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4 Great Fact Checking Sites from Common Sense Media

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4 Great Fact Checking Sites from Common Sense Media

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Common Sense is the nation's leading nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of all kids and families by providing the trustworthy information, education, and independent voice they need to thrive in the 21st century.

We're a nonprofit. Support our work

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4 Great Fact-Checking Sites for Tweens & Teens

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Parent’s Guide: watch Common Sense Media’s 4 Great Fact-Checking Sites for Tweens & Teens advice video to help you make informed decisions with your children.

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School Library Journal News Literacy Pinterest Board

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School Library Journal News Literacy Pinterest Board

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Find and save recipes, parenting hacks, style inspiration and other ideas to try.

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By Jen Thomas on

Seeking one-stop shopping for news literacy resources? Look no further than School Library Journal's News Literacy Pinterest page, curated by Jen Thomas, media and educational technology specialist at West Bridgewater (MA) Middle Senior High School.

Jen Thomas (@BlendedLibGirl) is dedicated to empowering teachers and students and has a strong interest in professional development, blended learning, and infusing information, digital, and media literacy into any school's curriculum.

This article was featured in our free Extra Helping enewsletter.
Subscribe today to have more articles like this delivered to you twice a week.

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By Jen Thomas on Seeking one-stop shopping for news literacy resources? Look no further than School Library Journal's News Literacy Pinterest page, curated by Jen Thomas, media and educational technology specialist at West Bridgewater (MA) Middle Senior High School.

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Librarians are stepping into the breach to help students become smarter evaluators of the information that floods into their lives. That's increasingly necessary in an era in which fake news is a constant.

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Janelle Hagen is a school librarian whose job goes far beyond checking out books. She and many other librarians are equipping students to fight through lies, distortion and trickery to find their way to truth.

Helping students become smarter evaluators of the information that floods into their lives has become increasingly necessary in an era in which fake news is a constant.

Two University of Washington professors recently announced a new class that will focus on the ways data are misused to mislead the public. Younger students may need guidance even more.

Hagen, the middle-school librarian at Lakeside School in Seattle, said the students she serves are online every day, and they need to be able to figure out what's trustworthy and what isn't.

Besides running the library, Hagen said, she teaches a class called "digital life." She meets with fifth-graders twice a week and with eighth-graders once a week. The classes are a mix of technology and information-literacy skills, but since the presidential election, she's increased the focus on the latter.

"It was because of all of the buzz (about fake news). You can look at the Google analytics, and the search for 'fake news' was unprecedented." she said. "It's our job as teachers to address what's going on in the world."

One Monday morning, her eighth-graders took a group quiz in which they were asked to identify different kinds of information - advertising, publicity, propaganda, news, opinion pieces. They worked on their laptops choosing from multiple options, and their choices showed up on a big screen at the front of the classroom. There was discussion after each question, especially when not everyone got the answer right.

Hagen introduced the new focus to students by showing them the results of a Stanford History Education Group study in which students from college, high school and middle school were tested on their understanding of various types of information.

Most middle-school students were able to distinguish advertisements from news stories, but more than 80 percent confused native advertisements with news stories. Native advertisements are designed to look like news stories, but they carry a label that sets them apart, usually "sponsored content." That wasn't enough.

There is a great need for more education in the critical-thinking skills that are part of information literacy.

Remember when many people thought librarians were going to become obsolete because the world of information was migrating to the web? But then we became enthralled by the possibilities of big data, and library schools became information schools, turning out people who could help navigate vast troves of online data. That's where the discipline was when Hagen graduated from the University of Washington Information School in 2011.

Librarians and libraries are still with us, and those new data skills are increasingly valuable, but an older skill is now rising in importance. Hagen said librarians have always helped people sort fact from fiction, reliable sources from deceptive ones. Usually that happened as students worked on research papers, but now those lessons need to cover daily life.

"It's a difficult time to work in education because we are seeing what's happening in the world and how opinions are really first and foremost rather than facts," Hagen said.

Lakeside's high-school librarians put up a display in the entrance to their building that offers several tips for spotting fake news. One says: "What's the evidence?" Underneath a flap there's more detail: "As you read an article, make sure to see if they have any evidence to back up their claims. Furthermore, research the evidence to see if it is real, made up, or used in a way not intended by its creators."

Are claims in an article backed up by verifiable facts? Check the authors' backgrounds to see if they have credibility on the topic they are writing about.

Hagen likes The News Literacy Project, a collaboration between journalists and educators to improve students' information literacy through lessons in the classroom and its online program Checkology.

Hagen's eighth-graders use AllSides, a website that rates the bias of news stories and other articles, labeling them according to where they fit on a political spectrum from left to center to right. And it posts multiple versions of major stories and their ratings. Readers can test their own biases on the site.

As the site says, "if you have a pulse, you have a bias." And Hagen tells her students that even the most honest media have biases, but they also try hard to be fair, and articles must past muster with layers of editors, so a reader or viewer is more likely to get a more reliable version of a given story.

Awareness is the key, she said. And it is. Read, listen, watch with an active, questioning mind.

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Librarians take up arms against fake news

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Librarians are stepping into the breach to help students become smarter evaluators of the information that floods into their lives. That's increasingly necessary in an era in which fake news is a constant. Share story Janelle Hagen is a school librarian whose job goes far beyond checking out books.

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Mind Over Media.  Analyzing Propaganda from the Media Education Lab

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Mind Over Media.  Analyzing Propaganda from the Media Education Lab

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http://propaganda.mediaeducationlab.com/http://propaganda.mediaeducationlab.com

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Mind Over Media.TV is an educational website where people can upload examples of beneficial and harmful propaganda and built critical thinking skills about the propaganda that's all around us in today's digital environment.

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The Smell Test: Educators can counter fake news with information literacy. Here’s how.

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The Smell Test: Educators can counter fake news with information literacy. Here’s how.

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WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO TEACH STUDENTS TO SPOT FAKE NEWS STORIES?

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WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO TEACH STUDENTS TO SPOT FAKE NEWS STORIES?

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One of the most interesting conversations currently taking place around Donald Trump's surprise victory in our Presidential election has been the role that fake news peddled and promoted in Facebook news streams may have played in swaying voters. Mark Zuckerberg - Facebook's charismatic founder - has called the notion that fake news is a problem on his site "a pretty crazy idea" and argued that a clear process is in place that allows users to flag suspicious or hateful content for further review.
But that position was openly challenged over and over again all week long.
Buzzfeed, a popular online source covering digital media and technology, opened the criticism by publishing the frightening results of an analysis of the election stories generating the most engagement - think likes, shares and comments - on Facebook in the final three months of the election. Here's what they found:
NPR went on to interview Facebook executives and employees to gain insight into just what happens when suspicious or hateful content is flagged for review on the site.
Turns out, the process isn't consistent, thorough or reliable. It's true that every piece of content is reviewed by a human being, but those human beings are mostly working in other countries simply because Facebook has subcontracted the work to save money. Worse yet, while every decision is supposed to take the complete context of a situation into consideration before decisions are made, employees are evaluated based on the number of pieces of content that they review in a single day.

From the NPR article:

"Current and former employees of Facebook say that they've observed these subcontractors in action; that they are told to go fast - very fast; that they're evaluated on speed; and that on average, a worker makes a decision about a piece of flagged content once every 10 seconds.

Let's do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Say a worker is doing an eight-hour shift, at the rate of one post per 10 seconds. That means they're clearing 2,880 posts a day per person. When NPR ran these numbers by current and former employees, they said that sounds reasonable."

Perhaps the most interesting article was this Washington Post interview with Paul Horner, who writes fake news stories for a living. Horner reports making close to $10,000 a MONTH off of the clicks on advertisements included on the fake news sites that he maintains. Every post that he writes on his slick looking ABC News ripoff website, for example, can make him rich, as long as it goes viral on Facebook. And what does Horner think of the people sharing his content over and over again?

It's not pretty:

"Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore - I mean, that's how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn't care because they'd already accepted it. It's real scary. I've never seen anything like it."

Scrutiny of Facebook's treatment of fake news and the hefty rewards paid to peddlers of lies by companies like Google who rely on advertising revenue have pressured both services into much-needed action: They are working to develop policies that will effectively ban fake news sources like Horner's from access to corporate advertising programs in an attempt to dry up the revenue streams that provide the motivation to pollute the web with hoaxes and lies.
But I think that's the wrong solution to Facebook's fake news problem.
We don't need new policies and tools from tech companies to identify sketchy content on the web. Instead, we need to develop citizens who take careful steps to verify that the information they are reading anywhere on the web is reliable. That's a new literacy in today's complicated media ecology - and it is a new literacy that we give too little attention to in schools.
The good news is that teaching students to identify sketchy content isn't all that hard to do.
There are simple questions that kids can ask when evaluating the reliability of a web source that can turn them into top-notch bunk filters without needing any help from Facebook or Google. Here are three:
How believable is this story to me?
The first lesson that I try to teach my students when spotting sketchy news stories is that their common sense is the most powerful tool that they have for fighting back against misinformation on the web. If a story just doesn't seem plausible, it's probably fake - and the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of fake news stories really ARE that easy to spot. People with good common sense don't get fooled very often - as long as they are willing to trust their intuition.

Try that with two recent headlines on Horner's fake ABC News website: Obama Signs Executive Order Banning National Anthem at All Sporting Events and Obama Signs Executive Order Banning Pledge of Allegience from All Schools Nationwide. Do either of those headlines seem even a little bit believable? Would a person who served as President of our country REALLY want to ban things like the National Anthem or the Pledge of Allegiance? No matter what you think about the people or parties leading our nation, chances are that they care enough about our country to protect our national symbols. That's just common sense.

And double-checking your common sense is super easy: Just take questionable headlines and drop them into Google. In most cases - including the notion that Obama is banning the Pledge of Allegiance - you'll see that reliable sites like Snopes and FactCheck.Org that are committed to debunking lies on the Internet have already reviewed the claims in question.
What do I know about this news source?
I also try to teach my students that spending a few minutes researching the author and the website of every piece of news that they are exploring can help them to spot sketchy news stories. Does the web address look reliable? What can you learn from the "About Us" or "Contact" links found on the page? What kind of search results are returned when you Google the name of the author of the article that you are reading?

Asking those questions about Dan Horner's ABC News website would identify it as a fraud in no time.

The web address - http://abcnews.com.co/ - is the first giveaway. Why would a major news network add a ".co' to the end of its web address? What's more, the contact information on the site shows that the headquarters of ABC News is a Tudor style home in Topeka, Kansas - and just a few minutes of digging into the background of Dr. Jimmy Rustling, one of the lead authors on the site, brings up this tongue-in-cheek bio of the author and this set of Google Search Results explaining that "Jimmy Rustling" and "Rustle my Jimmies" are slang terms for evoking strong emotions.
Can I spot any loaded words in the piece I am reading?
The final lesson that I try to teach my students is that loaded words and phrases - descriptions that imply a strong emotion and/or position - are signs indicating that the author or source is trying to push readers to feel a certain way about a topic instead of simply reporting the news in an unbiased way. They are an easy way to spot opinions instead of facts - and while opinions aren't automatically wrong, they need to be questioned by readers instead of accepted at face value.

What's interesting is that Dan Horner's fake news site avoids loaded words for the most part - which is one of the reasons that it is so successful at generating attention. Each piece sounds like an unbiased reporting of fact - even if those facts are impossible to believe.

But you don't have to go far to find loaded words in news sources. Can you spot the loaded words in these headlines from Fox News and the Huffington Post: Arizona Presidental Electors Being Harrassed, This is What it Means to Imprison a Whole Category of People.

In the first headline, I'd want my students to notice that "being harassed" is a loaded phrase that could mean a heck of a lot of things. Good readers would want to know what that harassment looked like before making a decision about the importance of the event. In the second headline, I'd want my students to notice that "imprison a whole category of people" is a phrase designed to elicit fear. Good readers would want to unpack that. Are newly elected officials REALLY trying to imprison entire categories of Americans? Or is "imprison" a metaphor?

In many ways, this is my favorite lesson to teach because kids LOVE looking for loaded words and phrases. Spotting the sneaky ways that authors are trying to influence readers - and then trying to decide if the evidence in the article actually supports the author's opinions - is like a scavenger hunt to them.
I've pulled all this content together into a handout that you can use if you are interested in teaching your students how to spot fake news sources. You can find it posted online here on my Teachers Pay Teachers website.
Does any of this make sense to you? More importantly, are you taking active steps to teach your kids the skills necessary to spot sketchy news stories?

#youshouldbe

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If teaching students about managing information, thinking critically and engaging in collaborative dialogue resonates with you, check out Teaching the iGeneration - Bill's book on using digital tools to introduce students to essential skills like information management, collaborative dialogue and critical thinking.

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What Are You Doing to Teach Students to Spot Fake News Stories?

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One of the most interesting conversations currently taking place around Donald Trump's surprise victory in our Presidential election has been the role that fake news peddled and promoted in Facebook news streams may have played in swaying voters.

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Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post-Truth’ World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News

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Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post-Truth’ World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News

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Lesson PlanHoax or No Hoax? Strategies for Online Comprehension and Evaluation

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Lesson PlanHoax or No Hoax? Strategies for Online Comprehension and Evaluation

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ReadWriteThink couldn't publish all of this great content without literacy experts to write and review for us. If you've got lessons plans, videos, activities, or other ideas you'd like to contribute, we'd love to hear from you.

Find the latest in professional publications, learn new techniques and strategies, and find out how you can connect with other literacy professionals.

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Lesson Plan

Student Objectives Extensions Student Assessment/Reflections
STUDENT OBJECTIVES

Students will

Use research-based comprehension strategies to read and evaluate websites

Practice analysis by comparing hoax and real websites and identifying false or misleading information

Apply what they have learned about hoaxes by creating an outline of their own hoax website and evaluating the outlines of their peers

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2.

Distribute the Online Comprehension Strategies Diagram to students. Read through the strategies with students and discuss how these strategies can help with reading a webpage.

3.

Model the use of the online comprehension strategies using Jo Cool or Jo Fool For Kids as an example (if possible, project the website onto a large screen; otherwise have students gather around the computer you are using). Think aloud as you navigate around the site, for example:

Plan. "What do I need to find out? I want to find the student activity. Where should I begin? I usually begin reading the main body of the website (the middle portion). Where do I want to go? Oh look, it tells me to click on the links on the right side bar to begin. What do I need to do first? Should I do Cybertour or Cyberquiz?"

Predict. As you mouse over Cybertour say something like, "I think this hyperlink will lead to the activity." Then mouse over the Cyberquiz and say "If I click here, I expect to find the quiz that is mentioned in the body text."

Monitor. Once you click on the Cybertour, ask, "Is this where I expected to be? What pertinent information stands out on this page? Should I skim or read more carefully? I think I should read carefully because this is the activity."

Evaluate. "Is this a likely and appropriate place for the information I need? I think I will read through this interactive and record any important information."

4.

At this point, have students work through the Cybertour in pairs. Ask them to record any important information they learn on the back of their Online Comprehension Strategies Diagrams.

5.

Ask students to discuss some of the ideas in the activity. What did they learn about the process of evaluating websites? Note: You may want to discuss some of the strategies in more detail using questions from the Jo Cool or Jo Fool Teacher's Guide.

6.

End the session by having students complete the interactive activity at Deconstructing Web Pages. Note: This activity has students practice strategies for identifying credible websites; in addition, they will become familiar with the Five W's of Cyberspace that are modified for use in the Is This a Hoax? evaluation sheet that is used in the next session.

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Project Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus onto a screen. Students should be working in pairs at computers with the same website showing.
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1.

Tell students you will work together to make a plan for reading using the strategies from the Online Comprehension Strategies Diagram. Model asking questions such as:

2.

Begin a discussion about the Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus homepage, soliciting observations from the students. Some things you may want to make sure they notice include:

The site's URL, which does not include any of the words pacific, northwest, tree, or octopus as one might expect it to.

On the left-hand side, the links under the heading Cephalopod News are regularly updated and most links lead to legitimate articles about this category of animal; ask students to explore some of these linked pages. (You might also choose to have students look up the word cephalopod to verify that it is a real word as well.)

The links found in the body text on the homepage are to a mix of legitimate and hoax websites.

In the bottom left corner, there is a link to an organization society called Green Peas.org that "supports the endangered Pacific Northwest Octopus." The link doesn't work.

In the bottom left corner there is a button that says "Made in Cascadia;" when clicked it goes to a website for this "republic" which is supposedly made up of Oregon, Washington State, and British Columbia.

4.

Hand out copies of the Is This a Hoax? evaluation sheet and review. Ask students if they feel there are any further questions they wish to add based on their work during Session 1 and their initial impressions of the Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus website. Tell them that their goal is to determine if the website is a hoax. Review the Online Comprehension Strategies quickly and remind students to use them to help as they read.

5.

Once students have completed their work, have them discuss their responses. How did they figure out that the site was a hoax? Discuss also what is effective about the site. Questions for discussion include:

What about this site makes it seem credible?

How long did it take you to suspect that this site was a hoax?

Why would someone want to create a site like this?

7.

If there is time, have students spend some time looking at other websites that the tree octopus site links to including The Bureau of Sasquatch Affairs and The Republic of Cascadia and responding to some of the same questions.

2.

When they have completed the outline, have each group create a sketch of the homepage for their hoax website, including title, pictures, navigation, and titles of possible articles. You might also have them go online to look for potential links to include on their websites.

3.

Student groups should trade outlines and sketches. Each student should complete the Is This a Hoax? evaluation for another group's work; you may want to give them some time to go online and check the links that other groups used. Note: There will be some areas of this sheet that will not apply to the outlines. You can ask students to simply write "not applicable" in those boxes.

EXTENSIONS

For more practice with identifying credible websites, have your students take the tutorial at Vaughan Memorial Library: Credible Sources Count!

Students can use the outlines from Session 4 to create mockups of their websites including pictures and text for articles.

