drama?

A recent Stanford University study found that over 80% of middle-schoolers couldn't determine the difference between an article and an advertisement online, according to NPR. Not knowing the agenda of the gossiper is a sure way to swallow a lie.

When high school students were asked whether "sponsored content" from a Bank of America financial advisor was a reliable source to determine the saving habits of millennials, most said it was, neglecting the incentive for a bank to encourage people to pay a bank for financial advice. By asking essential questions of sources of information - like who wrote it and why is he writing it - would save you from this trap and begin setting the record straight for your rumor affected friend (it might even save you some money later in life, apparently).

The next step to saving your friend's reputation would be to inquire about the rumor monger's reputation. Who do they hang out with? What do other people say about them? Are other people, people that you trust, saying the same rumor about your friend? This skill of cross-checking the source's character and information with other sources provides verification. This type of inquiry can easily be done via text message between classes or, crazy thought here, face to face at lunch time.

Transferring this analogy to the online world where fake news infected the latest presidential election, a good first action is to Google the name of the author or organization behind the "news" and see if any red flags surface. In interviews with experienced fact-checkers at prestigious news organizations, Stanford Ph.D. student Sarah McGrew and professor Sam Wineburg observed that the tactic fact checkers employed first was to move off the original post and onto another to learn more about the author and organization to help with determining accuracy. Cross-checking can apparently be a status saver for both teenagers and presidential contenders.

So if we use that same rumor-killing process with the post about Obama banning the Pledge of Allegiance, we would find out some interesting facts. ABCNews.com.co isn't actually the ABC News you were thinking of (that's abcnews.go.com). What a difference two letters make! Immediately, you would find that out after comparing the look of the two sites as the fake ABC News site has continuous advertisements asking you to download the latest Plug-in for Flash Player to play some medieval knight fighting app game. The "news" organization reportedly earns $10,000 a month from advertisements due to web traffic to the site. Googling the author, Jimmy Rustling, would, -- surprise surprise -- tell you he's not a reputable journalist when his bio achievements or his 'Russian mail order bride" and for his daily work he "spends 12-15 hours each day teaching [his] adopted 8-year-old Syrian refugee daughter how to read and write."

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In this op-ed, William Colglazier - an AP US History teacher from California who is teaching his students how to spot fake news - explains how we can do the same. Wait, what?! Did you hear? The days of saying the Pledge of Allegiance are gone! Check it out...

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A CNN editor offers a perspective on the online proliferation of fake news and misinformation. (2016)

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why fake news stories thrive online (opinion) - cnn

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Posting fake news stories has become a form of identity politics, writes Judith Donath. To remove the appeal of fake news, people need to be comfortable debating issues with those who hold opposing views.

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Sage advice from NPR for finding the truth in an age of doubt, when traditional guideposts don't exist. (2016)

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Are we really in a post-truth era? Somebody on the Internet said so. Many people, actually.

The presidential campaign was filled with falsehoods. Our president-elect no longer poses as a truth-teller: Aides and supporters say we should not take him literally. That's good for him, since he endorsed a conspiracy theory that cast doubt on his own election. (Remember? He claimed without evidence that there were "millions" of illegal voters, who, if they did exist, might have swung the election to him.) Fake news stories about a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant prompted a real person to "investigate" with a rifle in early December.

But let's properly define the problem. History and experience tell me it's not a post-truth era: Facts have always been hard to separate from falsehoods, and political partisans have always made it harder. It's better to call this a post- trust era.

Business, government, churches and the media have fallen in public esteem. These institutions paid a price for an entire generation of wars, scandals, economic convulsions and cynical politics. We're left with fewer traditional guideposts for whom to believe. The spread of fake news from fraudulent sources is only a symptom: The larger problem is that many Americans doubt what governments or authorities tell them, and also dismiss real news from traditional sources.

Hazardous as the post-trust era may be, it shouldn't cause despair. It's all right for Americans to be skeptical of what they read and hear. How could I say otherwise? I'm a journalist. It's my job to question what I hear. While I shouldn't cynically dismiss everything people tell me, I should ask for evidence and avoid buying into bogus narratives. Being a skeptical reporter has made me a more skeptical news consumer.

What we all need, as citizens, is to develop more skill in applying our skepticism. We need to spot false narratives, and also turn aside those who would replace them with pure fiction. Either we get this right or we cease to be free citizens.

Propagandists obviously have fun (and profit from) trying to con us, the public. Why not have fun smoking them out? You can apply this advice not only in hunting for totally fake stories, but also in testing out the stories on more or less fact-based websites or traditional TV and newspapers. (Even NPR.)

In general, traditional news organizations are more reliable because their business model is to paint the clearest picture of the world that they can manage. But in the post-trust era, we know that any news source can steer you wrong at times, and they're likely all jumbled together in your news feed anyway.

So here's a finder's guide for facts:

First, take a moment. If you have time to scroll Facebook or watch the news, you probably have a moment to decide if a news story seems credible. Ask some quick questions:

Is the story so outrageous you can't believe it? Maybe you shouldn't. Respect the voice inside you that says, "What?"

