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THE 5CS FOR A STRONG MARRIAGE

September 6, 2022  Defence Wards Matrimony

Marriage is a fertile ground for conflicts. It is also one of the best relationships one can have and experience in their lifetime. There are certain ingredients that are needed in marriage to make it a wonderful and accomplished one.

The perfect combination of all these small ingredients will lead to an amazing and tasteful environment for the marriage to bloom and grow.

Inequalities are not necessarily bad for a relationship — in fact, many people come together because of them. Indeed, defining and maintaining a sense of equality is highly subjective, and a couple’s ability to reach agreement on how and where boundaries lie is part of the challenge.

The different Cs or the 5 Cs are considered really important by the marriage specialist or those working and helping people to help them have a happy married life.

In this blog we are going to explain and discuss about the most important Cs of marriage.

By inculcating these in your behaviour and paying heed to what it can do to your marriage life will surely help you in building the happy and healthy marriage.

Communication

Communication is about effectively articulating thoughts in such a way that the other person understands them as intended. Obviously, this is a two-way street; the other party must also interpret such expressions “as intended.” The goal is the minimize the disparity between the parties’ collective understanding of communication, and that is achieved by minimizing bias towards self-interest. That is, statements or expressions should not be viewed as being advantageous to one party or the other, but with the goal of feeding the relationship.

Commitment

The role of commitment in a relationship is not so much that both people have the same level of commitment towards one another, only that their respective commitment profiles are acceptable by the other. When both feel comfortable with whatever that equilibrium is, it’s usually evident by virtue of a healthy relationship.

Compassion

Like Commitment, Compassion is also a frame of mind. It is more than just having a sense of another person.

Whenever relationships don’t work, it’s almost always that either or both partners are not looking at the other person’s point of view and appreciating the how and why they feel as they do. Such an investment of emotional attention and willingness requires compassion.

At the end of the day, true and authentic compassion usually results in less conflict during disagreements and a shorter path to resolution.

Chemistry

Is the natural and mutual flow with and between each other. It’s not just about physical or sexual attraction. A big part of chemistry is the desire to know more about other the person. In this desire to know more, you are truthful with each other; being open, curious, accepting, and respectful, even playful as you interact together.

The problem with chemistry is its inconsistency, especially in the beginning of a relationship. One may feel strongly about someone at first, but differently a week later, or under a different set of conditions. And of course, vice versa -people find their chemistry grows stronger as other aspects of a relationship develop. Having a strong chemistry will help you in building a healthy relationship.

Consensus

Is about cooperation-seeking the win-win, and is the result of a conscious and unconditional relationship. Consensus keeps in mind and balance the importance of both the goal/end in mind, and the relationship. It allows for mutual opinions and ways of being. There is dialogue, negotiation and compromise. Consensus is about power with. Consensus requires effective and respectful communication skills, flexibility, and openness to understand the others point of view; while expressing your own view. It requires the ability and willingness to find the common ground. Honoring your individual differences and working with your similarities, builds consensus.

Relationships like life, change, and situations happen that can impact any of these C’s in unproductive ways. So being aware of how life situations can impact these C’s is vital and an act of love, caring and concern for the relationship, and the two of you in it.

Communicate your thoughts and share your story. Dress up and show up as a team member instead of working against your partner. Choose to accept and value your partnership enough to lean in instead of push away. Before you know it, you’ll feel connected and that awful sense of loneliness will be replaced by the deep, affirming connection you signed up for in the first place.

www.defencewardsmatrimony.com

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Why do our brains love fake news? (Video)

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Why do our brains love fake news? (Video)

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Confronting Confirmation Bias: Giving Truth a FightingChance in the Information Age (Article)

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Confronting Confirmation Bias: Giving Truth a FightingChance in the Information Age (Article)

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A complete guide to seeing the news beyond your cozy filter bubble (Article)

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A complete guide to seeing the news beyond your cozy filter bubble (Article)

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Depending on where you fall on the political spectrum, your social-media feed on Feb. 17-when US president Donald Trump gave an unwieldy 77-minute press conference -may have been filled with posts like this:

Or this:

In all likelihood, you're not seeing both.

According to Eli Pariser, who authored the 2011 book The Filter Bubble, an already-divided public is becoming even more so as people increasingly use algorithm-driven platforms like Facebook to consume news.

These algorithms aim to serve consumers content that is most relevant to their lives and preferences. In the case of news, if you consistently click on stories with either a liberal or conservative bent, you will prime the algorithm to serve you similar stories in the future-with other views filtered out.