Have students use their Compare & Contrast Maps to write essays that outline the components of a real versus a hoax site using the specific sites they explored as examples.

Have students write either hoax or exposé newspaper articles that they publish using the ReadWriteThink Printing Press.

Have students create their own hoax webpage or website that is based on a real website they use routinely.

Have students create video public service announcements about Internet hoaxes and online safety. Instructions for creating video public service announcements can be found in the lesson MyTube: Changing the World With Video Public Service Announcements.

STUDENT ASSESSMENT/REFLECTIONS

Have students evaluate how well they are now able to read websites using the new comprehension strategies on the What I Learned self-evaluation sheet.

Collect both sets of student Is This a Hoax? evaluations and use the Teacher Evaluation Form for Online Comprehension to identify how well students understand the concepts. Look also at the outlines students create in Session 4 to see how well students were able to apply the characteristics of a hoax to their own work.

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Hoax or No Hoax? Strategies for Online Comprehension and Evaluation - ReadWriteThink

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Research has shown that online reading requires not only traditional comprehension strategies, but also new digital- and media-literacy strategies. In this lesson, students learn how to use these comprehension strategies involving a sequence of planning, predicting, monitoring, and evaluating. Once students learn the strategies, they read a variety of hoax websites and evaluate the content.

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Lesson plan: How to teach your students about fake news

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Lesson plan: How to teach your students about fake news

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Back to lesson plans archive

Lesson plan: How to teach your students about fake news

Fake news is making news, and it's a problem.

Not only did a BuzzFeed data analysis find that viral stories falsely claiming that the Pope endorsed Donald Trump and that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to terrorists receive more Facebook attention than the most popular news stories from established news outlets, but a false story about child trafficking in a Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant inspired a North Carolina man to drive 5 hours with a shotgun and other weapons to investigate.

This lesson gives students media literacy skills they need to navigate the media, including how to spot fake news.

Social studies, U.S. government, civics, journalism

One 50-minute class

A recent study by Stanford University found an overwhelming majority of students were not able to tell the difference between so-called fake news and real news. Part of the solution involves providing students with the media literacy skills they need to evaluate sources, including social media. With the help of NewsHour Extra, students will explore the problems with fake news and gain confidence exploring the media that they come across every day.

How do you know if a news source is reliable?

Warm up activity

Complete the following PBS NewsHour Extra Daily News Story activity with your students: Did fake news influence the outcome of Election 2016? You may also want to show your class Craig Silverman's from Buzzfeed, which is the subject of the NewsHour piece.

Procedure
Note: Given time constraints, you may choose to watch the video, read the text or choose which questions you will address with your students.

1. A group of researchers at Stanford University made quite a stir recently when their study revealed how susceptible young people are to fake news. Listen to the NPR story (4:14) Stanford Study Finds Most Students Vulnerable To Fake News and ask your students why they think this piece made front page headlines. Let your students know that the study has been the subject of conversation in news rooms and faculty rooms across the country. They will appreciate knowing that you care about their well-being and are interested in teaching news literacy skills.
Share the following with your students: Prof. Wineburg says one mistake schools make is to block certain websites from students while they are at school. "In many schools there are internet filters that direct students to previously vetted sites and reliable sources of information. But what happens when they leave school and they take out their phone and they look at their Twitter feed? How do they become prepared to make the choices about what to believe, what to forward, what to post to their friends when they've given no practice in doing those kinds of things in school?" Do your students agree with Dr. Wineburg? Should schools block certain websites? Why or why not?

2. The News Literacy Project and Checkology created a checklist of "Ten questions for fake news detection." Read it out loud with your students. Ask them if they have any questions about the checklist and which points they think will help them the most when it comes to detecting fake news.

3. Next, explore the following top fake news stories from Craig Silverman's Buzzfeed article. Using the checklist above-just based on the headline alone-how could students detect the likelihood of these stories being fake?

4. Have students study two stories from the chart above by looking at the fact checking and debunking Internet rumor website Snopes :

*Note: If you have any questions or concerns, talk with your technology coordinator or administrator and perhaps think about sending an email home letting parents know you are teaching important media literacy skills. There are many wonderful resources to help teachers learn about media literacy. Here are just a few to check out: The News Literacy Project, NAMLE, Media Education Lab, Project Look Smart and Center for News Literacy.

Extension Activities

Fake news might be a case of history repeating itself. Check out the role fake news has played in U.S. history in this Washington Post piece: Fake News? That's a very old story.

Who are some of the people behind fake news? What would make a person want to create a fake news story? This Eastern European teenager says he's just giving people what they want and making a lot more than the average yearly income of $5,000 in his hometown. Take a look at this NBC News story: Fake news: How a partying Macedonian teen earns thousands publishing lies

We also recommend Full Frontal with Samantha Bee's piece on 'Fake News, Real Consequences' but for more mature high school students. Be sure to preview before you show your class.

By Victoria Pasquantonio, PBS NewsHour education editor and 13-year social studies and English teacher.

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Lesson plan: How to teach your students about fake news | Lesson Plan | PBS NewsHour Extra

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Back to lesson plans archive Fake news is making news, and it's a problem. Not only did a BuzzFeed data analysis find that viral stories falsely claiming that the Pope endorsed Donald Trump and that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to terrorists receive more Facebook attention than the most popular news stories from established news outlets, but a false story about child trafficking in a Washington, D.C.

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Education Minister Proposes ‘Digital Literacy Classes’ to Combat ‘Fake News’

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Education Minister Proposes ‘Digital Literacy Classes’ to Combat ‘Fake News’

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FREDERICK FLORIN/AFP/Getty Images

Austrian Education Minister Sonja Hammerschmid has proposed the introduction of "digital literacy classes" for children in compulsory education to teach them how to differentiate between real news and so-called "fake news."

Ms. Hammerschmid, a member of the Socialist Party of Austria (SPÖ) claims that the subject is needed to ensure that children are able to receive and process what is considered correct information rather than what the government and others consider to be "fake news." The minister hopes that "digital literacy" will combat the "fake news" phenomenon and said the subject could be incorporated into existing courses or be made a course on its own, reports Kronen Zeitung.

Minister Hammerschmid also said that children would learn to deal with cyberbullying and online hate speech via the proposed new courses. "Digitalisation has arrived in our society, and we have to meet this challenge," she said.

Education experts in Austria back up the idea of teaching children how to tell fact from fiction on the internet from a young age. They say that the best response to "fake news" is not to punish, but rather to educate.

consultant Judith Denkmayr says she is unsure of what real steps should be taken to combat misinformation online. "There needs to be more education in the area, more sensitivity, but whether we will need new laws I am frankly undecided," she said.

Since the election of U.S. President-Elect Donald J. Trump in November, many in the media have rallied against what they refer to as "fake news" with some insisting that misinformation swayed the election itself.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her allies have hit out against the phenomenon saying purveyors of false news could be subjected to fines as high as €500,000. The German Interior Ministry fears that "fake news" may even influence the upcoming German federal election later this year and has ordered the creation of an Orwellian " defence centre " within the ministry to correct misinformation and fake news.

Both Germany and Austria have come down hard on so-called 'hate speech' since the start of the migrant crisis in 2015. German police have raided homes and arrested their citizens for making anti-migrant statements online.

In Austria, even the press is not immune from the speech crack down as the former regional editor of Kronen Zeitung, Christoph Biro, is set to be tried for hate speech over an article he wrote in October of 2015.

Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson@breitbart.com

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Minister: Teach 'Digital Literacy Classes' to Combat 'Fake News'

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Ms. Hammerschmid, a member of the Socialist Party of Austria (SPÖ) claims that the subject is needed to ensure that children are able to receive and process what is considered correct information rather than what the government and others consider to be "fake news."

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Political transparency advocacy group VoteSmart has cataloged and published speeches, voting records, campaign financing and news coverage of more than 40,000 candidates for political office throughout the United States since 1992, and next month, will relocate to Drake University as its new national headquarters.

Officials say the relocation continues a tradition of partnership between VoteSmart and higher education, as the office has found permanent stations at schools like Oregon State University, the University of Arizona, the University of Southern California and the University of Texas at Austin. Throughout its history, they say, the organization has looked to higher ed as the lightning rod for change in political structure, social awareness, and today what some call a new threat to democracy: fake news.

Facebook, the world's largest social media platform, this week announced steps to limit the sharing and publishing of fake news on its site, which estimates suggest reaches 170 million North Americans daily. VoteSmart officials say colleges and universities are central to challenging news organizations and social platforms to stem the effects of fake news, which is part of the historic role of social change and information awareness that has spurred student movements for generations.

At the University of Maryland, journalism faculty remains in regular conversation about teaching quality industry practices, while giving students the full scope of their responsibility to provide accuracy and timeliness.

"We're teaching students that they are going to have a tougher time with readers just assuming that they are credible," says Lucy A. Dalglish, dean of UMD's Philip Merrill College of Journalism. "Now more than ever before. you have less leeway to make mistakes."

She says that the university has developed media literacy training for faculty and students with a specific portion of the course dedicated to discerning good and bad news sources. While Internet technology has made the job tougher for debunking bad news sources, she says the journalists can still do more to help the public understand why information is important, and how it is cultivated for reporting.

"We also need to teach them to stick up for themselves and for the industry they are going into. It's also important to do a better job of explaining where we got information. Mention open records, public meeting acts so people know that the reporting is based upon something."

The journalism school is also developing a pilot program for incoming students to learn better Internet search skills, and currently offers a mandatory skills source for freshmen and sophomores in conjunction with the school's library to receive research insight from credentialed librarians.

"Younger people almost always take the more idealistic side of life, and have an enthusiasm for truth and accuracy," says VoteSmart founding board member and senior consultant Adelaide Kimball. "They aren't afraid to call out a lack of facts, and campuses have always been the appropriate places to do that."

Kimball says that thousands of college students have helped to drive the VoteSmart agenda for decades, with its commitment to fact gathering and provision driving crossover appeal among students from a variety of college majors and career ambitions to volunteer as fact checkers and researchers. She says that any effort colleges and their students can make to reverse the effects of accepted misinformation preserves the integrity of journalism industry, and democracy at large.

"It's becoming hard to convince people that they need the facts, that they need the truth," says Kimball. "Somehow, we've got to get people to care, and to recognize what may not be accurate or fake and that they don't accept it anyway."

Jennifer Glover Konfrst is an assistant professor and co-leader of Drake's Strategic Political Communication program, and says that even in the classroom, curriculum and attitudes have shifted to analyze the effects of fake news on a public growing in its comfort with misinformation.

"In the past, we might have talked about the risks of being incorrect or sloppy in reporting, but you didn't see it happening very often," Konfrst says. "Now, we have the opportunity to show them this is what's so harmful about fake news; it's been shared 90,000 times and it's not true, and it takes 13 hours for a story to be debunked on average online, and it's all over the world."

"The American Association of University Professors has supported academic freedom and opposed those who seek to curtail it for more than a hundred years, and will continue to do so, because the common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition," read a statement from the petition. "The type of monitoring of professors in which you are engaged can only inhibit the process through which higher learning occurs and knowledge is advanced."

Konfrst, who was aware of the watchlist, says that she discloses her political affiliation at the beginning of her courses, and at their conclusion asks in her student evaluations of they felt all voices were afforded a chance to be heard.

"It's hard, because you don't want to have to feel like you have to prove your legitimacy to your students. I tell them that I'm going to allow all voices to be heard, I'm not going to tell you my political beliefs because it's not about that. I put it out there that I have opinions, but I don't think you're going to notice them. Putting it out there is helpful, because there's a difference in being unopinionated and being fair in your writing."

Kimball says that collegiate response to fake news creation, ultimately, will prove to be a historic task for the sustainability of the public trust.

"We do see the advent of fake news as an enormous problem for democracy and our civic culture, she says. "I'm happy to hear that colleges are taking up this challenge immediately, because this is one of the most dangerous developments in our civic culture and probably hundreds of years, if not ever."

"We seem to have gotten to a place, partly because of technology and people's nature, that people have a hard time distinguishing what's accurate and what's not. If schools across the country can pound that into students and cover those important issues in a way that helps people to easily see what is accurate and what is not, it is a huge public service."

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Political transparency advocacy group VoteSmart has cataloged and published speeches, voting records, campaign financing and news coverage of more than 40,000 candidates for political office throughout the United States since 1992, and next month, will relocate to Drake University as its new national headquarters.

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News you can use: Infographic walks you through 10 questions to detect fake news

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News you can use: Infographic walks you through 10 questions to detect fake news

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Can this infographic help students spot a phony news article? Test it out with your students, kids or friends and let us know in the comments.

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A few weeks ago, we reported on how some Washington educators will be asking the Legislature for money to reform civics education as a way to combat fake news.

Whether that initiative will pass is up in the air. But there's an infographic for teachers (and any news consumer) wondering how to best approach misinformation in the short-term.

A Washington, D.C.-based organization, the News Literacy Project (NLP), has come up with a straightforward guide to help separate fact from conspiracy theory.

"Ten Questions For Fake News Detection" helps teachers and students comb through an article to find telltale signs of falsehood. Use of all caps and excessive punctuation are on the list of potential red flags, according to the graphic.

( Click here to see a PDF version.)

Peter Adams, the senior vice president for educational programs at NLP, said the worksheet was created in late November, when concerned teachers began to ask the organization how to best address fake news in their classrooms.

NLP, founded in 2008, develops resources and products that help educators teach students about smart news consumption, civic freedoms and the newsmaking process.

"Misinformation is being spread in ways it hasn't been," Adams said. And it's taking a toll on students. Around the same time NLP released its infographic, a team of Stanford researchers released a study that revealed widespread inability to verify information among middle-schoolers, high-schoolers and even college students.

Being skeptical is only half the battle when evaluating news sources. The worksheet's first question asks the reader to gauge his or her emotional reaction to an article.

"Confirmation bias is a powerful thing," Adams said. "We like for students to stop and think, 'Hold on: Is this making you angry?'"

For teachers interested in accessing more news-literacy resources, NLP is piloting a virtual platform called Checkology, where teachers and students can access about a dozen different lessons digitally, many of which are taught by journalists in the field. One of the activities on the platform, "Be the Editor," gives students a lesson about news judgment: They're given 20 stories and asked to feature only five of them on a mock website. Other topics explored include social-media algorithms and citizen watchdogs.

Basic membership with Checkology is free with registration. To test-drive premium features, which allows individual activities and assessments for students, teachers can apply for a fee waiver from March 1 until the end of June.
If you decide to try this infographic in your classroom or at home, we'd love to hear about it. Leave us a note in the comments or, if you prefer to reflect on the experience, submit a guest column.

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News you can use: Infographic walks you through 10 questions to detect fake news

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Can this infographic help students spot a phony news article? Test it out with your students, kids or friends and let us know in the comments. Share story A few weeks ago, we reported on how some Washington educators will be asking the Legislature for money to reform civics education as a way to combat fake news.

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Most Students Don’t Know When News Is Fake, Stanford Study Finds

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Most Students Don’t Know When News Is Fake, Stanford Study Finds

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Preteens and teens may appear dazzlingly fluent, flitting among social-media sites, uploading selfies and texting friends. But they're often clueless about evaluating the accuracy and trustworthiness of what they find.

Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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Most Students Don't Know When News Is Fake, Stanford Study Finds

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Preteens and teens may appear dazzlingly fluent, flitting among social-media sites, uploading selfies and texting friends. But they're often clueless about evaluating the accuracy and trustworthiness of what they find. Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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Teach students to navigate fake news, say researchers

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Teach students to navigate fake news, say researchers

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Universities should be providing students with the skills to understand and handle media manipulation, say academics behind a new study

Universities should teach students skills to help them navigate the potential hazards of "fake news" and media manipulation on social media sites, according to the authors of research on the topic.

Philip Seargeant and Caroline Tagg of the Open University and Amy Brown of the University of Nottingham Ningbo advise institutions to teach students "critical digital literacy" awareness to address issues such as the role Facebook and social media sites play in politics and the dissemination of news and other information.

Their argument forms part of the conclusion of their forthcoming book, Taking Offence on Social Media: Conviviality and Communication on Facebook, which looks at the communication habits of Facebook users.

Dr Seargeant, senior lecturer in English language and applied linguistics, told Times Higher Education that universities were ideally placed to educate on these issues, which have formed a significant part of recent public discourse after "fake news" controversies during the US presidential election and in the aftermath of the European Union referendum. He added that it would also have relevance within students' academic studies.

"Whatever subject you're doing, you're going to be learning how to process information, how to communicate that information, how to craft arguments, and that involves a lot of these issues," he said.

"The implications are wider within the whole 'fake news' discussion - Facebook now [has] such a central part in people's lives generally but also in the way news and opinions get circulated."

Dr Seargeant said that a lot of the debate around media manipulation has focused on refining the technology to combat problems, but his research found that the way people used social networks was not solely a result of their design and capabilities.

For example, the research, which looked at 150 people from Europe, North America and Asia in one extended Facebook network, found that some people deliberately created "filter bubbles" - constructing a news feed that contained only opinions with which they agreed.

"Filter bubbles", according to Dr Seargeant, are implicated in the spread of "fake news" because they create conditions in which one-sided and extreme opinions can freely circulate and where information is not easily challenged. He suggests that students would be able to avoid these problems if they had formal education from their universities "up front".

"For students, you can give warnings about it, but it's more than that - it's an understanding of what the media's doing, why it's doing it and then making informed decisions," he said.

"A lot of this is stuff you sort of learn in the background [as] a student, but my feeling is that it's got broader value. At the moment, it's the sort of thing that gets put under the auspices of study skills."
john.elmes@tesglobal.com

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Teach students to navigate fake news, say researchers

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Universities should be providing students with the skills to understand and handle media manipulation, say academics behind a new study Universities should teach students skills to help them navigate the potential hazards of "fake news" and media manipulation on social media sites, according to the authors of research on the topic.