Is the story so outrageous you do believe it? That's also a warning sign. Many stories play on your existing beliefs. If the story perfectly confirms your worst suspicions, look for more information.

Does the headline match the article? Many compelling headlines don't.

Does the article match the news story it's lifted from? Many sites rewrite other news articles to fit the political slant of their presumed audience. Look for links to original sources and click through and see what the original says.

Are quotes in context? Look for the sentences before and after the quote that makes your blood boil. If the article fails to give them, that's a warning sign.

Is the story set in the future? It's hard to get firsthand reporting from there. Any story that tells you what will happen should be marked down 50 percent for this reason alone.

Does the story attack a generic enemy? Vague denunciations of "Washington" or "the media" or "Trump supporters" or "the left" should be marked down 99 percent. Good reporting doesn't make these kinds of generalizations and is specific about who is making a claim about what.

Are you asked to rely on one killer factoid? Not a good idea. If a hacked document "proves" an implausible conspiracy, look for the context that shows what the document really means. As for photos and video, use Ronald Reagan's old slogan: trust but verify. If there's any doubt about a "stunning" video, see if more traditional sources link to it. They love video clicks as much as anyone. If they refrain, there may be good reason.

Who is the news source, anyway? Traditional news brands may occasionally get it wrong - sometimes hugely wrong - but at least you know where to find them and hold them accountable. Less prominent news sites might carry compelling stories - but expect them to show you who they are and where they gathered information.

Does the news source appear to employ editors? Many news organizations produce stories that are checked before publication. Others don't. It's a big deal. Hiring an editorial staff shows the publication's respect for you, and matters more than "political bias." The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, for example, have different owners, audiences, stories, perspectives and obsessions. Both have made mistakes and omissions; but both send reporters out into the world and back them up with an editorial process that catches and corrects many errors. This means both can be informative, regardless of your politics or theirs.

Are you told, "Trust me"? Don't. It's the post-trust era! Expect everyone to show where their facts come from, link to underlying articles, and demonstrate that they've argued honestly. Here's a way they may bolster their credibility:

Did the writer engage with anyone who disagrees? Did they call a senator whose legislation bugs them? Did they try to grasp what the president-elect was doing, or merely repeat one of his more outrageous statements? If it's a broadcast interview, was the guest presented with genuine opposing views and challenged to answer? Those who wrestle with opposing arguments do you a service and often improve their own arguments.

These simple questions should take you a long way toward judging the value of a news story. While applying such questions to any given story, you can also take a few more general steps:

Broaden your palate. Make a point to check sites that do not agree with your politics. You may discover stories that are wrong - but you'll know what other people are consuming, which will sharpen your own thinking.

Be open to the idea that some falsehoods are sincerely held. In spite of all the warnings here, some inaccurate news stories grow out of haste or misinformation rather than pure cynicism. (But they're still false.)

If a news source consistently passes the tests in this guide, support it. Gathering reliable information isn't free. Helping to pay for it aligns the news source's interests with yours.

If this guide helps you to find some reliable information, that's great - but remember one more thing: Never stop looking. Learning the truth is not a goal, but a process. As a journalist, I can never express everything in the world in a single day's program. The saving grace is tomorrow's program, when we try to do a little more. It is the same for me as a news consumer: I will always be learning more.

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Are we really in a post-truth era? Somebody on the Internet said so. Many people, actually. The presidential campaign was filled with falsehoods. Our president-elect no longer poses as a truth-teller: Aides and supporters say we should not take him literally. That's good for him, since he endorsed a conspiracy theory that cast doubt on his own election.

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Fair.org argues for an independent press, describing how mainstream news is compromised by corporate and political influences.

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Independent, aggressive and critical media are essential to an informed democracy. But mainstream media are increasingly cozy with the economic and political powers they should be watchdogging. Mergers in the news industry have accelerated, further limiting the spectrum of viewpoints that have access to mass media. With U.S. media outlets overwhelmingly owned by for-profit conglomerates and supported by corporate advertisers, independent journalism is compromised.

Ultimately, FAIR believes that structural reform is needed to break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent public broadcasting, and promote strong, non-profit alternative sources of information.

Corporate Ownership

Almost all media that reach a large audience in the United States are owned by for-profit corporations-institutions that by law are obligated to put the profits of their investors ahead of all other considerations. The goal of maximizing profits is often in conflict with the practice of responsible journalism.

Not only are most major media owned by corporations, these companies are becoming larger and fewer in number as the biggest ones absorb their rivals. This concentration of ownership tends to reduce the diversity of media voices and puts great power in the hands of a few companies. As news outlets fall into the hands of large conglomerates with holdings in many industries, conflicts of interest inevitably interfere with newsgathering.

FAIR believes that independent media are essential to a democratic society, and that aggressive antitrust action must be taken to break up monopolistic media conglomerates. At the same time, non-corporate, alternative media outlets need to be promoted by both the government and the non-profit sector.