Content producers are also learning to manipulate these algorithms, by framing stories that play directly into existing partisan narratives, often to maximize clicks-but sometimes with nefarious intent (see: fake news).

Whatever your political beliefs, it can be hard work to evade the algorithms and seek out stories and perspectives that challenge your own. But it's crucial for the vitality of democratic institutions that rely on an engaged, heterogeneous public.

Here's how you can do it for yourself.

Don't burst your bubble all at once

To get started, Pariser cautions against "overcorrection," and suggests reading the work of "bridge figures," like columnists who hold moderately different views from your own. This will help guard against the cerebral whiplash you may feel if you jump straight from one partisan extreme to the other.

"There's a tendency to go right to the opposite strand, like 'if I lean left, then I'm going to start reading Breitbart,'" he says. "That doesn't end very well and will generally make people unhappy and upset."

If you are looking for moderately conservative voices, try reading Joseph Rago (paywall) of the Wall Street Journal or Caroline Baum of MarketWatch. For a moderately liberal perspective, Political Gabfest or Vox's The Weeds podcast are two options.

For more, here are 25 journalists to follow on the right and left, courtesy of the Daily Beast.

Once you feel comfortable with these moderate voices, you can push yourself to stray further to the other end of the spectrum. For "alt-right" and conservative perspectives, I curated this Twitter list, while Slate has this one of " left-leaning " tweets.

If you use a Twitter client like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, try adding these lists as columns in the center, so they are impossible to miss. If you're not a Tweetdeck fan, you can create a folder of bookmarked websites in your web browser. Consider setting a desktop notification that will remind you to check these sites on a regular basis.

Another resource is the website Allsides.com, which presents left, right and center perspectives on issues in the news in a way that's visually easy to track.

While you can learn the most from reading each article in succession, even looking at the headlines next to each other can be illuminating if you were previously getting only one side of the story.

Get new perspectives in your inbox

E-mail newsletters are another simple way to incorporate new views into your media diet.

Since 2015, journalist Will Sommer, who grew up in Texas and is now an editor for the Hill has curated the weekly newsletter, Right Richter, a "media digest for people who don't usually consume right-wing news."

"Breitbart is literally in the White House right now," Sommer said. "So all the better to commit to a better understanding for the next four to eight years."

Sommers' roundup chronicles the best of the week in GOP news and talk radio, including stories that have been debunked and the occasional "word watch."

Another option, PolarNews, was developed by students at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania who were surprised by the outcome of the UK's Brexit referendum.

The daily newsletter gives readers a pair of divergent perspectives on topics that have made the US news-from Lady Gaga's half-time show at the SuperBowl to the implications of Trump's SCOTUS pick.

Make looking 'across the aisle' a habit

Perhaps the most critical step you can take to get past your filter bubble is to seek out alternative viewpoints on a regular basis. A new app can help you take a 'quantified self' approach to the problem.

" Read Across the Aisle," which launched on Feb. 21, aims to be a FitBit for responsible news consumers, says creator Nick Lum.

"If at 4 p.m. you're taking the stairs because you know you won't make your goal for the day, this is the same thing for your balanced news diet," Lum says. "If you've been reading all on one side, reminders will let you know that you should try reading something on the other side."

While perusing the news on the app, a blue-to-red meter tracks how frequently you seek out partisan sources. If you're leaning a little too far in either direction, you can make adjustments as you go.

"Social media makes it really easy to feel like you've got enough news for the day, but it's all coming from one side for many people," Lum said. "This tool that is aimed at people who realize that they're in a bit of a bubble, and want to get out and want something to get them to do it on a regular basis."

Lum also compiled this list of resources to help news consumers move past the filters, including a Chrome extension called " Escape Your Bubble " that inserts positive stories about either Democrats or Republicans into your Facebook feed.

If you find other tips or tools to burst your filter bubble, please let me know what you come up with. And once your media habits become more balanced, you could also consider more direct outreach with people on the other side of the aisle. You never know what you might learn.

As journalist Chris Baraniuk wrote for Quartz in November, "The best way to exit an echo chamber or throw off the blinders of prejudice is still by willingly exposing ourselves to people and ideas that challenge us."

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A complete guide to seeing the news beyond your cozy filter bubble

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Depending on where you fall on the political spectrum, your social-media feed on Feb. 17-when US president Donald Trump gave an unwieldy 77-minute press conference -may have been filled with posts like this: Or this: In all likelihood, you're not seeing both.