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By now, you've probably heard about one very real consequence of fake news - the infamous "pizzagate" conspiracy theory that ended with Edgar Welch, 28, firing a real gun inside a real Washington, D.C., pizzeria filled with real people.

When The New York Times later asked Welch what he thought when he realized there were no child slaves inside the restaurant, as one fake news story had led him to believe, he responded: "The intel on this wasn't 100 percent."

Welch isn't the only one struggling to tell fact from fiction in this digital age. A recent Stanford study found that America's middle, high school and college students are shockingly bad at it, too. It's clear that something has to change in the nation's classrooms. That something, according to Professor Sam Wineburg, one of those Stanford researchers, is "practice."

"How do they become prepared to make the choices about what to believe, what to forward, what to post to their friends," Wineburg asked on NPR's All Things Considered, "when they've been given no practice in school?"

And he's right. Many schools - perhaps most - aren't doing nearly enough to help students learn how to sort fact from social-media fiction. But some are.
"Like a flu in the winter"
"The question that many of you asked on your annotation of pizzagate was 'Why would anyone start a rumor?' " Patricia Hunt says to her students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va. "The question I want you to be thinking about today when we do this next lesson is 'Why would anyone believe it?' "

Hunt teaches U.S. and Virginia government. She's a 24-year veteran of the classroom, but today she's doing something she has never done before: helping to pilot a new, digital curriculum called the c heckology virtual classroom. It comes from the nonprofit The News Literacy Project. The morning's lesson kicks off with a video of Matea Gold, a political reporter with The Washington Post.

"Viral content includes stories, vignettes, ads, rumors and memes that catch on like a flu in the winter, quickly passing from one person to the next, often with little regard as to whether the content is true or not," Gold says from the Post's newsroom.

Hunt's students, most of them seniors, sit in clusters of threes and fours. Each has a laptop. After the video, they're presented with a series of viral stories. Some are propaganda. Some are ads. And some are pure fact.

"We don't know which is which at this point," laughs Kahder Smith, feeling a little overwhelmed. "We actually have to sit down, take our time, and actually read it. And probably Google some stuff to see if it's real or not."

The students' first test comes from Facebook. A post claims that more than a dozen people died after receiving the flu vaccine in Italy and that the CDC is now telling people not to get a flu shot. Autumn Cooper is torn.

"I mean, I've heard many rumors that the flu shot's bad for you," Cooper says. But instinct tells her the story's wrong. "It just doesn't look like a reliable source. It looks like this is off Facebook and someone shared it."

Cooper labels the story "fiction." And she's right.

Her classmate Suvra Das takes a different path to the same answer. When he's not sure of a story, he says, he now checks the comments section to see if a previous reader has already done the research.

"Because they usually figure it out," Das says. And, indeed, he wasn't the first to question the vaccine story's veracity. "Like one comment was, 'I just fact-checked this, and it doesn't appear to be true. Where else do you see this to be true?' "

The students come up with a few other red flags they can look for whenever they're unsure: no author byline, no quoted sources, no coverage elsewhere.
"Damn, why did I just read that?"
The News Literacy Project was founded nearly nine years ago by a Pulitzer prize-winning investigative reporter with the Los Angeles Times, Alan C. Miller. The group and its mission have been endorsed by 33 "partner" news organizations, including The Associated Press, The New York Times and NPR. That mission has always been to give students the tools to be smarter consumers - not just of news, but of all information. In May, the group unveiled its checkology virtual classroom. There's a free, basic version and a premium version that's more interactive for students.

"The No. 1 question that I love asking [students] is, 'Where do you get your news?' " says Elis Estrada, the group's Washington, D.C., program manager. "And the majority of them say, 'What is news?' They don't even know what it is. The fact that we have to start there is really telling."

Kahder Smith says he's happy to get the guided practice.

"I fall to fake news all the time. Even just random Twitter posts, and I'm like, 'Damn, why did I just read that?' "

Instead of teaching students the fundamentals of fact-checking, many schools simply ignore the problem, blocking social media sites on school computers.

"One of my friends says that's like teaching [students] to drive in the parking lot and then sending them out on the interstate and saying 'Good luck!' " says Audrey Church, president of the American Association of School Librarians. "This is something children don't know unless we teach them. They're not looking for bias. They take what they see on their device at face value, and so teaching them to be critical, thoughtful consumers of information is a challenge that's increasing."

Indeed, many of Hunt's students admit they don't consume news from traditional sources: not from TV networks or newspapers or even the websites of the major papers. One asked if NPR traffics in fake news.

Instead, these teens say they get their news largely from the social media on their smartphones. An infinite stream of stories. Some true. Some false. Much of it written by strangers hoping their readers can't tell the difference.

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By now, you've probably heard about one very real consequence of fake news - the infamous "pizzagate" conspiracy theory that ended with Edgar Welch, 28, firing a real gun inside a real Washington, D.C., pizzeria filled with real people.

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This education startup is teaching kids how to spot fake news

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This education startup is teaching kids how to spot fake news

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Flickr / Nadia Hatoum
Jennifer Coogan puts it bluntly: If adults can't be trusted to spot fake news, how can we expect kids to know when they're getting duped?

Coogan, editor-in-chief of education startup Newsela, believes children need a middle man to show them the way.

"Their lives are one-hundred percent digital," Coogan tells Business Insider. "And frankly, it's a lot easier in the digital world to create something fake."

Newsela's primary focus is helping kids boost their literacy skills through online news articles, but in the months since the presidential election the company has taken on a more civic-minded role. Across its user base of more than one million American teachers - which represent roughly 75% of American K-12 schools - it wants to mold students into responsible consumers of news.

This is a huge challenge, as there is no shortage of fake news on the internet. One estimate suggests there are dozens of major fake news sites, whose social media followings rise into the millions. Some are intentionally satirical, like The Onion (motto: Tu stultus es, Latin for "You are dumb"), but many purport to deliver straight news with no sign of fabrication.

To help kids separate fact from fiction, Newsela partnered with the American Press Institute in October of 2016. Now whenever kids read an article on their electronic device, in addition to their normal comprehension questions, they're prompted to ask questions about the article itself: Where do the facts come from? Is there a bias? What's missing from this piece?

"That'll be like a mini-research project for the student," Coogan says.

Teachers can ask kids probing questions about the outlet, including where it's headquartered, where it receives funding, and what affiliations its members might have. No one would go to such great lengths reading the morning paper, Coogan says, but it's meant to be overkill in order to instill healthy levels of skepticism.

"It's a good exercise to always question the source of the information," she says.

Historically, parents would help their kids discern what's real and fake. But Coogan argues there is a fundamental divide that exists in how parents and kids consume their news. Parents grew up with reputable, hard-copy sources at a time when producing fake news was an elaborate process.

"You'd have to get a printing press and roll out a bunch of issues of your fake newspaper," she says.

Today's young readers are digitally native, which means their news sources are, too. Parents who are familiar with only a few big-name publishers will struggle to offer any help in gauging which of these sources are trustworthy. They know the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are real, but what about AmericanNews.com and Infowars? Each sounds reputable enough, but both have been flagged as untrustworthy.

"Even if [children] come from a family where the parents are news junkies," Coogan says, "the way parents are consuming news is just not going to foster home training."

Newsela's approach has seen some early anecdotal success at getting kids to question what they read, and to filter out the sensational and suspicious, but concrete data is hard to come by. The larger goal is to move kids toward feeling confident that what they read is true and fair.

"I do think the onus is now on the teacher" to groom kids' savviness as readers of the news, Coogan says. "Maybe it does need to become a new standard."

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This education startup is teaching kids how to spot fake news

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Jennifer Coogan puts it bluntly: If adults can't be trusted to spot fake news, how can we expect kids to know when they're getting duped? Coogan, editor-in-chief of education startup Newsela, believes children need a middle man to show them the way. "Their lives are one-hundred percent digital," Coogan tells Business Insider.

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From Common Sense Media

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Parent's Guide: watch Common Sense Media's 5 Ways to Spot Fake News advice video to help you make informed decisions with your children.

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LibGuides: Colonels Library LHS: Library Info

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IFLA has made this infographic with eight simple steps (based on FactCheck.org's 2016 article How to Spot Fake News) to discover the verifiability of a given news-piece in front of you. Download, print, translate, and share - at home, at your library, in your local community, and on social media networks.

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FactCheck.org's "How to Spot Fake News" 

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FactCheck.org's "How to Spot Fake News" 

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Fake news is nothing new. But bogus stories can reach more people more quickly via social media than what good old-fashioned viral emails could accomplish in years past.

Concern about the phenomenon led Facebook and Google to announce that they'll crack down on fake news sites, restricting their ability to garner ad revenue. Perhaps that could dissipate the amount of malarkey online, though news consumers themselves are the best defense against the spread of misinformation.

Not all of the misinformation being passed along online is complete fiction, though some of it is. Snopes.com has been exposing false viral claims since the mid 1990s, whether that's fabricated messages, distortions containing bits of truth and everything in between. Founder David Mikkelson warned in a Nov. 17 article not to lump everything into the "fake news" category. "The fictions and fabrications that comprise fake news are but a subset of the larger bad news phenomenon, which also encompasses many forms of shoddy, unresearched, error-filled, and deliberately misleading reporting that do a disservice to everyone," he wrote.

A lot of these viral claims aren't "news" at all, but fiction, satire and efforts to fool readers into thinking they're for real.

We've long encouraged readers to be skeptical of viral claims, and make good use of the delete key when a chain email hits their inboxes. In December 2007, we launched our Ask FactCheck feature, where we answer readers' questions, the vast majority of which concern viral emails, social media memes and the like. Our first story was about a made-up email that claimed then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wanted to put a "windfall" tax on all stock profits of 100 percent and give the money to, the email claimed, "the 12 Million Illegal Immigrants and other unemployed minorities." We called it "a malicious fabrication" - that's "fake news" in today's parlance.

In 2008, we tried to get readers to rid their inboxes of this kind of garbage. We described a list of red flags - we called them Key Characteristics of Bogusness - that were clear tip-offs that a chain email wasn't legitimate. Among them: an anonymous author; excessive exclamation points, capital letters and misspellings; entreaties that "This is NOT a hoax!"; and links to sourcing that does not support or completely contradicts the claims being made.

Those all still hold true, but fake stories - as in, completely made-up "news" - has grown more sophisticated, often presented on a site designed to look (sort of) like a legitimate news organization. Still, we find it's easy to figure out what's real and what's imaginary if you're armed with some critical thinking and fact-checking tools of the trade.

Here's our advice on how to spot a fake:

Consider the source. In recent months, we've fact-checked fake news from abcnews.com.co (not the actual URL for ABC News), WTOE 5 News (whose "about" page says it's "a fantasy news website"), and the Boston Tribune (whose "contact us" page lists only a gmail address). Earlier this year, we debunked the claim that the Obamas were buying a vacation home in Dubai, a made-up missive that came from WhatDoesItMean.com, which describes itself as "One Of The Top Ranked Websites In The World for New World Order, Conspiracy Theories and Alternative News" and further says on its site that most of what it publishes is fiction.

Clearly, some of these sites do provide a "fantasy news" or satire warning, like WTOE 5, which published the bogus headline, "Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement." Others aren't so upfront, like the Boston Tribune, which doesn't provide any information on its mission, staff members or physical location - further signs that maybe this site isn't a legitimate news organization. The site, in fact, changed its name from Associated Media Coverage, after its work had been debunked by fact-checking organizations.

Snopes.com, which has been writing about viral claims and online rumors since the mid-1990s, maintains a list of known fake news websites, several of which have emerged in the past two years.

Read beyond the headline. If a provocative headline drew your attention, read a little further before you decide to pass along the shocking information. Even in legitimate news stories, the headline doesn't always tell the whole story. But fake news, particularly efforts to be satirical, can include several revealing signs in the text. That abcnews.com.co story that we checked, headlined "Obama Signs Executive Order Banning The Pledge Of Allegiance In Schools Nationwide," went on to quote "Fappy the Anti-Masturbation Dolphin." We have to assume that the many readers who asked us whether this viral rumor was true hadn't read the full story.

Check the author. Another tell-tale sign of a fake story is often the byline. The pledge of allegiance story on abcnews.com.co was supposedly written by "Jimmy Rustling." Who is he? Well, his author page claims he is a "doctor" who won "fourteen Peabody awards and a handful of Pulitzer Prizes." Pretty impressive, if true. But it's not. No one by the name of "Rustling" has won a Pulitzer or Peabody award. The photo accompanying Rustling's bio is also displayed on another bogus story on a different site, but this time under the byline " Darius Rubics." The Dubai story was written by "Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers." The Pope Francis story has no byline at all.

What's the support? Many times these bogus stories will cite official - or official-sounding - sources, but once you look into it, the source doesn't back up the claim. For instance, the Boston Tribune site wrongly claimed that President Obama's mother-in-law was going to get a lifetime government pension for having babysat her granddaughters in the White House, citing "the Civil Service Retirement Act" and providing a link. But the link to a government benefits website doesn't support the claim at all.

The banning-the-pledge story cites the number of an actual executive order - you can look it up. It doesn't have anything to do with the Pledge of Allegiance.

Another viral claim we checked a year ago was a graphic purporting to show crime statistics on the percentage of whites killed by blacks and other murder statistics by race. Then-presidential candidate Donald Trump retweeted it, telling Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly that it came "from sources that are very credible." But almost every figure in the image was wrong - FBI crime data is publicly available - and the supposed source given for the data, "Crime Statistics Bureau - San Francisco," doesn't exist.

Recently, we've received several questions about a fake news story on the admittedly satirical site Nevada County Scooper, which wrote that Vice President-elect Mike Pence, in a "surprise announcement," credited gay conversion therapy for saving his marriage. Clearly such a "surprise announcement" would garner media coverage beyond a website you've never heard of. In fact, if you Google this, the first link that comes up is a Snopes.com article revealing that this is fake news.

Check the date. Some false stories aren't completely fake, but rather distortions of real events. These mendacious claims can take a legitimate news story and twist what it says - or even claim that something that happened long ago is related to current events.

Since Trump was elected president, we've received many inquiries from readers wanting to know whether Ford had moved car production from Mexico to Ohio, because of Trump's election. Readers cited various blog items that quoted from and linked to a CNN Money article titled " Ford shifts truck production from Mexico to Ohio." But that story is from August 2015, clearly not evidence of Ford making any move due to the outcome of the election. (A reminder again to check the support for these claims.)

One deceptive website didn't credit CNN, but instead took CNN's 2015 story and slapped a new headline and publication date on it, claiming, "Since Donald Trump Won The Presidency... Ford Shifts Truck Production From Mexico To Ohio." Not only is that a bogus headline, but the deception involves copyright infringement.

If this Ford story sounds familiar, that's because the CNN article has been distorted before.

In October 2015, Trump wrongly boasted that Ford had changed its plans to build new plants in Mexico, and instead would build a plant in Ohio. Trump took credit for Ford's alleged change of heart and tweeted a link to a story on a blog called Prntly.com, which cited the CNN Money story. But Ford hadn't changed its plans at all, and Trump deserved no credit.

In fact, the CNN article was about the transfer of some pickup assembly work from Mexico to Ohio, a move that was announced by Ford in March 2014. The plans for new plants in Mexico were still on, Ford said. "Ford has not spoken with Mr. Trump, nor have we made any changes to our plans," Ford said in a statement.

Is this some kind of joke? Remember, there is such thing as satire. Normally, it's clearly labeled as such, and sometimes it's even funny. Andy Borowitz has been writing a satirical news column, the Borowitz Report, since 2001, and it has appeared in the New Yorker since 2012. But not everyone gets the jokes. We've fielded several questions on whether Borowitz's work is true.

Among the headlines our readers have flagged: " Putin Appears with Trump in Flurry of Swing-State Rallies" and " Trump Threatens to Skip Remaining Debates If Hillary Is There." When we told readers these were satirical columns, some indicated that they suspected the details were far-fetched but wanted to be sure.

And then there's the more debatable forms of satire, designed to pull one over on the reader. That "Fappy the Anti-Masturbation Dolphin" story? That's the work of online hoaxer Paul Horner, whose "greatest coup," as described by the Washington Post in 2014, was when Fox News mentioned, as fact, a fake piece titled, "Obama uses own money to open Muslim museum amid government shutdown." Horner told the Post after the election that he was concerned his hoaxes aimed at Trump supporters may have helped the campaign.

The posts by Horner and others - whether termed satire or simply "fake news" - are designed to encourage clicks, and generate money for the creator through ad revenue. Horner told the Washington Post he makes a living off his posts. Asked why his material gets so many views, Horner responded, "They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore."

Check your biases. We know this is difficult. Confirmation bias leads people to put more stock in information that confirms their beliefs and discount information that doesn't. But the next time you're automatically appalled at some Facebook post concerning, say, a politician you oppose, take a moment to check it out.

Try this simple test: What other stories have been posted to the "news" website that is the source of the story that just popped up in your Facebook feed? You may be predisposed to believe that Obama bought a house in Dubai, but how about a story on the same site that carries this headline: " Antarctica 'Guardians' Retaliate Against America With Massive New Zealand Earthquake." That, too, was written by the prolific "Sorcha Faal, and as reported to her Western Subscribers."

We're encouraged by some of the responses we get from readers, who - like the ones uncertain of Borowitz's columns - express doubt in the outrageous, and just want to be sure their skepticism is justified. But we are equally discouraged when we see debunked claims gain new life.

We've seen the resurgence of a fake quote from Donald Trump since the election - a viral image that circulated last year claims Trump told People magazine in 1998: "If I were to run, I'd run as a Republican. They're the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they'd still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific." We found no such quote in People's archives from 1998, or any other year. And a public relations representative for the magazine confirmed that. People 's Julie Farin told us in an email last year: "We combed through every Trump story in our archive. We couldn't find anything remotely like this quote -and no interview at all in 1998."

Comedian Amy Schumer may have contributed to the revival of this fake meme. She put it on Instagram, adding at the end of a lengthy message, "Yes this quote is fake but it doesn't matter."