Advertiser Influence

Most of the income of for-profit media outlets comes not from their audiences, but from commercial advertisers who are interested in selling products to that audience. Although people sometimes defend commercial media by arguing that the market gives people what they want, the fact is that the most important transaction in the media marketplace-the only transaction, in the case of broadcast television and radio-does not involve media companies selling content to audiences, but rather media companies selling audiences to sponsors.

This gives corporate sponsors a disproportionate influence over what people get to see or read. Most obviously, they don't want to support media that regularly criticizes their products or discusses corporate wrongdoing. More generally, they would rather support media that puts audiences in a passive, non-critical state of mind-making them easier to sell things to. Advertisers typically find affluent audiences more attractive than poorer ones, and pay a premium for young, white, male consumers-factors that end up skewing the range of content offered to the public.

It is becoming harder and harder to escape from the propagandistic effects of advertising. Many students are now forced to watch commercials in school on Channel One. Even supposedly "noncommercial" outlets like PBS and NPR run ads-euphemistically known as "underwriter announcements." FAIR believes that commercial advertising should be taxed, with the proceeds earmarked to fund truly noncommercial media.

Official Agendas

Despite the claims that the press has an adversarial relationship with the government, in truth U.S. media generally follow Washington's official line. This is particularly obvious in wartime and in foreign policy coverage, but even with domestic controversies, the spectrum of debate usually falls in the relatively narrow range between the leadership of the Democratic and Republican parties.

The owners and managers of dominant media outlets generally share the background, worldview and income bracket of political elites. Top news executives and celebrity reporters frequently socialize with government officials. The most powerful media companies routinely make large contributions to both major political parties, while receiving millions of dollars in return in the form of payments for running political ads.

In this incestuous culture, "news" is defined chiefly as the actions and statements of people in power. Reporters, dependent on "access" and leaks provided by official sources, are too often unwilling to risk alienating these sources with truly critical coverage. Nor are corporate media outlets interested in angering the elected and bureaucratic officials who have the power to regulate their businesses.

Telecom Policy

The United States' original communications policy is the 1st Amendment. Freedom of the press was guaranteed in the Constitution because an exchange of information and an unfettered debate were considered essential components of a democratic society.

Today, however, government policy is designed less to facilitate a democratic discussion than to protect the investments of media corporations. Regulations tend to promote the formation of huge media conglomerates and discourage new, competing voices.

PR Industry

The drive to maximize profits compels corporate news outlets to produce more and more news with fewer and fewer reporters. With less time to do each story, journalists are increasingly pressured to rely on the public relations industry to do much of their work for them: Reporters can rewrite press releases rather than do their own independent research, and TV stations can broadcast promotional videos that are designed to look like news footage. This symbiotic relationship between news outlets and the industries they cover, however, is a bad deal for the public.

Pressure Groups

While institutional pressures are enough to keep most journalists from straying from the conventional wisdom, pressure groups stand ready to punish the exceptional reporter who challenges the official agenda.

FAIR believes that grassroots activism around media issues is legitimate and indeed essential. When does an activist group become a pressure group? A pressure group is more concerned with suppressing viewpoints that it disagrees with than ensuring that a wide range of perspectives is available. Since pressure groups are often funded by companies or industries whose interests they promote, these groups often push ideologies that are already well-represented in media debates.

Narrow Range of Debate

Given that most media outlets are owned by for-profit corporations and are funded by corporate advertising, it is not surprising that they seldom provide a full range of debate. The right edge of discussion is usually represented by a committed supporter of right-wing causes, someone who calls for significantly changing the status quo in a conservative direction. The left edge, by contrast, is often represented by an establishment-oriented centrist who supports maintaining the status quo; very rarely is a critic of corporate power who identifies with progressive causes and movements with the same passion as their conservative counterparts allowed to take part in mass media debates.

Censorship

Since governments almost always have an interest in controlling the free flow of information, official censorship is something that must be constantly guarded against. In our society, however, large corporations are a more common source of censorship than governments: Media outlets killing stories because they undermine corporate interests; advertisers using their financial clout to squelch negative reports; powerful businesses using the threat of expensive lawsuits to discourage legitimate investigations. The most frequent form of censorship is self-censorship: Journalists deciding not to pursue certain stories that they know will be unpopular with the boss.

Sensationalism

Profit-driven news organizations are under great pressure to boost ratings by sensationalizing the news: focusing attention on lurid, highly emotional stories, often featuring a bizarre cast of characters and a gripping plot but devoid of significance to most people's lives. From Tonya Harding to O.J. Simpson to Elian Gonzalez, major news outlets have become more and more dependent on these kind of tabloid soap operas to keep profits high.

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Independent, aggressive and critical media are essential to an informed democracy. But mainstream media are increasingly cozy with the economic and political powers they should be watchdogging. Mergers in the news industry have accelerated, further limiting the spectrum of viewpoints that have access to mass media. With U.S.