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Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm Relinquishes Control Of What We “See First” (Article)

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Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm Relinquishes Control Of What We “See First” (Article)

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Facebook is boring when your best friends get lost in a sea of acquaintances. To make sure that doesn't happen, Facebook is testing a new feature called "See First", which I spotted this morning. When turned on from a friend's profile or Page, you'll see their recent posts at the top of your News Feed.

See First could be the new Holy Grail for marketers that want to make sure your feed doesn't filter out their content. And for users, it's perhaps the most precise way to tune what you see on Facebook .

After asking about what I'd seen, Facebook responded "We are always exploring new ways to improve the Facebook experience, and are currently running a small test of a feature that lets you indicate that you'd like to see posts from a specific person or Page at the top of your News Feed."

Until now, Facebook only let you Friend/Follow and unfollow people entirely on the feed, or say "I don't want to see this" to flag what you want less of in your feed. There remains an option to set someone as a Close Friend and get Facebook notifications when they post. But See First lets you pick people or Pages you care about and see them in the most prominent spot on Facebook, the top of the News Feed.

Many years ago Facebook offered granular sliders for choosing how much you wanted to see each type of content, like photos or relationship statuses. That was too complicated, though, so it moved to letting you choose to see more or less of someone, and select what content types like game posts or photos of theirs you did or didn't want to see. This was still confusing, and took too many clicks to manage subscriptions to lots of friends.

Last year, Facebook unveiled its solution, a News Feed settings menu which lets you instantly unfollow anyone to banish them from your feed without unfriending. But it lacked a way to flag people or Pages as your favorites and see more of them.

With this test, Facebook has found a natural remedy for your closest pals and beloved Pages getting drowned out. By tapping the "Following" button on a friend or Page, you can select to unfollow or "See First". Facebook doesn't tell this person you've highlighted them in your feed, so don't worry about seeming creepy.

The social network has been on a mission to refine its feed lately, hiding memes and hoaxes, showing people you interact with most more frequently, and taking how long you linger looking at a post into account when determining what to show you in the future. But despite the power of its omniscient algorithm, it still doesn't always know who really makes our feeds feel essential. Nowadays, Facebook's about news, videos, events, and more. But See First strengthens the core reason people keep coming back. It's the friends, stupid.

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Facebook's News Feed Algorithm Relinquishes Control Of What We "See First"

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Facebook is boring when your best friends get lost in a sea of acquaintances. To make sure that doesn't happen, Facebook is testing a new feature called "See First", which I spotted this morning. When turned on from a friend's profile or Page, you'll see their recent p...

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I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days. Here's what it did to me (Article)

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I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days. Here's what it did to me (Article)

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There's this great Andy Warhol quote you've probably seen before: "I think everybody should like everybody." You can buy posters and plates with pictures of Warhol, looking like the cover of a Belle & Sebastian album, with that phrase plastered across his face in Helvetica. But the full quote, taken from a 1963 interview in Art News, is a great description of how we interact on social media today.

Warhol: Someone said that Brecht wanted everybody to think alike. I want everybody to think alike. But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a way. Russia is doing it under government. It's happening here all by itself without being under a strict government; so if it's working without trying, why can't it work without being Communist? Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we're getting more and more that way.
I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should like everybody.
Art News: Is that what Pop Art is all about?
Warhol: Yes. It's liking things.
Art News: And liking things is like being a machine?
Warhol: Yes, because you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again.

The like and the favorite are the new metrics of success-very literally. Not only are they ego-feeders for the stuff we put online as individuals, but advertisers track their campaigns on Facebook by how often they are liked. A recent New York Times story on a krill oil ad campaign lays bare how much the like matters to advertisers. Liking is an economic act.

I like everything. Or at least I did, for 48 hours. Literally everything Facebook sent my way, I liked-even if I hated it. I decided to embark on a campaign of conscious liking, to see how it would affect what Facebook showed me. I know this sounds like a stunt (and it was) but it was also genuinely just an open-ended experiment. I wasn't sure how long I'd keep it up (48 hours was all I could stand) or what I'd learn (possibly nothing.)

See, Facebook uses algorithms to decide what shows up in your feed. It isn't just a parade of sequential updates from your friends and the things you've expressed an interest in. In 2014 the News Feed is a highly-curated presentation, delivered to you by a complicated formula based on the actions you take on the site, and across the web. I wanted to see how my Facebook experience would change if I constantly rewarded the robots making these decisions for me, if I continually said, "good job, robot, I like this." I also decided I'd only do this on Facebook itself-trying to hit every Like button I came across on the open web would just be too daunting. But even when I kept the experiment to the site itself, the results were dramatic.