Consult the experts. We know you're busy, and some of this debunking takes time. But we get paid to do this kind of work. Between FactCheck.org, Snopes.com, the Washington Post Fact Checker and PolitiFact.com, it's likely at least one has already fact-checked the latest viral claim to pop up in your news feed.

FactCheck.org was among a network of independent fact-checkers who signed an open letter to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg suggesting that Facebook "start an open conversation on the principles that could underpin a more accurate news ecosystem on its News Feed." We hope that conversation happens, but news readers themselves remain the first line of defense against fake news.

On our Viral Spiral page, we list some of the claims we get asked about the most; all of our Ask FactChecks can be found here. And if you encounter a new claim you'd like us to investigate, email us at editor@factcheck.org.

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Fake news is nothing new. But bogus stories can reach more people more quickly via social media than what good old-fashioned viral emails could accomplish in years past. Concern about the phenomenon led Facebook and Google to announce that they'll crack down on fake news sites, restricting their ability to garner ad revenue.

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NPR: "Fake News Expert On How False Stories Spread And Why People Believe Them"

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NPR: "Fake News Expert On How False Stories Spread And Why People Believe Them"

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DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. So do you remember reading that Hillary Clinton paid Jay Z and Beyonce $62 million dollars for performing at a rally in Cleveland before the election? You might have, but the story is false, one of many posted on hyper-partisan websites and spread by aggressive social media campaigns during the presidential election.

Our guest, Craig Silverman, has spent much of his career as a journalist writing about issues of accuracy in media. He wrote a column for the Poynter Institute called Regret the Error and later a book of the same name on the harm done by erroneous reporting. He also launched a web-based startup called Emergent devoted to crowdsourcing the fact-checking of fake news.

He's now the media editor for the website BuzzFeed, and he spent much of this year writing about fake news, rumors and conspiracy theories that gained currency in the presidential campaign - where they came from, why they got so much engagement on social media and what should be done to reduce their impact on public discourse. I spoke to Craig Silverman yesterday.

Well, Craig Silverman, welcome to FRESH AIR. You did an analysis comparing how stories done by, you know, mainstream major news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post did it in terms of engagement on Facebook. You compared those stories to other stories done by essentially fake websites or fake election stories. What did you find?

CRAIG SILVERMAN: Something pretty surprising. So what we did was we looked at 19 major media organizations and we found sort of the election content from them that had performed best on Facebook. And to kind of define what that means, Facebook doesn't give us a lot of data. That's I think one of the frustrations overall that a lot of researchers and other people have. But what Facebook will give you is one number for a piece of content that gives you the total count of the number of shares and comments and reactions for that one piece of content.

And so what we did was we looked across 19 major media organizations and we picked out the best-performing stuff about the election. And then because I'd been looking at fake news for so long, I have lists of more than 50 websites that completely publish fake information. I looked at what had performed best from them about the election, and I also did some searches to try and find other things about conspiracy theories that I knew had spread.

So at the end of the day, when we kind of looked at the numbers we saw that nine months before the election, six months before the election, the overall Facebook engagement for those top election stories from the mainstream outlets was greater than the fake news that was spreading. But when we went three months before the election, that critical time, we actually saw the fake news spike. And we saw the mainstream news engagement on Facebook for those top 20 stories decline.

And so at the end of the day, in that critical moment, the fake news of those top 20 stories was getting more engagement on Facebook than some of the stories from the biggest media outlets in the U.S. And that was incredibly surprising. I didn't actually expect fake news to win out in that sense.

DAVIES: So what does that tell us?

SILVERMAN: Something was going on there where, one, you can conclude that the stuff that they were creating and spreading was really resonating with voters. But two, I think you also have to look at Facebook itself and wonder how is it that these sites that have for so long been so marginal, how is it that these sites that in many cases had only been launched in the previous, you know, six to 12 months, how is it possible that they're getting stuff out there on this massive platform, Facebook, that is getting more engagement than, you know, op-eds and commentary pieces from major media, than, you know, big stories about the Trump campaign, about the Clinton campaign? It just didn't make sense to me.

But there's no question that these fake stories resonated with people. There's no question that they saw them and they shared them or they commented on them and they liked them, and that created tremendous velocity on Facebook. And a lot of people saw them, and that's a really surprising thing and it's a distressing thing.

DAVIES: When you looked at the fake news stories, did they tend to help one side more than another?

SILVERMAN: Yeah. Overwhelmingly, when you looked at the stories that performed really well on Facebook, they were pro-Trump or they were anti-Clinton. And that was a very clear trend. The stuff that was anti-Trump was just not getting the same traction. And so I think what happened is that a lot of people creating fake news looked at this and said, well, let's go all-in on Trump.

DAVIES: You've discovered that there are more than a hundred websites peddling false news stories for the American voting public from a single town in Macedonia in the Balkans. Tell us about this place. Who's pushing this stuff?

SILVERMAN: There's a town in central Macedonia called Veles, you know, population is roughly around 40 to 50,000 people. And, you know, to back up for a second, myself and a researcher named Lawrence Alexander were interested in pro-Trump movements outside of the United States and outside of North America. And so working with Lawrence, we kind of went from, you know, one European country in particular to the next to sort of see, you know, are there other pro-Trump Facebook pages? Are there pro-Trump websites? Who are the people running these? You know, what messaging are they using?

We were interested in that element of it, and we were interested for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that a lot of pro-Trump content online was getting really good engagement. And so we figured that there might be people from other countries around the world who are sort of trying to grab a piece of that. And then the second piece was that we were interested to see if there were any other foreign entities that were helping push pro-Trump messaging outside of the U.S.

And, obviously, one of the ones that comes to mind when you think about that would be Russia. Are there any sites pushing pro-Trump messaging in Europe that had connections perhaps to Russian interests? So we went looking and we found some sites in different places. And we found this small cluster initially in Macedonia, and that was sort of of interest. You know, why would people in Macedonia be running sites that seemed very pro-Trump in English?

And we looked a little bit closer and did more research and we found that actually The Guardian months earlier had pointed to over a hundred websites about U.S. politics in this small town of Veles. So we did our own research and we turned up a number of 140 sites. And I went and I visited every single one of these 140 sites personally. And we started to build a spreadsheet to sort of see like, OK, so what kind of content are they publishing and do they lean right or left or do they seem kind of, you know, in the middle?

And as I filled out the spreadsheet it became very clear that they were overwhelmingly pro-Trump. And as I visited the websites and read their content, I saw that a lot of the stuff that they were pushing was misleading, was to the extreme of partisanship and also occasionally was false. And so we dug in even more and realized that among the top shared articles from, you know, these range of sites, the majority of, like, the top five were actually completely false. So at that point, once we understood the content that they were publishing and how many there were, we really wanted to understand so who are the people behind these sites?

DAVIES: OK, so you got in contact with these folks. Who were they?

SILVERMAN: Yeah, I shot out a lot of emails. You know, the sites that we had found, we found sort of who was registered as the owner of the sites. And most people didn't respond to me. Some people got back to me and politely declined saying that they weren't interested in talking to me.

But a few people through email or through finding them on Facebook and talking to them did speak to me. And one of the things that stood out right away was that a lot of them were very young. In fact, a lot of the people I spoke to were still in their teens or in their 20s and in university. And, you know, the biggest question is why. You know, why run politics sites, why pro-Trump politics sites and how would a teenager in Macedonia think to do this?

And I think there were probably still some unanswered questions there. But the answer that they always gave me was that, you know, it was simply for money. There are a lot of sites run out of Veles, run out of Macedonia in general that we found. In particular, there's a huge cluster of websites in English about health issues because they find that that content does really well.

And if they sign up, for example, for Google AdSense, an ad program, they can get money as people visit their sites and it's pretty straightforward. So they tried election sites, and over time they all came to realize that the stuff that did the best was pro-Trump stuff. They got the most traffic and most traction.

DAVIES: So these are young people, teenagers in some cases, who aren't driven by ideology. They're making a buck. Do they make money from doing well on Facebook?

SILVERMAN: Facebook directly doesn't really earn them a lot of money. But the key thing about Facebook - and this is true whether you're running a politics site out of Macedonia or whether you run a very large website in the U.S. - Facebook is the biggest driver of traffic to, you know, news websites in the world now. You know, 1.8 billion people log into Facebook every month. And they'll...

DAVIES: They see stuff they like, they hit the link and they go to the site, right?

SILVERMAN: That's it. And so the key thing there is you have to get your content onto Facebook. You have to get in front of people so that they start sharing it and clicking on it. And so Facebook is the driver. And what we've found in subsequent investigations was that a lot of the folks running these sites in Macedonia also have these - sometimes they're creating or buying fake Facebook accounts which they then use to go online and to drop links to the stories on their websites into, for example, pro-Trump Facebook groups that exist online. Maybe they have thousands or tens of thousands of members. If you put your story in there, hopefully you're going to get some clicks. And so that's what they were doing. They were using Facebook to drive the traffic to the website where they had ads from Google and where they would earn money from that traffic.

DAVIES: Right. Now, these young people in Macedonia I don't expect know enough about American politics to produce convincing fake election stories. Where were they getting the content?

SILVERMAN: This is, again, one of the key things you wonder because, I mean, the English of some of the folks that I interviewed, you know, was OK, but not enough for them to kind of create this content themself. And so as we were looking at the sites, we realized that, you know, if you, for example, would place the headline for a particular article on a Macedonian site in Google, you would probably find that exact headline on a site run out of the U.S. maybe a day or two earlier.

And so in the end, what they were doing was paying attention to the content that was doing well on Facebook, you know, looking in those pro-Trump Facebook groups to see what people were sharing. And then they would, you know, copy that text completely or just kind of pick a little piece out of it and link back. And so it was a very easy thing for them to do. They didn't have to come up with stories. They certainly weren't doing reporting. They were kind of copying and pasting and getting their stuff onto Facebook.

And the key here is it speaks to kind of what happens on Facebook, which is that it doesn't matter who necessarily created the story first. It matters who was able to get it to move the most on Facebook. That's who would earn the most money.

DAVIES: So these guys figured out there was money to be made from pushing this. When you talked to them, did you say hey, this isn't true, voters are being misinformed? Did they care?

SILVERMAN: There wasn't a huge amount of concern over that. And I think part of it is that, you know, Veles, it's a small place. It's - economically, it's not doing very well. Used to be heavy industry there. A lot of those jobs are gone now. And I think there was an element almost - in some of the people I was speaking to, there was almost an element of pride saying, you know, we're here in this small country that most Americans probably don't even think about, and we're able to, you know, put stuff out and earn money and to run a business. And I think there was a bit of pride in that. One of the people that I spoke to, who was a bit older - he was in his 20s - you know, he said that yeah, I mean, people know that a lot of the content is false. But that's what works.

And that's, again, one of the really big takeaways, I think, from this election, is - and I heard this not only from people in Macedonia, but from people in the U.S. who run very large - what people sort of refer to as hyper-partisan conservative Facebook pages. You know, meaning that their content is very, very slanted and very much appealing to their core audience there. They all said that when it came down to it, the fake stuff performed better on Facebook. And if you weren't doing some stuff that was misleading or fake, you were going to get beat by people who were.

DAVIES: You actually did an analysis where you looked at the accuracy of stories done by hyper-partisan sites on the right, hyper-partisan sites on the left and mainstream sites. What did you find about how well accurate stuff played and how well false stuff played?

SILVERMAN: So a team of us at BuzzFeed, you know, we spent seven consecutive weekdays looking at all of the posts that went up on the Facebook pages of a selection of, as you said, pages on the right, pages on the left. And then we also looked at three mainstream pages as well as kind of, you know, a base of comparison. And what we found overall is that the content that performed best was - you know, fell into two categories. So one is - was sort of misleading or false completely. That would get high engagement, meaning high shares on Facebook. That's - we really zeroed in on shares because that's how you drive the most traffic.

And then the other type of content that performed really well was, you know, memes, like a photo that just sort - kind of expressed a very partisan opinion. These - you know, they weren't necessarily factually based, but they really kind of riled up the base. And for the pages that were partisan pages on the right and the left, if you had stuff that really appealed to people's existing beliefs - really appealed to, you know, a negative perception of Hillary Clinton, a negative perception of Donald Trump - even if it, you know, completely bent the truth, that would perform much better than a sort of purely factual thing.

And when we looked at the performance of the mainstream pages, you know, the engagement for the partisan pages was much better. And I don't think that's only because we did find false and misleading stuff on the partisan pages. I think it's also because frankly, you know, the mainstream pages weren't posting as many memes. They weren't posting as many videos. And that stuff does really well on Facebook. It's strange, but you would think the media - big media companies are better at kind of running their Facebook pages. But honestly, these partisan pages on the right and the left were just much better at understanding what does well on Facebook.

DAVIES: Craig Silverman is the media editor for BuzzFeed. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.

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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're talking about fake news in the presidential campaign with BuzzFeed media editor Craig Silverman. When we left off, we were talking about BuzzFeed's analysis of how false, highly partisan content did better on Facebook than stories reported by mainstream media.

SILVERMAN: So at the core of this is - there's two factors that are at play here. So one is a human factor and one is kind of a platform or algorithmic factor. So on the human side, there's a lot of research out there going back a very long time that looks at sort of how humans deal with information. And one of the things that we love as humans - and this this affects all of us. We shouldn't think of this as just being something for people who are very partisan. We love to hear things that confirm what we think and what we feel and what we already believe. It's - it makes us feel good to get information that aligns with what we already believe or what we want to hear.

And on the other side of that is when we're confronted with information that contradicts what we think and what we feel, the reaction isn't to kind of sit back and consider it. The reaction is often to double down on our existing beliefs. So if you're feeding people information that basically just tells them what they want to hear, they're probably going to react strongly to that. And the other layer that these pages are very good at is they bring in emotion into it, anger or hate or surprise or, you know, joy. And so if you combine information that aligns with their beliefs, if you can make it something that strikes an emotion in them, then that gets them to react.

And that's where the kind of platform and algorithms come in. Which is that on Facebook, you know, the more you interact with certain types of content, the more its algorithms are going to feed you more of that content. So if you're reading stuff that aligns perfectly with your political beliefs, it makes you feel really good and really excited and you share it, Facebook is going to see that as a signal that you want more of that stuff. So that's why the false misleading stuff does really well is because it's highly emotion-driven. It tells people exactly what they want to hear. It makes them feel very comforted and it gets them to react on the platform. And the platform sees that content does really well and Facebook feeds more of it to more people.

DAVIES: There are plenty of stories that debunk inaccurate information and you looked at how they do. How do they compare to the false stories?

SILVERMAN: They don't, unfortunately. And this goes back to a research project I did a couple of years ago where I was really very focused, one, on the spread of rumors and misinformation online and two, also how media organizations deal with this new world where it's very easy for something, you know, that's simply a tweet claiming something to suddenly get huge exposure and huge distribution. And the same obviously happens on Facebook on an even bigger scale. So when you're a journalist and you see something out there, you're not sure whether it's true or false, how do you deal with it? Do you wait and do your work? Or because potentially millions of people have already seen it, do you kind of write about it?

So I did a research project where we kind of identified rumors that we saw out there. We looked at how media coverage was of it. And this is how I started to encounter a lot of fake news stories and started to realize that there were entire websites that existed that just had completely fake stuff. So when I would see that completely fake stuff circulating, I would - we would look at the Facebook and other types of social engagement for it. And then we would also try to find any debunking of it from Snopes or from other sources. And honestly during that research project, we really only found I think one example where the debunkings (ph) actually had actually gotten more engagement on social, and in particular Facebook, than the false information.

DAVIES: It's just not as much fun?

SILVERMAN: Yeah. There's a few things going on there. And again, psychology comes into it a little bit. So one, when people create the false stuff and if they're smart about it - if I put it that way - you know, they know that it needs to appeal to emotion. They know that maybe if it can have a sense of urgency, if it can be tied to things people care about, that's probably going to do well in terms of fake stuff. Whereas when you come in as the debunker, what you're doing is actively going against information that people are probably already, you know, willing to believe and that gets them emotionally. And to tell somebody I'm sorry that thing you saw and shared is not true is you coming in in a very negative way unfortunately.

And so the reaction is often for people to get defensive and to disagree with you. And just in general you just seem like kind of a spoil sport. You're ruining the fun or you're getting in the way of their beliefs. And a lot of times when I put debunkings out there, you know, some of the reactions I get are people saying, well, it might as well be true. You know, he could have said that or that could have happened. Or, of course, you get accusations that, you know, you're biased. And so the debunkings just don't appeal as much to us on a psychological level. There's some emotional resistance to wanting to be wrong. That's a very natural human thing. And they're just not as shareable because the emotion there isn't as real and raw as something that makes you angry, for example.

DAVIES: Craig Silverman is media editor for BuzzFeed. After a break, he'll talk about how Facebook handles fake news and what it might do better. I'm Dave Davies and this is FRESH AIR.

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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. We're speaking with BuzzFeed media editor Craig Silverman about the spread of fake news in the presidential campaign. Silverman spent a lot of this year investigating fake news, reporting that a torrent of false web stories came from a small town in Macedonia and discovering that late in the campaign fake news did better on Facebook than stories from mainstream media sources.

As the campaign proceeded, did the campaigns themselves or Donald Trump through his tweets have any role in building an audience for these fake news stories?

SILVERMAN: Yeah. I think the Trump campaign was so remarkable for so many reasons when we talk about this specific area. So the first that I think needs to be mentioned is that, you know, the Trump campaign itself helped circulate false news stories, 100 percent fake news stories from 100 percent fake news websites.

DAVIES: Give us an example.

SILVERMAN: So the one that comes to mind right away, this is a story that was on a website that is made to look like ABC News but its domain is slightly different. And the story that was published, you know, long before the election claimed that a protester had been paid $3,500 to go and protest at Trump rally. And this fed into perceptions that the people who are against Trump were being paid by big interests.