>There is a very specific form of Facebook messaging, designed to get you to interact. And if you take the bait, you'll be shown it ad nauseam.

The first thing I liked was Living Social-my friend Jay had liked it before me and it was sitting at the top of my feed. I liked two more updates from friends. So far, so good. But the fourth thing I encountered was something I didn't really like. I mean, I don't truly like Living Social either, whatever the hell that is, but who cares. But this fourth thing was something I sort of actively disliked. A bad joke-or at least a dumb one. Oh well. I liked it anyway.

One thing I had to decide right away was what to do about the related items that appear after you've liked something. Let's say you like a story about cows that you see on Modern Farmer. Facebook will immediately present you with four more options to like things below that cow story, "relateds" in Facebook parlance. Probably more stories about cows or agriculture.

Relateds quickly became a problem, because as soon as you like one, Facebook replaces it with another. So as soon as I liked the four relateds below a story, it immediately gave me four more. And then four more. And then four more. And then four more. I quickly realized I'd be stuck in a related loop for eternity if I kept this up. So I settled on a new rule: I would like the first four relateds Facebook shows me, but no more.

Sometimes, liking is counterintuitive. My friend Hillary posted a picture of her toddler Pearl, with bruises on her face. It was titled "Pearl vs. the concrete." I didn't like it at all! It was sad. Normally, it would be the kind of News Feed item that would compel me to leave a comment, instead of hitting the little thumbs up button. Oh well. Like. The only time I declined to like something was when a friend posted about the death of a relative. I just had a death in my family last week. It was a bridge I wasn't going to cross.

But there was still plenty more to like. I liked one of my cousin's updates, which he had re-shared from Joe Kennedy, and was subsequently beseiged with Kennedys to like (plus a Clinton and a Shriver). I liked Hootsuite. I liked The New York Times, I liked Coupon Clipinista. I liked something from a friend I haven't spoken to in 20 years-something about her kid, camp and a snake. I liked Amazon. I liked fucking Kohl's. I liked Kohl's for you.

My News Feed took on an entirely new character in a surprisingly short amount of time. After checking in and liking a bunch of stuff over the course of an hour, there were no human beings in my feed anymore. It became about brands and messaging, rather than humans with messages.

Likewise, content mills rose to the top. Nearly my entire feed was given over to Upworthy and the Huffington Post. As I went to bed that first night and scrolled through my News Feed, the updates I saw were (in order): Huffington Post, Upworthy, Huffington Post, Upworthy, a Levi's ad, Space.com, Huffington Post, Upworthy, The Verge, Huffington Post, Space.com, Upworthy, Space.com.

Also, as I went to bed, I remember thinking "Ah, crap. I have to like something about Gaza," as I hit the Like button on a post with a pro-Israel message.

By the next morning, the items in my News Feed had moved very, very far to the right. I'm offered the chance to like the 2nd Amendment and some sort of anti-immigrant page. I like them both. I like Ted Cruz. I like Rick Perry. The Conservative Tribune comes up again, and again, and again in my News Feed. I get to learn its very particular syntax. Usually it went something like this:

A sentence recounting some controversial news. Good!

A sentence explaining why this is good.

A call to action, often ending with a question?

Once I see this pattern, I start noticing it everywhere. SF Gate, the San Francisco Chronicle's web presence, uses a similar tactic. It is a very specific form of Facebook messaging, designed to get you to interact. And if you take the bait, you'll be shown it ad nauseam.

I was also struck by how different my feeds were on mobile and the desktop, even when viewed at the same time. By the end of day one, I noticed that on mobile, my feed was almost completely devoid of human content. I was only presented with the chance to like stories from various websites, and various other ads. Yet on the desktop-while it's still mostly branded content-I continue to see things from my friends. On that little bitty screen, where real-estate is so valuable, Facebook's robots decided that the way to keep my attention is by hiding the people and only showing me the stuff that other machines have pumped out. Weird.

As day one rolled into day two, I began dreading going to Facebook. It had become a temple of provocation. Just as my News Feed had drifted further and further right, so too did it drift further and further left. Rachel Maddow, Raw Story, Mother Jones, Daily Kos and all sort of other leftie stuff was interspersed with items that are so far to the right I'm nearly afraid to like them for fear of ending up on some sort of watch list.

>Stop what you're doing and look at this baby that looks exactly like Jay-Z.

This is a problem much bigger than Facebook. It reminded me of what can go wrong in society, and why we now often talk at each other instead of to each other. We set up our political and social filter bubbles and they reinforce themselves-the things we read and watch have become hyper-niche and cater to our specific interests. We go down rabbit holes of special interests until we're lost in the queen's garden, cursing everyone above ground.

But maybe worse than the fractious political tones my feed took on was how deeply stupid it became. I'm given the chance to like a Buzzfeed post of some guy dancing, and another that asks Which Titanic Character Are You? A third Buzzfeed post informs me that "Katy Perry's Backup Dancer is the Mancandy You Deserve." According to New York magazine, I am "officially old" because Malia Obama went to Lollapalooza (like!) and CNN tells me "Husband Explores His Man-ternal Instincts" alongside a photo of a shirtless man cupping his nipples. A cloud that looks like a penis. Stop what you're doing and look at this baby that looks exactly like Jay-Z. My feed was showing almost only the worst kind of tripe that all of us in the media are complicit in churning out yet should also be deeply ashamed of. Sensational garbage. I liked it all.

While I expected that what I saw might change, what I never expected was the impact my behavior would have on my friends' feeds. I kept thinking Facebook would rate-limit me, but instead it grew increasingly ravenous. My feed become a cavalcade of brands and politics and as I interacted with them, Facebook dutifully reported this to all my friends and followers.

That first night, a small little circle with a dog's head popped up in the corner of my phone. A chat head, from Facebook's Messenger software! The dog turned out to be my old WIRED editor, John Bradley. "Have you been hacked," he wanted to know. The next morning, my friend Helena sent me a message. "My fb feed is literally full of articles you like, it's kind of funny," she says. "No friend stuff, just Honan likes." I replied with a thumbs up. This continued throughout the experiment. When I posted a status update to Facebook just saying "I like you," I heard from numerous people that my weirdo activity had been overrunning their feeds. "My newsfeed is 70 percent things Mat has liked," noted my pal Heather. Eventually, I would hear from someone who worked at Facebook, who had noticed my activity and wanted to connect me with the company's PR department.

But I'd already put a stop to it by then anyway, because it was just too awful. I tried counting how much stuff I'd liked by looking in my activity log, but it was too overwhelming. I'd added more than a thousand things to my Likes page-most of which were loathsome or at best banal. By liking everything, I turned Facebook into a place where there was nothing I liked. To be honest, I really didn't like it. I didn't like what I had done.

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I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook for Two Days. Here's What It Did to Me

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There's this great Andy Warhol quote you've probably seen before: "I think everybody should like everybody." You can buy posters and plates with pictures of Warhol, looking like the cover of a Belle & Sebastian album, with that phrase plastered across his face in Helvetica.

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Escape Your Bubble helps you better understand and accept others.

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PolitEcho is open source. Check out the code on Github.

What is PolitEcho?

PolitEcho shows you the political biases of your Facebook friends and news feed. The app assigns each of your friends a score based on our prediction of their political leanings then displays a graph of your friend list. Then it calculates the political bias in the content of your news feed and compares it with the bias of your friends list to highlight possible differences between the two.

How do I use it?

PolitEcho is a Google Chrome extension. Click on the button above to find PolitEcho's Google Chrome store page and click the "Add to Chrome" button to install PolitEcho on your computer. Once it is installed, simply log into Facebook and click on the PolitEcho icon in your navigation bar to get started.

What does PolitEcho do with my Facebook data?

PolitEcho never sends your personal information to any external services, and your results stay private unless you choose to share them publicly. PolitEcho will need to look up some basic information from your news feed and friends list. In particular, it will examine what pages your friends have liked to estimate their political leaning and the sources for the posts on your news feed to figure out the relative bias of your news feed. All processing is done client-side, so data never leaves your computer.

How does the political analysis work?

Your friends' political ratings are based on the political Facebook pages they like. We compare your friends liked pages to a database of Facebook pages that have been rated for their liberal/conservative bias and then compute a score based on any matches. Hovering over a person's data point will show you the reasoning behind the app's prediction.

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PolitEcho is open source. Check out the code on Github. PolitEcho shows you the political biases of your Facebook friends and news feed. The app assigns each of your friends a score based on our prediction of their political leanings then displays a graph of your friend list.