And that story did pretty well on Facebook. It got a fair amount of engagement. But it was tweeted by Eric Trump. It was tweeted by Corey Lewandowski, who was a campaign manager for Donald Trump, and it was tweeted by Kellyanne Conway, who was his campaign manager, not that long before the election. So when you have people in positions of power and influence putting out fake news - and I want to say, you know, there's no evidence that they knew it was fake and put it out there to fool people. I think in each case they genuinely believed it was true because, as we've discussed, I think it fed into the message their campaign wanted to put out. And it's really kind of unprecedented to think of people that high in a campaign actively putting out misinformation and it happening from several people. You would have thought that after one or two of them did it, you people would have talked to them. So that piece is really, really remarkable.

The other one that I think has to be mentioned is that Donald Trump, on a very frequent basis throughout the campaign and now that he is the president-elect, says things that are not true and things that are demonstrably false. And when you have somebody who is in that position of power, with that amount of influence, with that amount of people who are very passionate about him and what they think he can bring to the country, putting out false information - you know, I think it lays the groundwork for other false information to get out there. And it creates a fertile environment for folks to start kind of making things up because the door is wide open. And I think that there is something unique about the Trump campaign in that respect.

DAVIES: Did you see any of this kind of activity among Democrats?

SILVERMAN: So there certainly was false information circulating that was, you know, anti-Trump or pro-Clinton. I certainly can't think of an example from the Clinton campaign of them actively falling for fake news or what have you. But there's no question that there were things that were false that spread about Donald Trump.

I can think of one meme that I saw where people had misquoted him. One that was really popular actually was one that falsely claimed he had given a quote to People magazine many years ago basically saying that if I ever ran for president, I would run as a Republican because conservatives are so stupid they'll believe anything. And this was turned into a meme.

It spread a lot on Facebook. It was debunked so many times. We debunked it at BuzzFeed. Snopes has debunked it. And it just kept going and going and going because this is something I think a lot of Democrats wanted to believe. But it also has to be said, I mean, all of the analysis that we've done about misinformation related to the election has shown that pro-Trump misinformation and anti-Clinton misinformation far outperformed anything that came from the other side.

DAVIES: Do we have any idea what the effect of this was on this election? Has anybody tried to figure out how many minds were changed, how many votes might have been affected?

SILVERMAN: I don't think anybody's going to get a definitive answer on that. It's really tough to conclude the effect of media on people's voting habits because there are so many factors. But - so I think anyone who believes that fake news won Trump the election is wrong. There's no data to support that. And I say this as somebody who's been looking at this data in a lot of different ways. There's no smoking gun. There's - I don't think we'll ever get it.

But when we look at some of the data about the impact of misinformation, it's really significant. So we at BuzzFeed partnered with Ipsos to do a survey of 3,000 Americans. And one of the things we wanted to find out was their familiarity with fake news headlines about the election. And what we found in the end after testing a group of five fake news headlines that went really big during the election and six real news headlines that went really big during the election is that 75 percent of the time, the Americans who were shown a fake news headline and had remembered it from the election believed it to be accurate.

And that's a really shocking thing. It's impossible to go the next step and say, well, they voted because of that. But I think one of the things this election has shown is that people will believe fake news, misinformation will spread and people will believe it and it will become part of their worldview.

DAVIES: Yeah, but did I hear that right, three quarters of us will believe a fake headline, think it's true?

SILVERMAN: This is - this was a pretty high number, a shocking number. And that number is based on more than 1,500 judgments about fake news headlines from people in this sample of 3,000 people. So it's a pretty good sample size. It's not definitive, but it's a high number. And it is shocking because, I mean, for example, one of these headlines that we tested claimed that Hillary Clinton had been proven to have sold weapons to ISIS. I mean, that was one of the headlines and people did believe that.

DAVIES: We're speaking with Craig Silverman. He is the media editor for BuzzFeed. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. And we're speaking with Craig Silverman. He is the media editor for BuzzFeed. He's been writing about accuracy in reporting and fact-checking for many years. And he spent a lot of time this election season writing about fake news.

Let's talk about Facebook's role here. Now, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has said a number of different things about this. At one point, he said, you know, we're a tech company, not a media company. And that's what Facebook does - right? - it allows millions of people to share content and is kind of reluctant maybe to regulate it. What have its own policies done to propagate or limit the spread of false information?

SILVERMAN: One of the core things that Facebook does or I suppose what it doesn't do as much as it can tries to not act as kind of a censor or a control point on what people are sharing. And I think overall, you know, that's a good thing. I don't want Facebook deciding whether what I put up is good enough to be shown to other people or not.

And this goes into what you mentioned about it sees itself as a platform, meaning it's a place where you can put stuff out and they help it reach lots of people and help you connect with other people. But, of course, that cuts both ways. So me sharing stuff about my family, me sharing news stories I've read that I care about can get just as much attention and can move just as easily as somebody who's consciously created something false and is working to get it to spread on Facebook. So the platform mentality creates the opportunity there.

And the scale of Facebook, which I think people should never get comfortable with how big it is because it's unlike anything in human history. There are almost 2 billion people logging in every month around the world. We've never had a communications system where people are connected in this way that has reached that amount of scale.

And so I think along with, you know, the platform mentality, there's also the scale piece of it that is a huge factor in false information spreading because there's just so many people there. And there's so much potential for information to move and to spread. And Facebook at the scale it's at to a certain extent I feel is almost unknowable. You can't even fathom understanding what's happening on it at any given moment. I think that's not only true for us, but it's also true for them because I think from what we've seen Mark Zuckerberg say, I think he's been really taken aback by what happened, to be honest.

DAVIES: Taken aback by the volume of fake news stories that spread during the election, you mean?

SILVERMAN: Yeah. I mean, his first comments were very dismissive. You know, the first thing he said publicly about it was at a tech conference and he talked about it being, you know, just a crazy idea that fake news had an effect on the election. And, you know, I agree with him. I'm not ready to say that fake news decided the election for Trump. But I also think that completely dismissing, you know, the growing evidence that we have that fake news got huge, huge engagement on his platform, you know, it doesn't make any sense. And he got a lot of blowback for that comment. And I think over time they have come to realize inside Facebook that, you know, this is actually a big issue. And they faced a lot of criticism. And now, you know, the most recent thing from Mark Zuckerberg is they announced seven things they're going to do to try and reduce the spread of misinformation on their platform.

DAVIES: What are they? And do you think they're effective?

SILVERMAN: So one of the things that they're going to do, for example, is to make it easier for average users of Facebook if they see something that's false to be able to kind of flag it and say, hey, this is a false piece of content and signal to Facebook that this is something that you don't want to see but also something that they should look at and prevent from spreading further. Now, that's a feature that actually already exists in some ways. The problem is that it's very hidden. So they want to make that a little more evident for people. And I think that's a good thing. The downside as always is that how many people are going to use that? And would people use it to kind of flag stuff they simply just disagree with rather than things that are false?

They've also acknowledged that there's a role of their algorithms in this. And they're looking at ways of having algorithms be able to recognize stuff that might be misinformation. And that may sound like a simple thing to say. It's incredibly complicated to do. And I've spoken to a lot of researchers who were very focused in this area of trying to automatically identify misinformation or automatically identify rumors and there is no algorithm that exists today that can do that at a high level of accuracy. So the opportunity is for Facebook to really do huge amounts of leadership in this area and do some innovation.

The downside is for them to hand too much over to an algorithm that starts suppressing free speech and suppressing other things it's not supposed to. One of the last things he mentioned that's probably worth noting is they've announced that they are not going to allow fake news websites to have access to the advertising tools on Facebook. So if you run a fake news website, they're going to try and stop you from, for example, paying to promote that post to more people on Facebook. And that's a good thing. And I think if we can cut off some of the financial incentives around fake news, that overall it can be quite powerful.

DAVIES: Right. And, of course, that requires somebody to make a judgment about what a fake new site is.

SILVERMAN: Yeah. Now, this is where things are getting very tricky. And as much as we talk about algorithms when we talk about Facebook, you know, there are humans who are involved in the review of content. When you flag something as offensive on Facebook, it's possible that it may automatically then be scanned by an algorithm and realize that that is an image, for example, maybe they've already banned. But a lot of the time it ends up in front of a person on their content review team who has to make a judgment call. And I can tell you from speaking to people in conservative media, they are extremely concerned.

One, they view Facebook as a liberal organization. They think it's biased against conservative points of view. And two, they're extremely concerned that if Facebook starts trying to weed out fakes, they're going to have people with a liberal point of view who disagree with an article potentially suppressing it. And so there is risk now of suppression of free speech and suppression of different points of view if these things were to go in the wrong direction.

DAVIES: Do you have a view yourself about what they should be doing?

SILVERMAN: You know, the first thing in terms of what should be done is that - is the answer is kind of a lot of things. And that's an unsatisfying answer to give, but it speaks to the complexity of this problem. When people started circulating lists of fake news websites, it was a huge problem because a lot of the sites on those lists, sure, they may publish some stuff that's misleading or false but they weren't publishing stuff a hundred percent in those areas. And there were a lot of simply ideologically-driven sites that were on these lists. And so if, for example, Facebook wanted to just implement a big bad blacklist, get rid of lots of sites, that would be a terrible, terrible outcome. So it's not as simple as I think some people have suggested it can be.

I would like to see them make flagging more of - more easy for people and to make sure that it can't be abused. I think they absolutely need to innovate in the area of algorithmic detection of misinformation. I also think, frankly, they do need to increase the amount of people who are reviewing content, whether it's for being offensive or other things because the scale of their platform is so big that I don't think they've put the human element in there in the right places. So them figuring out where that can be applied and how to guard against ideologically-driven decisions is a big thing. And to be honest, I think that they should figure out ways to identify the sites that are a hundred percent fake news and to see how they're sharing. Are they just being shared among small groups of people who all sort of think the same way and realize that that probably isn't a story that should spread further. So I'm not a huge proponent of blacklists but I think that analyzing the content and knowing what it is and knowing how it's being shared is really important.

The other unsexy thing finally, I think, is that we need to put this in our education system. There are a lot of people being fooled by fake news. There are a lot of people who don't know how to kind of check out the story they're reading online and that's understandable. It's not a matter of intelligence. We're consuming media in very different ways. We're having a whole menu of links and things from all different kinds of sources fed to us every day by Facebook. And that's very different from opening up a newspaper and knowing where everything was coming from. So I think we do in our schools need to start thinking about how we integrate more media literacy and critical thinking education so that people can make better judgments for themselves.

DAVIES: What's Google's role in all of this?

SILVERMAN: Well, Google is in a lot of ways the financial engine for fake news. And similar to Facebook, Google is - considers itself a technology company, not a media company, and considers itself in many ways a platform, which means they're not there, you know, to decide what should or shouldn't be published. They're there to facilitate these things.

The biggest piece for Google - aside from obviously the search element which can send a lot of traffic to these sites - the biggest piece is AdSense, which is their very big advertising network, which you can sign up for very quickly. If you put up a website and you've got some content on it and you submit to AdSense to apply to put ads on it, you can get approved relatively quickly. They do review the site to see if it goes against any of their terms of service. But once you have the ads up there, that's how you make the money.

And I have to say, I mean, the vast majority of the fake news websites and kind of dubious websites that I come across are running AdSense. And oftentimes they're doing things that are in direct opposition to the terms of service that Google says it applies to the sites that are supposed to be in that program.

DAVIES: How would they violate Google's terms of service?

SILVERMAN: Well, let's take the Macedonian sites as an example. One of the things that Google looks for in approving a site for AdSense is that they're adding value in some way. So if you, for example, set up a site and all you did was copy and paste content from other sites and you added nothing to it, you should not be approved for AdSense.

But that's what a lot of the Macedonia's sites that I looked at were doing. They were either completely plagiarizing or just quickly taking from elsewhere and copying it almost completely. There's no reason why those sites should have been approved. They violate Google's own terms of service for AdSense, and they just shouldn't be able to make money that way, but they do.

And so these review processes, whether it's Facebook, you know, trying to review a piece of content to figure out whether it's false or offensive or Google trying to figure out whether a site is in line with its advertising standards, you know, there's always going to be mistakes. There's always going to be things that slip through cracks because when you're a platform, you have reached such massive scale that it's very hard to do quality control.

DAVIES: Well, Craig Silverman, thanks so much for speaking with us.

SILVERMAN: Thank you.

DAVIES: Craig Silverman is media editor of BuzzFeed and author of the book "Regret The Error." This is FRESH AIR.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

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Fake News Expert On How False Stories Spread And Why People Believe Them

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DAVE DAVIES, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in for Terry Gross. So do you remember reading that Hillary Clinton paid Jay Z and Beyonce $62 million dollars for performing at a rally in Cleveland before the election?

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EasyBib's Free Website Credibility Checker

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http://webeval.easybib.com/

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Copy of Spotting Fake News in a Post-Truth World (American Lit)

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Making Sense of the News: News Literacy Lessons for Digital Citizens

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Never before has the need for News Literacy been more urgent. As news consumers are bombarded with a constant stream of fake news, ... Enroll for free.

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Let's Begin...

In previous decades, most news with global reach came from several major newspapers and networks with the resources to gather information directly. The speed with which information spreads now, however, has created the ideal conditions for something called circular reporting. Noah Tavlin sheds light on this phenomenon.

Create and share a new lesson based on this one.

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In previous decades, most news with global reach came from several major newspapers and networks with the resources to gather information directly. The speed with which information spreads now, however, has created the ideal conditions for something called circular reporting. Noah Tavlin sheds light on this phenomenon.

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If you're on social media, you've likely had the experience of scrolling through your feed and seeing something you thought was so great, so important, or so awful that you wanted to share it far and wide.

Recently, I watched a fake graphic about a protest inauguration-day concert go viral among many smart people in my news feed.

The same week, I saw someone else share a Breitbart piece about Obama ignoring the fact that violent crime in America is way up, even though real statistics actually show the violent crime rate is way down.

We tend to get excited when we see things that a) align with our ideas, or b) outrage us, and sometimes, we share those things without checking as well as we should.

Who cares? Well, it's important to realize that whatever political side you're on, sharing things that are unconfirmed or just plain wrong tends to weaken your positions, rather than strengthen them. If you're interested in curating a social media feed that's respected and thoughtful - and not just in the eyes of people who agree with everything you believe - here are some questions to ask yourself before you hit that Share button.

What's the source for this information?

With links, that's fairly easy to determine. Is the website hosting the information a reputable news source? Real news outlets employ trained professionals with journalism degrees. They're trained in investigative reporting as well as legal issues relating to journalism, and ethics. (That doesn't mean they don't make mistakes from time to time, but when a real journalist does report something in error, you'll see a timely correction and/or apology rather than a doubling down on the incorrect information.)

Which news sources are trusted by most people in America? This chart based on a 2014 study from the Pew Research Center and published in Business Insider offers some guidelines.

If your hope is to have people across the political spectrum view your social media feed as reliable and reasonable, you'll probably want to stick to sharing information from sources that are more maroon than yellow.

You might also choose to make a special note of that source. Donalyn Miller, an author & educator I respect a lot, has taken to posting something like this each time she shares a piece on Facebook:

**Please read the article before commenting or sharing. PBS is a legitimate, credible news source.

I think this is a great idea. It's helpful to identify what you're sharing, whether that's news, a persuasive piece written to promote one point of view, or something intended to be humorous. (More on that when we talk about satire...)

Is this particular piece NEWS or OPINION/COMMENTARY?

Reputable news sources such as those identified above offer both objective news and opinion or commentary pieces. Sometimes, they're labeled clearly in the headline, but often they're not. You may need to take a close look at the piece to determine what you're reading.

How can I check to verify the information shared here?

Google is your friend, especially if you really want to share something being reported on a less consistently reliable source like BuzzFeed or HuffPost. Find out if similar information is also being shared via some of the more reputable, trusted new sources listed above.

Sometimes, there may be other ways to check out information, too. If the piece is about what someone said on Twitter or on a website, go directly to the source. But also realize that tweets can be deleted, so the fact that something isn't there now doesn't mean it never was. Sometimes people have screen shots of these deleted tweets, and you can look for that as well. It's important to look very carefully at the Twitter account, too. There are many, many fake Donald Trump accounts, with the same profile picture and very similar Twitter handles. Go to the person's actual Twitter home page to check the account name and look for the "verified" checkmark in their profile in situations like this.

For example, this is a real tweet from Trump:

This is not:

Sometimes it's difficult to tell the difference between real tweets & the parody tweets, so checking the profile is helpful.

One more note about Twitter: Keep in mind that unless an account is verified or you know the person who owns it, you have no way of knowing who's tweeting. The fact that a Twitter account is named "Democrats for Trump" or "Conservatives Against Trump" doesn't mean that the account is run by people who fit that description. Since KellyAnne Conway's "alternative facts" interview on Meet the Press and bans on social media from government agencies like the EPA and National Parks Service, several apparently subversive Twitter accounts have sprung up with names like AltUSEPA and RogueNASA. While it makes good sense that someone defying a gag order would need to protect themselves with an anonymous account, there's no way to guarantee that those accounts are run by people from those agencies. Even if they are, before long, we'll probably see similar accounts that are not. So follow & read if you'd like, but be wary.

It's also important to look carefully and use tools to evaluate websites. One example: Since the inauguration, I've seen shared articles about the WhiteHouse.gov website, including some that criticized Melania Trump's biography for promoting her jewelry line's availability on QVC.

In situations like this, it's important to visit the website to check the article's accuracy. It's also important to remember that websites get updated all the time. It's common for someone who receives criticism to edit in response to that criticism. If all you see is the "right now" version of the website, it might look like the criticism was based on "fake news."

An Internet Archive tool called the Wayback Machine allows interested citizens to check on things like this. It's an online archive that allows you to paste in the website's URL and look at what was posted there at specific times on specific dates. As an example, here's what the Melania Trump bio paragraph in question looked like Friday afternoon after the inauguration (on the top) vs. Sunday, after the critical articles were published (on the bottom).

Regardless of whether you care about Melania's jewelry line, this is a helpful tool for evaluating information about what was or wasn't on any website. It's also interesting for students to see how websites change over time.

Be careful with photos.

If you want to share a photo that's not connected to a legitimate news article, find the ORIGINAL source to determine its origin. Photos get repurposed sometimes, and pictures being shared on social media don't always show what the caption says they show or what is implied. During the campaign (September 2016), Eric Trump tweeted this.

Whether or not you agree with Eric Trump's sentiment, this photo wasn't taken at the Pensacola rally. It was a year-old photo of a larger crowd from a Trump rally in Dallas. (Note the Texas flag to the bottom-left of the big screen. That might have been a clue for careful photo sharers.)

Just after the November election, another photo circulated on social media showed hooded Ku Klux Klan members marching with a caption saying it was KKK members celebrating. This wasn't true either. The Klan did hold a victory parade in North Carolina, but the particular photo being shared in this case was an old one that had nothing to do with the election. Unless you check the original source of the photo, you have no way of knowing where it came from, who took it, or when it was taken.

Check the date for news articles and tweets

And highlight it in your post if you choose to share something that's not current. This is an easy mistake to make when sharing everything from politics to astronomical events. Just yesterday, this tweet from Vice President Mike Pence was making the rounds.

This came as the Trump administration was reportedly preparing to issue an executive order banning immigration from a list of mostly Muslim countries. This Pence tweet could give the impression that the Vice President is critical of that policy. But check the date. This was Mike Pence of December 2015, before Trump had won the Republican nomination and tapped Pence to be his VP. The current order is also expected to modify the ban so it's no longer "a complete and total ban on Muslims" as Trump promised during his campaign but a ban that lists mostly Muslim countries the administration says are "terror prone."

This "old news" situation also happens sometimes with articles about bills urgently described as "currently being voted on." Check the date so you're not sharing bad information that results in a flood of calls to a politician's office about something that happened a month ago.

Checking the date doesn't just apply to political articles. A while back, I saw a Facebook post about a meteor shower that would be "Lighting Up the Skies Tonight." I love meteor showers! My first impulse was to share, but before I did, I wanted to find out the exact date & time. When I clicked through to the article, I found out that it was old - about a meteor shower that had happened a couple years earlier. If I'd shared, I'd have been that person who sent 4500 of her closest friends out into their yards in the cold to stare at an empty, dark sky.

Check to see if the piece is satire.

Satire is defined by Merriam Webster as "a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn." If the piece you're sharing is satire, you might want to consider making that clear in your post. The Onion is a well-known satire site that posts pieces like this.

Most people know that The Onion is a satire site, in which all of the articles are made up, including the details, the quotes...everything. Still, you'll sometimes see a piece like this shared with a heartfelt comment about how upset the person is that the Vice President would be so sexist in his language. That happens even more often when the piece comes from a magazine like The New Yorker, which offers both real, in-depth news articles and satirical pieces, often by the writer Andy Borowitz.

These pieces, if you look closely, are labeled as "Satire from the Borowitz Report." It's helpful if you label them in your social media feeds, too. This is especially important in our current climate where some real news may feel like satire to readers, given the unprecedented nature of some things being tweeted or said by those in power.

Pay extra attention before sharing something that you feel passionate about, either way.

Propaganda is designed to produce strong emotions - patriotism, fear, love, disgust, identity. When something you read gives you a surge of one of those feelings, that doesn't mean it's automatically not true or worth sharing, but it does mean that you'll need to be diligent to make sure you're sharing news and not propaganda that will cause others to view all of your posts as less trustworthy. Strong, emotional language in a headline is another clue that what you're reading might be written to influence more than to inform.

Don't make assumptions.

I participated in the March for Civil Rights and Women in Atlanta recently and saw this when the march passed by the Ferris wheel by Centennial Park.

I immediately connected it with the tens of thousands of people demonstrating, and I shared this photo along with some other march pictures on social media. I was just visiting Atlanta and am not a football fan, so I didn't know that aside from being a beloved and revolutionary line from the musical Hamilton, Rise Up! is also a rallying cry for the Atlanta Falcons, who were about to play the game that ended up sending them to the Super Bowl. It was an excellent lesson for me on how we all see things through our own lenses, and I appreciated the people online who kindly let me know that I'd misinterpreted the message. The people who jumped into my Twitter mentions to call me names and make thinly veiled misogynistic threats were another story. Which brings me to the next topic...

How to Help a Friend Who's Shared Something Untrue or Unreliable

I appreciated the friends & strangers alike who replied to me on Twitter, saying things like "Hey, not to be a bummer, but I'm pretty sure that sign is for the Falcons," or even "That awkward moment when you think the Falcons sign is for your demonstration..." Those posts allowed me to realize my mistake and make a note on the photo so other people weren't under the false impression that the Ferris wheel was lit up for the march. I got other replies, too - the usual, misogynistic, name-calling tweets that appears in most women's social media feeds when they've said something a man doesn't like. Those just make the person tweeting look like a jerk.

If a friend posts something on social media that's just plain false and you can find the reliable information that shows that, it's often helpful to share a link to a reliable, trusted news source with a friendly note that says, "Hey...just so you know, I think this might be inaccurate. Look what (source xyz) has today."

If your friend posts something that's circulating but that you can't find confirmed anywhere, a question might be helpful. "Were you able to confirm this anywhere else? I read this piece with interest but haven't been able to find the information anywhere else, so I'm wondering how accurate it is. Thanks!" That's a kind way to ask the question and is likely to result in a good conversation in which your friend either shares more sources or realizes that the information might not be confirmed.

What Happens When You Make a Mistake

If you discover that you've posted something that turns out to be inaccurate, unconfirmed, or badly dated, you might feel embarrassed. But the reality is, mistakes happen. Try to be open to listening and researching, rather than feeling defensive. Read what people are saying, whether they agree with your position or not (this is admittedly easier with meteor showers than it is with politics) and then defer to common-sense guidelines and decide if what you shared is really news or not. If you've posted satire that people thought was real, that's easy to fix with a quick edit identifying it as such. Same story if you've posted an opinion piece that people are taking as fact. But I'd advocate for a different approach if you come to realize that what you've posted is just incorrect or misleading.

Standard social media protocol is often not to delete tweets/posts that have become controversial because it can look like you're trying to cover up your mistake. But personally, I think sharing bad information should be an exception to that rule. If you share an article that turns out to be false or misleading, it's not enough to add a note at the bottom of the comments thread saying, "Please note: This is not confirmed and is from a questionable source." Those articles - especially the emotionally charged ones - get shared at lightning speed with one click, so it's probably best to delete the bad information entirely and offer a new, separate post that says something like "Earlier today, I posted an article about a meteor shower that I then deleted because it was brought to my attention that the article was from two years ago. I apologize for the mistake & appreciate the friends who pointed out the date."

Why is all of this important?

We're living in an age where facts are under attack and where information spreads more quickly than it ever has, whether it's reliable information or not. Being part of the solution means doubling down on our efforts to make sure what we share on social media is clear. I've decided that for me, that means sharing news that comes from reliable sources, double checking those sources, and clearly identifying essays and satirical pieces I choose to share so that they're not mistaken as news.

Here are some great resources for reading, thinking about, and sharing with students.

Politifact is a nonpartisan, Pulitzer Prize winning fact check website for political issues.
http://www.politifact.com/
Snopes is a reliable website for determining the validity of almost anything going viral on social media, from politics to warnings about going to your car at the mall.
http://www.snopes.com/
Snopes gets attacked sometimes by people who don't like their ideas challenged. Here's an article about who runs it & its background so you can make your own decisions about that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/25/technology/for-fact-checking-website-snopes-a-bigger-role-brings-more-attacks.html
Here's the Business Insider article on trusted news sources in America:
http://www.businessinsider.com/here-are-the-most-and-least-trusted-news-outlets-in-america-2014-10
A Finders Guide to Facts from NPR has another good list of questions to ask yourself before hitting that Share button.
http://www.npr.org/2016/12/11/505154631/a-finders-guide-to-facts
The News Literacy Project is a nonpartisan national education nonprofit working with educators & journalists to teach students about information literacy.
http://www.thenewsliteracyproject.org/
An article from the NY Times on How Fake News Spreads
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/business/media/how-fake-news-spreads.html?_r=0
A piece from the journal Psychology Today on the manipulation tactic known as gaslighting
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/here-there-and-everywhere/201701/gaslighting-know-it-and-identify-it-protect-yourself
Blogger's note: Given that this post is all about checking and evaluating sources, here's some information about me. Aside from being a children's author, I spent fifteen years teaching middle school English and earned National Board Certification in Early Adolescent English Language Arts in 2006. Before that, I worked in television newsrooms for seven years and have a degree in Broadcast Journalism from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication. The common ground with all three of these jobs is that facts matter.

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To Share or Not to Share: Evaluating News & Other Online Content

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If you're on social media, you've likely had the experience of scrolling through your feed and seeing something you thought was so great, so important, or so awful that you wanted to share it far and wide. Recently, I watched a fake graphic about a protest inauguration-day concert go viral among many smart people in my news feed.

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I am Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D. Well, actually my name is John, and I'm a journalist. I do have a Ph.D., but it's in the molecular biology of bacteria, not humans. The Institute of Diet and Health? That's nothing more than a website.

Other than those fibs, the study was 100 percent authentic. My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.

Here's how we did it.

The Setup

I got a call in December last year from a German television reporter named Peter Onneken. He and his collaborator Diana Löbl were working on a documentary film about the junk-science diet industry. They wanted me to help demonstrate just how easy it is to turn bad science into the big headlines behind diet fads. And Onneken wanted to do it gonzo style: Reveal the corruption of the diet research-media complex by taking part.

The call wasn't a complete surprise. The year before, I had run a sting operation for Science on fee-charging open access journals, a fast-growing and lucrative new sector of the academic publishing business. To find out how many of those publishers are keeping their promise of doing rigorous peer review, I submitted ridiculously flawed papers and counted how many rejected them. (Answer: fewer than half.)

Onneken and Löbl had everything lined up: a few thousand Euros to recruit research subjects, a German doctor to run the study, and a statistician friend to massage the data. Onneken heard about my journal sting and figured that I would know how to pull it all together and get it published. The only problem was time: The film was scheduled to be aired on German and French television in the late spring ( it premieres next week), so we really only had a couple of months to pull this off.

Could we get something published? Probably. But beyond that? I thought it was sure to fizzle. We science journalists like to think of ourselves as more clever than the average hack. After all, we have to understand arcane scientific research well enough to explain it. And for reporters who don't have science chops, as soon as they tapped outside sources for their stories-really anyone with a science degree, let alone an actual nutrition scientist-they would discover that the study was laughably flimsy. Not to mention that a Google search yielded no trace of Johannes Bohannon or his alleged institute. Reporters on the health science beat were going to smell this a mile away. But I didn't want to sound pessimistic. "Let's see how far we can take this," I said.

The Con

Onneken and Löbl wasted no time. They used Facebook to recruit subjects around Frankfurt, offering 150 Euros to anyone willing to go on a diet for 3 weeks. They made it clear that this was part of a documentary film about dieting, but they didn't give more detail. On a cold January morning, 5 men and 11 women showed up, aged 19 to 67.

Gunter Frank, a general practitioner in on the prank, ran the clinical trial. Onneken had pulled him in after reading a popular book Frank wrote railing against dietary pseudoscience. Testing bitter chocolate as a dietary supplement was his idea. When I asked him why, Frank said it was a favorite of the "whole food" fanatics. "Bitter chocolate tastes bad, therefore it must be good for you," he said. "It's like a religion."

After a round of questionnaires and blood tests to ensure that no one had eating disorders, diabetes, or other illnesses that might endanger them, Frank randomly assigned the subjects to one of three diet groups. One group followed a low-carbohydrate diet. Another followed the same low-carb diet plus a daily 1.5 oz. bar of dark chocolate. And the rest, a control group, were instructed to make no changes to their current diet. They weighed themselves each morning for 21 days, and the study finished with a final round of questionnaires and blood tests.

Onneken then turned to his friend Alex Droste-Haars, a financial analyst, to crunch the numbers. One beer-fueled weekend later and... jackpot! Both of the treatment groups lost about 5 pounds over the course of the study, while the control group's average body weight fluctuated up and down around zero. But the people on the low-carb diet plus chocolate? They lost weight 10 percent faster. Not only was that difference statistically significant, but the chocolate group had better cholesterol readings and higher scores on the well-being survey.

The Hook

I know what you're thinking. The study did show accelerated weight loss in the chocolate group-shouldn't we trust it? Isn't that how science works?

Here's a dirty little science secret: If you measure a large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost guaranteed to get a "statistically significant" result. Our study included 18 different measurements-weight, cholesterol, sodium, blood protein levels, sleep quality, well-being, etc.-from 15 people. (One subject was dropped.) That study design is a recipe for false positives.

Think of the measurements as lottery tickets. Each one has a small chance of paying off in the form of a "significant" result that we can spin a story around and sell to the media. The more tickets you buy, the more likely you are to win. We didn't know exactly what would pan out-the headline could have been that chocolate improves sleep or lowers blood pressure-but we knew our chances of getting at least one "statistically significant" result were pretty good.

Whenever you hear that phrase, it means that some result has a small p value. The letter p seems to have totemic power, but it's just a way to gauge the signal-to-noise ratio in the data. The conventional cutoff for being "significant" is 0.05, which means that there is just a 5 percent chance that your result is a random fluctuation. The more lottery tickets, the better your chances of getting a false positive. So how many tickets do you need to buy?

With our 18 measurements, we had a 60% chance of getting some"significant" result with p < 0.05. (The measurements weren't independent, so it could be even higher.) The game was stacked in our favor.

It's called p-hacking-fiddling with your experimental design and data to push p under 0.05-and it's a big problem. Most scientists are honest and do it unconsciously. They get negative results, convince themselves they goofed, and repeat the experiment until it "works." Or they drop "outlier" data points.

But even if we had been careful to avoid p-hacking, our study was doomed by the tiny number of subjects, which amplifies the effects of uncontrolled factors. Just to take one example: A woman's weight can fluctuate as much as 5 pounds over the course of her menstrual cycle, far greater than the weight difference between our chocolate and low-carb groups. Which is why you need to use a large number of people, and balance age and gender across treatment groups. (We didn't bother.)

You might as well read tea leaves as try to interpret our results. Chocolate may be a weight loss accelerator, or it could be the opposite. You can't even trust the weight loss that our non-chocolate low-carb group experienced versus control. Who knows what the handful of people in the control group were eating? We didn't even ask them.

Luckily, scientists are getting wise to these problems. Some journals are trying to phase out p value significance testing altogether to nudge scientists into better habits. And almost no one takes studies with fewer than 30 subjects seriously anymore. Editors of reputable journals reject them out of hand before sending them to peer reviewers. But there are plenty of journals that care more about money than reputation.

The Inside Man

It was time to share our scientific breakthrough with the world. We needed to get our study published pronto, but since it was such bad science, we needed to skip peer review altogether. Conveniently, there are lists of fake journal publishers. (This is my list, and here's another.) Since time was tight, I simultaneously submitted our paper-"Chocolate with high cocoa content as a weight-loss accelerator"-to 20 journals. Then we crossed our fingers and waited.

Our paper was accepted for publication by multiple journals within 24 hours. Needless to say, we faced no peer review at all. The eager suitor we ultimately chose was the t he International Archives of Medicine. It used to be run by the giant publisher BioMedCentral, but recently changed hands. The new publisher's CEO, Carlos Vasquez, emailed Johannes to let him know that we had produced an "outstanding manuscript," and that for just 600 Euros it "could be accepted directly in our premier journal."

Although the Archives' editor claims that " all articles submitted to the journal are reviewed in a rigorous way," our paper was published less than 2 weeks after Onneken's credit card was charged. Not a single word was changed.

The Marks

With the paper out, it was time to make some noise. I called a friend of a friend who works in scientific PR. She walked me through some of the dirty tricks for grabbing headlines. It was eerie to hear the other side of something I experience every day.

The key is to exploit journalists' incredible laziness. If you lay out the information just right, you can shape the story that emerges in the media almost like you were writing those stories yourself. In fact, that's literally what you're doing, since many reporters just copied and pasted our text.

Take a look at the press release I cooked up. It has everything. In reporter lingo: a sexy lede, a clear nut graf, some punchy quotes, and a kicker. And there's no need to even read the scientific paper because the key details are already boiled down. I took special care to keep it accurate. Rather than tricking journalists, the goal was to lure them with a completely typical press release about a research paper. (Of course, what's missing is the number of subjects and the minuscule weight differences between the groups.)

But a good press release isn't enough. Reporters are also hungry for "art," something pretty to show their readers. So Onneken and Löbl shot some promotional video clips and commissioned freelance artists to write an acoustic ballad and even a rap about chocolate and weight loss. (It turns out you can hire people on the internet to do nearly anything.)

Onneken wrote a German press release and reached out directly to German media outlets. The promise of an "exclusive" story is very tempting, even if it's fake. Then he blasted the German press release out on wire service based in Austria, and the English one went out on NewsWire. There was no quality control. That was left to the reporters.

I felt a queazy mixture of pride and disgust as our lure zinged out into the world.

The Score

We landed big fish before we even knew they were biting. Bild rushed their story out-"Those who eat chocolate stay slim!"-without contacting me at all. Soon we were in the , the Irish Examiner,Cosmopolitan's German website, the Times of India, both the German and Indian site of the Huffington Post, and even television news in Texas and an Australian morning talk show.

When reporters contacted me at all, they asked perfunctory questions. "Why do you think chocolate accelerates weight loss? Do you have any advice for our readers?" Almost no one asked how many subjects we tested, and no one reported that number. Not a single reporter seems to have contacted an outside researcher. None is quoted.