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The Problem with Fake News (And how our students can solve it) (Video)

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The Problem with Fake News (And how our students can solve it) (Video)

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

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Government 'Cyber Troops' Manipulate Facebook, Twitter, Study Says

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Government 'Cyber Troops' Manipulate Facebook, Twitter, Study Says

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Fake news is having a bit of a moment.

The Kremlin has denied meddling in the campaign. It also said this week that a French media report alleging Fillon was paid to arrange introductions to Putin was "fake news".
-Reuters.com, 23 Mar. 2017

Not blunt enough? In mid-February, following Trump's freewheeling news conference, Smith labeled Trump's responses "absolutely crazy." He even - horror of horrors! - defended CNN, Fox's mortal enemy, when Trump blasted it as "fake news" during another news conference.
-Paul Farhi, The Washington Post, 23 Mar. 2017

Wenger yesterday denied that he had been offered a contract by Paris Saint-Germain. The Arsenal manager told BeIN Sports: "It is a false rumour, that is what you call 'fake news'. I formally deny it. It is not true."
-Paul Hirst, The Times (London, UK), 22 Mar. 2017

Fake news is frequently used to describe a political story which is seen as damaging to an agency, entity, or person. However, as seen in the last of the three citations given above, it is by no means restricted to politics, and seems to have currency in terms of general news.

The printing and dissemination of spurious news is hardly new, but the term fake news is. However, when we say that an English word is "new," we are using a broader meaning of that word than if we were to refer to, say, a musical genre. Fake news appears to have begun seeing general use at the end of the 19th century.

Secretary Brunnell Declares Fake News About His People is Being Telegraphed Over the Country.
- Cincinnati Commercial Tribune (Concinnati, OH), 7 Jun. 1890

Fake News. The following is handed to us for publication: Sunday's Enterprise says that I and a companion were run over by the Neptune and thrown into the water. As can be proved by more than one, we did not so much as get our feet wet, nor were we helped into the Neptune. Clarence Collins.
- The Kearney Daily Hub (Kearney, NE), 7 Jul. 1890

The public taste is not really vitiated and it does not in its desire for 'news' absolutely crave for distortions of facts and enlargements of incidents; and it certainly has no genuine appetite for 'fake news' and 'special fiend' decoctions such as were served up by a local syndicate a year or two ago.
- The Buffalo Commercial (Buffalo, NY), 2 May 1891

One of the reasons that fake news is such a recent addition to our vocabulary is that the word fake is also fairly young. Fake was little used as an adjective prior to the late 18th century. But we obviously had fake news before the 1890s, so what did we call it? There was doubtless a wide range of expressions that people have resorted to when they felt the need to indicate that the newspapers had been fibbing, but one of the most common ones was false news. We can see this collocation in use as far back as the 16th century.

Other thinges are in this Court at a good price, or to say it better, very good cheap: that is to wit, cruel lies, false news, vnhonest women, fayned friendship, continuall enimities, doubled malice, vaine words, and false hopes, of whiche eight things we haue suche abundance in this Courte, that they may set out bouthes, and proclayme faires.
-Antonio de Guevara, The Familiar Epistles of Sir Anthony of Gueuara (trans. By Edward Hellowes), 1575

If, however, Mr. B. should appear, and not forfeit his recognizance, then that the writer has been guilty of "spreading false news," contrary to law, "no rational man can doubt."
- Impartial Observer (Richmond, VA), 9 May 1807

The French press knows little, and under laws which punish "false news," and render a journal liable to suppression if it displeases the executive power, is naturally afraid to say what little it knows.
- The Detroit Free Press, 20 Sept. 1866

So now we know that fake news has been in use for over a century, has increasingly widespread use, and has a consistent meaning: does this mean that it is a word we are watching? Er...not really.

The reason fake news is unlikely to be entered in our dictionary anytime soon is that it is a self-explanatory compound noun - a combination of two distinct words, both well known, which when used in combination yield an easily understood meaning. Fake news is, quite simply, ("material reported in a newspaper or news periodical or on a newscast") that is ("false, counterfeit").

While there are many other such compound nouns (such as compound noun) that we do not define, there is a way for fake news to make its way into the dictionary. All it has to do is take on a specific and commonly used meaning that is independent of the meaning of fake and news. For instance, long ago had the meaning of "a bag for putting dirt into," and was not entered in many (if any) dictionaries. However, once it took on the figurative meaning of "a dirty, unkempt, or contemptible person" it began being seen as a worthy candidate for definition.