These publications, though many command large audiences, are not exactly paragons of journalistic virtue. So it's not surprising that they would simply grab a bit of digital chum for the headline, harvest the pageviews, and move on. But even the supposedly rigorous outlets that picked the study up failed to spot the holes.

Shape magazine's reporting on our study-turn to page 128 in the June issue-employed the services of a fact-checker, but it was just as lackadaisical. All the checker did was run a couple of sentences by me for accuracy and check the spelling of my name. The coverage went so far as to specify the appropriate cocoa content for weight-loss-inducing chocolate (81 percent) and even mentioned two specific brands ("available in grocery stores and at amazon.com").

Some dodged the bullet. A reporter from Men's Health interviewed me by email, asking the same sort of non-probing questions. She said that the story was slated for their September issue, so we'll never know.

But most disappointing? No one dipped into our buffet of chocolate music videos. Instead, they used vaguely pornographic images of women eating chocolate. Perhaps this music will take on a life of its own now that the truth is out:

The Knock

So why should you care? People who are desperate for reliable information face a bewildering array of diet guidance- salt is bad, salt is good, protein is good, protein is bad, fat is bad, fat is good-that changes like the weather. But science will figure it out, right? Now that we're calling obesity an epidemic, funding will flow to the best scientists and all of this noise will die down, leaving us with clear answers to the causes and treatments.

Or maybe not. Even the well-funded, serious research into weight-loss science is confusing and inconclusive, laments Peter Attia, a surgeon who cofounded a nonprofit called the Nutrition Science Initiative. For example, the Women's Health Initiative-one of the largest of its kind-yielded few clear insights about diet and health. "The results were just confusing," says Attia. "They spent $1 billion and couldn't even prove that a low-fat diet is better or worse." Attia's nonprofit is trying to raise $190 million to answer these fundamental questions. But it's hard to focus attention on the science of obesity, he says. "There's just so much noise."

You can thank people like me for that. We journalists have to feed the daily news beast, and diet science is our horn of plenty. Readers just can't get enough stories about the benefits of red wine or the dangers of fructose. Not only is it universally relevant-it pertains to decisions we all make at least three times a day-but it's science! We don't even have to leave home to do any reporting. We just dip our cups into the daily stream of scientific press releases flowing through our inboxes. Tack on a snappy stock photo and you're done.

The only problem with the diet science beat is that it's science. You have to know how to read a scientific paper-and actually bother to do it. For far too long, the people who cover this beat have treated it like gossip, echoing whatever they find in press releases. Hopefully our little experiment will make reporters and readers alike more skeptical.

If a study doesn't even list how many people took part in it, or makes a bold diet claim that's "statistically significant" but doesn't say how big the effect size is, you should wonder why. But for the most part, we don't. Which is a pity, because journalists are becoming the de facto peer review system. And when we fail, the world is awash in junk science.

There was one glint of hope in this tragicomedy. While the reporters just regurgitated our "findings," many readers were thoughtful and skeptical. In the online comments, they posed questions that the reporters should have asked.

"Why are calories not counted on any of the individuals?" asked a reader on a bodybuilding forum. "The domain [for the Institute of Diet and Health web site] was registered at the beginning of March, and dozens of blogs and news magazines (see Google) spread this study without knowing what or who stands behind it," said a reader beneath the story in Focus, one of Germany's leading online magazines.

Or as one prescient reader of the 4 April story in the Daily Express put it, "Every day is April Fool's in nutrition."
Correction: The study referenced by Peter Attia was called the Women's Health Initiative, not the Women's Health Study, and it was one of the largest of its kind, not the largest. Also, when it was published, this article erroneously featured a screenshot showing the Daily Mail's coverage of a chocolate study, but not the one discussed in this story. The day after publication, we replaced it with a screenshot of the Daily Mail's actual coverage of the study.
Update: The paper has been removed from the International Archives of Medicine website, but you can read it here.

Top image: Art by Jim Cooke

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I Fooled Millions Into Thinking Chocolate Helps Weight Loss. Here's How.

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"Slim by Chocolate!" the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found that people on a low-carb diet lost weight 10 percent faster if they ate a chocolate bar every day. It made the front page of Bild, Europe's largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about the Germanwings crash.

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Update: Please also see our new, 2017 lesson, Evaluating Sources in a 'Post-Truth' World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News

_________

How do you know if something you read is true? Why should you care?

We pose these questions this week in honor of News Engagement Day on Oct. 6, and try to answer them with resources from The Times as well as from Edutopia, the Center for News Literacy, TEDEd and the NewseumEd.

Although we doubt we need to convince teachers that this skill is important, we like the way Peter Adams from the News Literacy Project frames it in a post for Edutopia.

As he points out, every teacher is familiar with "digital natives" and the way they seem to have been born with the ability to use technology. But what about "digital naïveté" - when students trust sources of information that are obviously unreliable?

Even though they know how easy it is to create and distribute information online, many young people believe - sometimes passionately - the most dubious rumors, tempting hoaxes (including convincingly staged encounters designed to look raw and unplanned) and implausible theories.

Below, a roundup of tools, questions, activities and case studies we hope can help reduce this digital naïveté. Tell us what you think - or what we missed.
Getting Started: What is News Literacy and Why Do You Need It? Video and a related lesson plan from TEDEd.
The concept of " media literacy " has been around for decades, but "news literacy" is a new field that is growing as fast as the boundaries around old definitions of journalism are being dismantled.

The Center for News Literacy explains it this way:

The most profound communications revolution since the invention of Gutenberg's printing press seems to make it harder, not easier, to determine the truth. The digital revolution is characterized by a flood of information and misinformation that news consumers can access from anywhere at any time.

News aggregators, bloggers, pundits, provocateurs, commentators and "citizen journalists" are competing with traditional journalists for public attention. Uninformed opinion masquerades as news. Lines are blurring between legitimate journalism and the propaganda, entertainment, self-promotion and unmediated information on the Internet.

This superabundance of information has made it imperative that citizens learn to judge the reliability of news reports and other sources of information that is passed along their social networks.

Teachers can check out Edutopia's Five-Minute Film Festival on News Literacy to find more resources on the concept, or, to explore it in much greater depth, visit the Center for News Literacy's Digital Resource Center to access a comprehensive curriculum series "From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg in 14 Lessons."

Before you embark on a full unit, however, we suggest two exercises.
First, Ask Your Students to Weigh In

More people have died from selfies than shark attacks this year: //t.co/0IcHpOaWgY pic.twitter.com/1Ij5cG6iMs

- Mashable (@mashable) September 27, 2015

Mashable claims that, in 2015, selfies have killed more people than sharks. The Washington Post's Intersect says that's ridiculous. What do you think?
A couple of years ago, we asked students on our blog, How Do You Know if What You Read Online Is True?

One of our daily Student Opinion questions, it was inspired by a Times article that week, "If a Story Is Viral, Truth May Be Taking a Beating," that noted, "viral trumps verified ... as long as the clicks keep coming."

Here are some of the questions we posed in the course of that discussion. You might invite your own students to talk about them in pairs, small groups or as a whole class before you begin a news literacy curriculum - and then revisit their answers after you finish. And since all of our Student Opinion questions are still open to comment, they can also post their thoughts to our blog:

1. How many viral posts - whether articles, videos or photographs - do you click on each week? How many on average do you share on social media?

2. How often do you check to make sure what you are sharing or commenting on is real? How do you go about finding that out?

3. How much do you care if a story purporting to be real actually is?

4. How much more careful are you with online sources when you are doing work for school than when you are simply surfing the web for fun? How do you decide what is a reliable source for your schoolwork?

5. What sources of news do you usually trust? What sources do you rarely trust? Why?

6. What responsibility do journalists and news outlets who post or link these stories have to make sure they are true? Is it their job to make sure something is not a hoax before they cover or link to it? How do you think they go about verifying information?

7. Can embellished, or outright fake, stories have real-world consequences? What examples can you give?

8. In a world where news can be reported by anyone with a cellphone, how do you decide what is true? What questions should you ask to find out? What personal rules might you develop to decide what news you post and when you post it? What harm might be done by not following those rules?
Then, Impose a 48-Hour News Blackout
Another introductory exercise that can help students examine their media habits and show them why and how news matters comes from the Center for News Literacy, as described in a 2007 Times article about its work:

At the outset of the course, students are required to impose a 48-hour news blackout on themselves. They are not to watch, read or listen to the news, including weather reports and sports scores. The idea is to emphasize the role that such information plays in their lives, often without students' realizing it.

You can find more about that idea here.
Tools and Strategies: How to Tell Fake News From Real News Worst Twerk Fail EVER - Girl Catches Fire Mexican Red Rump Tarantula Missing in Brooklyn Post a Facebook Copyright Status to Protect Your Information
These stories all went viral on social media, but if you click the links, you'll see all of them turned out to be hoaxes. And yet, sometimes something that sounds fake - like this story about West Point cadets who "weaponized" a pillow fight - isn't.

How can you tell? Before you hit "share," what questions should you ask?

First, suggests Chad Lorenz in a piece for Slate that explores the need for news literacy curriculums, consider the places from which you routinely get information:

Today a tour through your social media news feed might take you to Mental Floss, Dadaviz, Colossal, Cracked, Dangerous Minds, Uproxx. How is a reader to know what from this assortment of blogs and webzines can be trusted? What about a site like Inquisitr? ( Approach with caution.) What about Before It's News? (Trick question: That one is definitely not to be trusted.) While it might seem easy to distinguish real news from fake news, many people, including experienced journalists, get suckered more often than you would think. Students, as heavy users of social media, where fake news and hoaxes proliferate, should think about their own responsibility to share reliable information and not perpetuate misinformation.

Once you've done that, you might next consult the Newseum's popular Believe It Or Not? lesson plan that walks teachers and students through basic news literacy. Students learn to ask these six "consumer questions" when vetting a story:

Who made this?

How was this made?

Why was this made?

When was this made?

What is this missing?

Where do I go from here?

Another method for questioning sources of information is the mnemonic the students at Intermediate School 303 in Coney Island use: IMVAIN.

Independent sources are preferable to self-interested sources.

Multiple sources are preferable to a report based on a single source.

Sources who Verify or provide verifiable information are preferable to those who merely assert.

Authoritative and/or Informed sources are preferable to sources who are uninformed or lack authoritative background.

Named sources are better than anonymous ones.

Watch a video and learn more about how they use this technique, from the Center for News Literacy, here, then try it yourself with this checklist.

Finally, here are some guidelines specifically about breaking news from NPR's On The Media:
More Sites and Tools for Fact-Checking What You Read Going Further: Applying Your Skills, Reading Case Studies and More Practice With Content From Your News Feeds
Go through your social media feeds or your daily newspaper or both, and choose one news story, then try asking the six questions the Newseum suggests. (To learn more about how to apply each individual question, consult this resource.)

Or, compare two or more news reports on the same topic but from different news outlets to see how the same story is covered in each. You might compare lead stories or, via the Newseum's daily gallery, compare newspaper front pages from around the world, whether from that day or from big news events of years past. Or, pick a divisive or controversial topic and look at how different news sources have handled the subject.

Remember as you read that news outlets feature both straight news reporting as well as opinion about the news, and that sometimes those distinctions can blur. How can you tell the difference?

If you are a teacher doing this with an entire class, you and your students might eventually create a full classroom gallery walk of news items that highlight some of the issues raised in this post.
Learn From Some Famous Case Studies
So far most of the examples we've provided have been fairly silly - pigs rescuing goats, twerking problems - but there can be serious consequences to inaccurate news reporting, and to contributing to viral stories by sharing them yourself.

And sometimes, even generally reliable sources will make mistakes.

For instance, just after the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, the F.B.I. released pictures and video of two young men who officials believed may have been responsible for the explosions, and the Internet quickly offered to help find them. Nick Bilton writes about what happened next:

In a scene metaphorically reminiscent of a movie in which vigilantes swarm the streets with pitchforks and lanterns, people took to Reddit, the popular community and social news Web site, and started scouring images posted online from the bombings.

One Reddit forum told users to search for "people carrying black bags," and noted that "if they look suspicious, then post them. Then people will try and follow their movements using all the images."

In the process, each time a scrap of information was discovered - the color of a hat, the type of straps on a backpack, the weighted droop of a bag - it was passed out on Twitter like "Wanted" posters tacked to lampposts. It didn't matter whether it was right, wrong or even completely made up (some images posted to forums had been manipulated) - off it went, fiction and fact indistinguishable.

Some misinformation online landed on the front page of The New York Post, incorrectly identifying an innocent high school student as a suspect.

Later in the week, the Web wrongly identified one of the suspects as a student from Brown University who went missing earlier this month.

Read Mr. Bilton's article, as well as " The Pressure to Be the TV News Leader Tarnishes a Big Brand" and " Should Reddit Be Blamed for the Spreading of a Smear? " to understand the real-life consequences of the race to be first with news.

During Hurricane Sandy, news and images circulated quickly via social media. ( Poynter reported, for instance, that Instagram users were posting 10 Hurricane Sandy pictures every second at one point.)

Reports that the New York Stock Exchange was underwater and that sharks were swimming in front yards in New Jersey spread widely.

This article from The Atlantic, " InstaSnopes: Sorting the Real Sandy Photos From the Fakes, " explores the stories and photos that circulated, helping readers understand which were real and which weren't.

Why might it be dangerous to rely on social media during a crisis or disaster? What did we learn about social media from Hurricane Sandy?

Finally, you might also consider The Times's Retro Report series, documentaries exploring major news stories of the past and their lasting impact. This one looks at "a moment in 1999 so searing that it is still instantly evoked with a single word: Columbine."

As the related article says, "much of what the public came to believe about Columbine was flat-out wrong. Myths took root from the start, nurtured by frightened and confused students and amplified by news outlets running hard with rumor and conjecture" - and the way the media reports on school shootings today is still affected by those early reports.

To find many more examples of news reporting gone awry, and to consider questions of accuracy and bias in far more depth then this post has room for, we again recommend the Center for News Literacy's 14 lesson series.
News or Satire?
If you spend a lot of time on social media, you've most likely been tricked, or nearly tricked, by taking at face value a story from The Onion or some other satirical news site. In fact, in 2012 the Chinese Communist Party's news outlet may have fallen for an Onion story calling Kim Jong-un, the young, chubby North Korean ruler, the "Sexiest Man Alive for 2012."

Every week in our News Quiz, we save the 10th question for news literacy. Each lists four recent news headlines - three from The Times and one from The Onion - and asks which is which. Though we often feature wacky news as "distractors," these are not trick questions: Close reading should reveal fairly quickly which headline just can't be true.

Try it. Here are two from recent quizzes. You'll notice that not only is the "news" from The Onion improbable, the humor in it is almost always a riff on real news, so keeping up with what's going on in the world in general should make the exercise even easier:
What About The New York Times?
Though most people consider The New York Times, with its reporters, editors, fact-checkers, and ethical reporting guidelines, to be among the most reliable news sources, the paper can still make mistakes - sometimes very important ones.

In 2003, after the Jayson Blair scandal rocked the institution, The Times added more safeguards, including a public editor. This person writes about The Times and its journalism, investigates matters of journalistic integrity and works independently, outside of the reporting and editing structure of the newspaper. The position is now held by Margaret Sullivan.

In her column, you can read her take on everything from the paper's coverage of Iraq in 2003 to its current use of anonymous sources and recent dubious reporting on hipster trends like "man buns." Anyone who has a concern about The Times can write to her at public@nytimes.com.
Related Learning Network Resources 50 Ways to Teach With Current Events News and 'News Analysis': Navigating Fact and Opinion in The Times Three Teacher-Tested Ways to Encourage Your Students to Follow Current Events This School Year Skills Practice | Distinguishing Between Fact and Opinion Guest Post | Practical Tools for Teaching News Literacy Guest Post | News Literacy Is Not Optional if You Need to Be Well-Informed

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Skills and Strategies | Fake News vs. Real News: Determining the Reliability of Sources

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Update: Please also see our new, 2017 lesson, Evaluating Sources in a 'Post-Truth' World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News _________ How do you know if something you read is true? Why should you care? We pose these questions this week in honor of News Engagement Day on Oct.

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Helping Students Identify Fake News with the Five C's of Critical Consuming

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I read a good article today on NPR's All Tech Considered, Fake Or Real? How To Self-Check The News And Get The Facts.
Except I figure people who aren't schooled in figuring out the difference aren't likely to be reading an NPR article.
So I quickly put together this infographic based on the article and a link provided to a google doc, False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical "News" Sources, prepared by Melissa Zimdars, an assistant professor of communication and media at Merrimack College.

Is it helpful? Is it accurate? Please comment. I'll collect feedback and make revisions for version 2.0.

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[infographic] Fake news or real news? 10 tips to getting the facts for yourself - Stone Soup Creative

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I read a good article today on NPR's All Tech Considered, Fake Or Real? How To Self-Check The News And Get The Facts. Except I figure people who aren't schooled in figuring out the difference aren't likely to be reading an NPR article. So I quickly put together this infographic based on the article and a...

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When the AP United States history students at Aragon High School in San Mateo, California, scanned the professionally designed pages of minimumwage.com, most concluded that it was a solid, unbiased source of facts and analysis. They noted the menu of research reports, graphics and videos, and the "About" page describing the site as a project of a "nonprofit research organization" called the Employment Policies Institute.

But then their teacher, Will Colglazier, demonstrated how a couple more exploratory clicks-critically, beyond the site itself-revealed the Employment Policies Institute is considered by the Center for Media and Democracy to be a front group created by lobbyists for the restaurant and hotel industries.

"I have some bright students, and a lot of them felt chagrined that they weren't able to deduce this," said Colglazier, who videotaped the episode in January. "They got duped."

One student responded loudly, "Fudge nuggets!"

Get Future Tense in your inbox.