And speaking of adding new words to the dictionary: did you know that all the lexicographers in North America and Britain have a competition every year to see who can add the most inappropriate word to their dictionary? The winner receives $1000, but more importantly, is also granted the right to remove one word from all the dictionaries that take place in this competition.

And that's fake news.

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Fake news is having a bit of a moment. The Kremlin has denied meddling in the campaign. It also said this week that a French media report alleging Fillon was paid to arrange introductions to Putin was "fake news".-Reuters.com, 23 Mar. 2017 Not blunt enough?

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'Fake News' And How The Washington Post Rewrote Its Story On Russian Hacking Of The Power Grid (Article)

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'Fake News' And How The Washington Post Rewrote Its Story On Russian Hacking Of The Power Grid (Article)

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On Friday the Washington Post sparked a wave of fear when it ran the breathless headline "Russian hackers penetrated U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont, U.S. officials say." The lead sentence offered "A code associated with the Russian hacking operation dubbed Grizzly Steppe by the Obama administration has been detected within the system of a Vermont utility, according to U.S. officials" and continued "While the Russians did not actively use the code to disrupt operations of the utility, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss a security matter, the penetration of the nation's electrical grid is significant because it represents a potentially serious vulnerability."

Yet, it turns out this narrative was false and as the chronology below will show, illustrates how effectively false and misleading news can ricochet through the global news echo chamber through the pages of top tier newspapers that fail to properly verify their facts.

The original article was posted online on the Washington Post's website at 7:55PM EST. Using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, we can see that sometime between 9:24PM and 10:06PM the Post updated the article to indicate that multiple computer systems at the utility had been breached ("computers" plural), but that further data was still being collected: "Officials said that it is unclear when the code entered the Vermont utility's computers, and that an investigation will attempt to determine the timing and nature of the intrusion." Several paragraphs of additional material were added between 8PM and 10PM, claiming and contextualizing the breach as part of a broader campaign of Russian hacking against the US, including the DNC and Podesta email breaches.

Despite the article ballooning from 8 to 18 paragraphs, the publication date of the article remained unchanged and no editorial note was appended, meaning that a reader being forwarded a link to the article would have no way of knowing the article they were seeing was in any way changed from the original version published 2 hours prior.

Yet, as the Post's story ricocheted through the politically charged environment, other media outlets and technology experts began questioning the Post's claims and the utility company itself finally issued a formal statement at 9:37PM EST, just an hour and a half after the Post's publication, pushing back on the Post's claims: "We detected the malware in a single Burlington Electric Department laptop not connected to our organization's grid systems. We took immediate action to isolate the laptop and alerted federal officials of this finding."

From Russian hackers burrowed deep within the US electrical grid, ready to plunge the nation into darkness at the flip of a switch, an hour and a half later the story suddenly became that a single non-grid laptop had a piece of malware on it and that the laptop was not connected to the utility grid in any way.

However, it was not until almost a full hour after the utility's official press release (at around 10:30PM EST) that the Post finally updated its article, changing the headline to the more muted "Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say" and changed the body of the article to note "Burlington Electric said in a statement that the company detected a malware code used in the Grizzly Steppe operation in a laptop that was not connected to the organization's grid systems. The firm said it took immediate action to isolate the laptop and alert federal authorities." Yet, other parts of the article, including a later sentence claiming that multiple computers at the utility had been breached, remained intact.

The following morning, nearly 11 hours after changing the headline and rewriting the article to indicate that the grid itself was never breached and the "hack" was only an isolated laptop with malware, the Post still had not appended any kind of editorial note to indicate that it had significantly changed the focus of the article.

This is significant, as one driving force of fake news is that as much of 60% of the links shared on social media are shared based on the title alone, with the sharer not actually reading the article itself. Thus, the title assigned to an article becomes the story itself and the Post's incorrect title meant that the story that spread virally through the national echo chamber was that the Russians had hacked into the US power grid.

Only after numerous outlets called out the Post's changes did the newspaper finally append an editorial note at the very bottom of the article more than half a day later saying "An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Russian hackers had penetrated the U.S. electric grid. Authorities say there is no indication of that so far. The computer at Burlington Electric that was hacked was not attached to the grid."

Yet, even this correction is not a true reflection of public facts as known. The utility indicated only that a laptop was found to contain malware that has previously been associated with Russian hackers. As many pointed out, the malware in question is actually available for purchase online, meaning anyone could have used it and its mere presence is not a guarantee of Russian government involvement. Moreover, a malware infection can come from many sources, including visiting malicious websites and thus the mere presence of malware on a laptop computer does not necessarily indicate that Russian government hackers launched a coordinated hacking campaign to penetrate that machine - the infection could have come from something as simple as an employee visiting an infected website on a work computer.