The exercise was part of "Civic Online Reasoning," a series of news-literacy lessons being developed by Stanford University researchers and piloted by teachers at a few dozen schools. The Stanford initiative launched in 2015, joining a handful of recent efforts to help students contend with misinformation and fake news online-a problem as old as dial-up modems but now supercharged by social media and partisan news bubbles. The backers of these efforts warn that despite young people's reputation as "digital natives," they are woefully unprepared to sort online fact from fiction, and the danger isn't just to scholarship but to citizenship.

Stanford's myth busters, led by education professor Sam Wineburg and doctoral student Sarah Cotcamp McGrew, have field-tested 15 news-literacy tasks of varying difficulty, with about 50 more in the works. Can middle-school students spot "native advertising" (ads masquerading as articles) on a crowded news website? Can high-school kids check the authenticity of an alarming image posted on Facebook? Will students investigate the sources of controversial claims? Will they seek corroboration? By and large, according to a report the group published in November, the answer in each case is no.

"Overall," the report concluded, "young people's ability to reason about the information on the internet can be summed up in one word: bleak."

The news literacy initiative is based in the Stanford History Education Group that Wineburg founded in 2002 to train teachers how to use primary sources and help students critically evaluate historical claims. The group also created a free digital curriculum called " Reading Like a Historian " that's been downloaded more than 3 million times, according to Wineburg.

"We live in a world where our library begins with G," Wineburg said, for Google, and the Common Core's push for evidence-based reasoning falls flat if students trust everything that pops up in their Google search results.

Even before a deluge of fibs and fakery swamped our recent election cycle, Wineburg and company realized that readers of online news need many of the same skills used by a good historian, such as identifying the sources of claims and asking questions about their evidence. After all, what shows up in your Twitter or Facebook feed can come from anywhere, and a post-election BuzzFeed analysis suggested the fake stuff spreads faster than real news, thanks to hyper-partisan readers blindly sharing sensational headlines.

"This isn't just a problem with kids," said Wineburg. "Reliable information is to democratic functioning what clean air and water are to public health."

Fortunately, long-neglected civics education seems to be on the rebound in many states, which has helped groups like the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University get their message into K-12 classrooms. The center has run a course for undergraduates since 2007 and has since expanded into secondary schools by hosting summer teacher-training workshops and making course materials available online through its Digital Resource Center. In January, it plans to launch a massive online open course (aka MOOC) called " Making Sense of the News: News Literacy Lessons for Digital Citizens."

One early K-12 adopter of the Center's news-literacy lessons was Janis Schachter, a social studies teacher at Northport High School in Long Island, New York. Schachter took one of the center's first summer trainings and has taught Northport's news-literacy course since 2011 as an elective that meets New York state's "participation in government" graduation requirement.

"My students are all about social media. They've never known life without it, and it's where they get all their information," said Schachter. "Whether that information is from a news organization or from your uncle, it all looks the same to them."

Gradually, Schachter's students learn how to sort through it all-to check for multiple, informed, and named sources, and for claims backed by evidence they can independently verify.

"I tell the kids, it's not fair that we have to do all this work, but the reality of the internet is that we do," said Schachter, who also stresses that students only need to verify news they plan to act on, whether by voting, protesting, or just spreading the story by sharing it.

Still, learning news-literacy skills is one thing, and the motivation to use those skills is another. If that tantalizing headline in our Facebook news feed fits our political outlook, why do the digging that might undermine it?

The fact that so many of us now get our news in partisan online echo chambers sets up "a perfect storm for fake news," according to Joe Kahne, an education professor at the University of California, Riverside.

In some good news, a new study Kahne co-authored, based on a national survey of young people ages 15 to 27, found that self-reported media-literacy training did make people significantly less likely to believe a factually inaccurate claim even if it aligned with their political point of view.

Kahne plans to study news-literacy efforts to discover what specific strategies get young people to value facts, whether they bolster their existing beliefs or contradict them. For now, one popular suggestion by news-literacy educators is to tap teenagers' instinctive aversion to people telling them what to think.

"One of the messages we've tried to stress more and more lately with the rise of fake news is this: Do you want to be fooled?" said Jonathan Anzalone, assistant director of the Center for News Literacy. "Wouldn't you rather make up your own mind?"
This story was produced by Future Tense is a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and . Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, follow us on Twitter and sign up for our weekly newsletter. The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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How to Teach High-School Students to Spot Fake News

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When the AP United States history students at Aragon High School in San Mateo, California, scanned the professionally designed pages of minimumwage.com, most concluded that it was a solid, unbiased source of facts and analysis. They noted the menu of research reports, graphics and videos, and the "About" page describing the site as a project of a "nonprofit research organization" called the Employment Policies Institute.

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Looking to test your students' capabilities at figuring out if a website is real or not? Use these fake websites to help, but be careful! Looks may deceive you! Some of these sites are tougher to catch than others.

GenoChoice gives parents the opportunity to genetically modify their future child's DNA to prevent diseases and health issues. It's essentially a service that allows parents to create the "perfect child." While there aren't many links on the site, GenoChoice states that it is affiliated with "RYT Hospital". Upon clicking on the RYT Hospital link, viewers are directed to a hospital website that is quite official looking at first glance.

The giveaway? Many of the links do not work, both on GenoChoice and RYT Hospital's site. In addition, RYT Hospital cannot be found on a map or a simple Google search. There is also a feature on the site where readers can place their thumb on the screen for a DNA scan. This is not possible!

Ever wish you were related to a famous person? Have you ever tried to produce your family tree, but came up empty handed? Buy an Ancestor Online provides you with the ability to purchase an ancestor, "complete with authenticating documents." With daily hot deals and monthly specials, this site can provide you with the missing link in your family tree that you've always dreamed of.

The giveaway? The site not only looks outdated, but it was last updated in 2012. There is also very little information on the founder, Bob Fulkerson, and the site is maintained by the "Losing Proposition Company." The real giveaway? Reviews placed on the site by so-called "expert genealogists," state that it's all a scam and it will bring in some "REAL suckers."

A beautiful sanctuary for our four-legged friends, Dog Island is home to 2,500 dogs. All are able to roam free and enjoy a peaceful life among their furry friends. With man-made caves as shelters, plenty of rabbits and other wildlife to feed on, and separate islands for dogs of similar sizes, families can send their dogs to Dog Island to live happily in this oasis, for free.

The giveaway? While a Google search shows that Dog Island is the name of a real island off the coast of Florida, numerous grammatical errors throughout the Frequently Asked Questions page raises red flags about the validity of the website. Want to visit their main office? Due to protesters who oppose Dog Island, "we've had to make our land office a maze to get to." The directions to the office involve solving a cryptic puzzle.

Nestled in the heart of the midwest, Mankato Minnesota boasts itself as a "hidden vacation Mecca." It sits on the "Sclare/Far Fissure," which is a phenomenon that turns the air temperature to a 70 degree paradise...all year long. With tons of pages and links to back up their claim and five-star reviews from newspapers, this site could easily convince someone about this magical paradise in Minnesota.

The giveaway? The site looks outdated, with colorful, flashy images and banners. A Google search of Mankato, Minnesota pulls up the city's official homepage, which shows that it is currently 32 degrees, a far cry from the 70 degrees that the hoax site claims.

Which came first? The chicken or the egg? The Ova Prima Foundation is on a mission to find out. This non-profit agency's site is quite convincing. All links work and the site includes information regarding the mission, history, and abstracts and citations of research papers associated with the foundation. There are even lesson plans for educators who are looking to teach chicken or the egg theories.

The giveaway? Doing a quick search on the author and the company pulls up a ton of results showcasing that website as a hoax. In addition, the term, "ovaprimatological," is used throughout, which is not a real word. While it's convincing to see the research abstracts and citations, all are missing dates.

This beautifully designed website seems like the perfect place for elementary and middle school students to find information about famous explorers. With many of the world's most famous explorers featured, this site is easy for students to navigate, includes lesson plans for teachers, and information about the authors.

The giveaway? All About Explorers' mission is to teach students to check their facts with a second source, so the site is riddled with tons of incorrect information. It states that, "Christopher Columbus was born in 1951 in Sydney, Australia." and that Juan Ponce de Leon, "was hired by Revlon, a cosmetic company, to search for the Fountain of Youth (a body of water that would enable you to look young forever)."

In addition to incorrect information about the explorers, the biographies about the authors contain numerous inaccuracies. Their chief researcher worked at the University of Demiglace-on-Seine, which isn't a real school and it states that the webmaster has, "visited six of the seven major continents and a few minor ones as well."

Probably the toughest website to catch as a fake, the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus site is beautifully designed, all links work, and the author's information is available with a link to his regularly updated blog. There is even an online store where readers can purchase mugs, shirts, and stickers, all displaying images of the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus!

The giveaway? A quick search of the affiliated school, "Kelvnic University," and the "Wild Haggis Conservation Society," brings up quite a few websites that state them as fake. In addition, the author states that sasquatch is a natural predator to the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.
Related blog posts:

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Looking to test your students' capabilities at figuring out if a website is real or not? Use these fake websites to help, but be careful! Looks may deceive you! Some of these sites are tougher to catch than others. GenoChoice gives parents the opportunity to genetically modify their future child's DNA to prevent diseases and health issues.

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Tackk.com : votre guide shopping et guide d'achat !

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Study: Most Students Cannot Distinguish Fake and Real News

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Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post-Truth’ World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News

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Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post-Truth’ World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News

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NY Times Learning

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KQED

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Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world

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Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world

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Joyce Valenza, 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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Jennifer LaGarde

Link to Jennifer's infographic

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Fake News, Alternative Facts and Librarians As Dedicated Defenders of Truth

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Fake News, Alternative Facts and Librarians As Dedicated Defenders of Truth

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Jennifer LaGarde

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Identifying Fake News Infographic and Educator Resources

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Identifying Fake News Infographic and Educator Resources

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EasyBib

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We recently posted, " 10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Article," which highlighted key items to look for on a website when determining its credibility. The infographic found here summarizes the content from the blog post and students can use it as a guide when using news sources in research. Post, print, or share it with your students or others!

Looking for other resources related to website credibility? We've listed some of our favorites below the infographic!

This lesson plan, by Channel One News (a Houghton Mifflin Harcourt company), includes discussion questions, a writing activity, and a video that can be shown to students to help them understand that they shouldn't believe everything that they read or hear. It highlights fake information posted on social media sites and also discusses how "official" looking news sites could actually be fake.

This checklist can be distributed to students to help them determine if a news article is fake or not. We love how they included red flags throughout the checklist. Too many red flags circled? This means that the website the student is rating most likely contains false information!

Have you seen our blog post, "How Savvy Are Your Students?: 7 Fake Websites to Really Test Their Evaluation Skills." ?

The websites listed on this blog post all contain incorrect information. See if your students are able to put the pointers from the infographic to the test and catch on that these sites are not credible.

This page includes the TED-Ed videos, How to Choose Your News , and How False News Can Spread . It also features discussion questions for students to answer, as well as an activity where students are asked to impose a 48-hour news blackout.
Related blog posts:

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Identifying Fake News: An Infographic and Educator Resources - EasyBib Blog

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We recently posted, " 10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Article," which highlighted key items to look for on a website when determining its credibility. The infographic found here summarizes the content from the blog post and students can use it as a guide when using news sources in research.

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Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus 🌲🐙🌳

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Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus 🌲🐙🌳

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Internet Literacy lesson source

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Help Save The ENDANGERED

From EXTINCTION!

The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus

Rare photo of the elusive tree octopus
(Enhanced from cropped telephoto)

The Pacific Northwest tree octopus ( Octopus paxarbolis) can be found in the temperate rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula on the west coast of North America. Their habitat lies on the Eastern side of the Olympic mountain range, adjacent to Hood Canal. These solitary cephalopods reach an average size (measured from arm-tip to mantle-tip,) of 30-33 cm. Unlike most other cephalopods, tree octopuses are amphibious, spending only their early life and the period of their mating season in their ancestral aquatic environment. Because of the moistness of the rainforests and specialized skin adaptations, they are able to keep from becoming desiccated for prolonged periods of time, but given the chance they would prefer resting in pooled water.

An intelligent and inquisitive being (it has the largest brain-to-body ratio for any mollusk), the tree octopus explores its arboreal world by both touch and sight. Adaptations its ancestors originally evolved in the three dimensional environment of the sea have been put to good use in the spatially complex maze of the coniferous Olympic rainforests. The challenges and richness of this environment (and the intimate way in which it interacts with it,) may account for the tree octopus's advanced behavioral development. (Some evolutionary theorists suppose that "arboreal adaptation" is what laid the groundwork in primates for the evolution of the human mind.)

Reaching out with one of her eight arms, each covered in sensitive suckers, a tree octopus might grab a branch to pull herself along in a form of locomotion called tentaculation; or she might be preparing to strike at an insect or small vertebrate, such as a frog or rodent, or steal an egg from a bird's nest; or she might even be examining some object that caught her fancy, instinctively desiring to manipulate it with her dexterous limbs (really deserving the title "sensory organs" more than mere "limbs",) in order to better know it.

Map of estimated tree octopus maximum range, including spawning waters

Tree octopuses have eyesight comparable to humans. Besides allowing them to see their prey and environment, it helps them in inter-octopus relations. Although they are not social animals like us, they display to one-another their emotions through their ability to change the color of their skin: red indicates anger, white fear, while they normally maintain a mottled brown tone to blend in with the background.

The reproductive cycle of the tree octopus is still linked to its roots in the waters of the Puget Sound from where it is thought to have originated. Every year, in Spring, tree octopuses leave their homes in the Olympic National Forest and migrate towards the shore and, eventually, their spawning grounds in Hood Canal. There, they congregate (the only real social time in their lives,) and find mates. After the male has deposited his sperm, he returns to the forests, leaving the female to find an aquatic lair in which to attach her strands of egg-clusters. The female will guard and care for her eggs until they hatch, refusing even to eat, and usually dying from her selflessness. The young will spend the first month or so floating through Hood Canal, Admiralty Inlet, and as far as North Puget Sound before eventually moving out of the water and beginning their adult lives.

Why It's Endangered

Route 101, separating the rainforests of the Olympic Peninsula from Hood Canal

Although the tree octopus is not officially listed on the Endangered Species List, we feel that it should be added since its numbers are at a critically low level for its breeding needs. The reasons for this dire situation include: decimation of habitat by logging and suburban encroachment; building of roads that cut off access to the water which it needs for spawning; predation by foreign species such as house cats; and booming populations of its natural predators, including the bald eagle and sasquatch. What few that make it to the Canal are further hampered in their reproduction by the growing problem of pollution from farming and residential run-off. Unless immediate action is taken to protect this species and its habitat, the Pacific Northwest tree octopus will be but a memory.

The possibility of Pacific Northwest tree octopus extinction is not an unwarranted fear. Other tree octopus species-including the Douglas octopus and the red-ringed madrona sucker-were once abundant throughout the Cascadia region, but have since gone extinct because of threats similar to those faced by paxarbolis, as well as overharvesting by the now-illegal tree octopus trade.

Tree Octopus hat from 1923

The history of the tree octopus trade is a sad one. Their voracious appetite for bird plumes having exhausted all the worthy species of that family, the fashionistas moved on to cephalopodic accoutrements during the early 20th Century. Tree octopuses became prized by the fashion industry as ornamental decorations for hats, leading greedy trappers to wipe out whole populations to feed the vanity of the fashionable rich. While fortunately this practice has been outlawed, its effects still reverberate today as these millinery deprivations brought tree octopus numbers below the critical point where even minor environmental change could cause disaster.

While efforts were made in the past to preserve remaining tree octopus habitat, these were met with resistance by the timber industry, which has traditionally viewed the tree octopus as a nuisance, both because the octopuses favor the valuable, moss-shrouded trees of old growth forests-pitting conservation needs against lucrative sources of lumber-and because octopuses hiding among felled trees often gummed up sawmills and stained pulp vats with their ink.

Traveling sideshow exhibits, such as this one by Glen "Bones" Hartzell from 1942, demonized tree octopuses to the ignorant masses
(Click to enlarge)

These nuisances led many loggers to regard tree octopuses as bad luck, resulting in the pointless killing of octopuses on sight at logging camps in a misguided attempt at eradicating the troublesome species. Anti-octopus sentiment was so strong among loggers that some even began to fear that the octopuses were prone to attacking humans.

These fears were fueled in no small part by gratuitous stories involving tree octopuses harassing lumberjacks and distressing damsels in Northwestern-themed pulp magazines of the 1930-40s and variously "nipping", "entangling", or "suckering the flesh" of the heroes of men's action magazines of the 1950-60s. (The magazine publishers depended on cheap paper made from wood pulp and were glad to contribute to the anti-octopus propaganda campaign of the timber industry.)

To this day, misunderstanding and fear of these gentle creatures can still be found among many old timers, although education campaigns-and special octopus-separators installed at sawmills-have largely halted the practice of tree octopus eradication.

How You Can Help

More Tree Octopus Information

Posters motivate the citizenry to action! Post them!

Tree Octopus FAQs - Frequently asked questions, now with answers.

Tree Octopus Sightings - Includes photos of and behavioral research on the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus and other tree octopus species.

Tree Octopus In The Media - appearances of tree octopuses, both real and fictional, in the media and popular culture.

Research On Other Tree Octopus Species:

The author of this article and its subsections is Lyle Zapato.
This site is not associated with any school or educational organization,
other than the Kelvinic University branch of the Wild Haggis Conservation Society.
Not to be confused with the Pacific Northwest Octopus Tree.

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Information about the endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus and what you can do to save it.

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President Trump tweets a lot. With tens of millions of followers on Twitter, Trump proposes policy, shares his latest actions and reacts to the news. But 140 characters rarely gives the full context. During the president's first 100 days in office, we attempted to do just that for key tweets.

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President Trump's Tweets In His First 100 Days, Annotated

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President Trump tweets a lot. With tens of millions of followers on Twitter, Trump proposes policy, shares his latest actions and reacts to the news. But 140 characters rarely gives the full context. During the president's first 100 days in office, we attempted to do just that for key tweets.