Moreover, just as with the Santa Claus and the dying child story, the Post story went viral and was widely reshared, leading to embarrassing situations like CNBC tweeting out the story and then having to go back and retract the story.

Particularly fascinating that the original Post story mentioned that there were only two major power utilities in Vermont and that Burlington Electric was one of them, meaning it would have been easy to call both companies for comment. However, while the article mentions contacting DHS for comment, there is no mention of any kind that the Post reached out to either of the two utilities for comment. Given that Burlington issued its formal statement denying the Post's claims just an hour and a half later, this would suggest that had the Post reached out to the company it likely could have corrected its story prior to publication.

When I reached out to Kris Coratti, Vice President of Communications and Events for the Washington Post for comment, she responded that regarding the headline change, "Headlines aren't written by story authors. When editors realized it overreached, as happens from time to time with headlines, it was corrected." She also indicated that posting the editor's note at the bottom of the article instead of the top was a mistake and indeed this was corrected shortly after my email to her inquiring about it.

Ms. Coratti's response regarding the article headline is a fascinating reminder of just how many different people and processes combine to produce a single article in a newspaper - that contrary to popular belief, a reporter doesn't sit down and write a story, choose a headline and then hit "Publish" and have the story go live on the newspaper website. Most newspapers, like the Washington Post, either employ dedicated headline writers or have their editors write the headlines for each piece and articles typically go through an elaborate review process designed to catch these sorts of issues prior to publication.

It is also interesting to note that the Post said it was an error for the editorial note to be buried at the very bottom of the page instead of at the top of the article, as was done for the Santa Claus story. This reflects the chaotic nature of newsrooms in which an editorial note is frequently added by an editor simply logging into a CMS portal and updating a live page, rather than a templated system which automatically places all editorial notes in the same place with the same style and formatting to ensure consistency.

Equally fascinating, neither Ms. Coratti nor Post Public Relations responded to any of my remaining queries regarding the article's fact checking process. In particular, the Post did not respond when I asked how headlines are fact checked and if headline writers conduct any form of fact checking to ensure their summarized version is consistent with known facts. The Post also did not respond to a request for comment on why it took nearly half a day from the time the article was rewritten until an editorial note was finally appended acknowledging that the conclusions of the original article were false and that the article had been substantively rewritten to support a different conclusion, nor did the Post comment on why the editor's note was originally placed at the bottom of the article and only moved after I inquired about its location.

Yet, perhaps most intriguing is that, as with the Santa Claus story, the Post did not respond to repeated requests for comment regarding how it conducts fact checking for its stories. This marks twice in a row that the Post has chosen not to respond in any fashion to my requests for more detail on its fact checking processes. Given the present atmosphere in which trust in media is in freefall and mainstream outlets like the Post are positioning themselves as the answer to "fake news" it certainly does not advance trust in the media when a newspaper will not even provide the most cursory of insight into how it checks its facts.

As with the Santa Claus story, the Post appears to have run this story without even attempting to perform the most basic of fact checks before publication. The original story noted that there were only two utilities in Vermont and yet the article states that the Post only attempted to contact DHS and does not mention any attempt to contact either of the utilities. Standard journalistic practice would have required that the Post mention that it attempted to reach either utility even if neither responded. The Post did not respond to a request for comment when I asked if it had attempted to reach either utility for comment prior to publication.

Putting this all together, what can we learn from this? The first is that, as with the Santa Claus and PropOrNot stories, the journalism world tends to rely far more on trust than fact checking. When one news outlet runs a story, the rest of the journalism world tends to follow suit, each writing their own version of the story without ever going back to the original sources for verification. In short - once a story enters the journalism world it spreads without further restraint as each outlet assumes that the one before performed the necessary fact checking.

The second is that the news media is overly dependent on government sources. Glenn Greenwald raises the fantastic point that journalists must be more cautious in treating the word of governments as absolute truth. Indeed, a certain fraction of the world's false and misleading news actually comes from the mouths of government spokespeople. Yet, in the Post's case, it appears that a government source tipped off the post about a sensational story of Russians hacking the US power grid and instead of reaching out to the utilities themselves or gathering further detail, the Post simply published the story as fed to them by the government officials.

The third is that breaking news is a source of a tremendous amount of false and misleading news as rumors and falsehoods spread like wildfire in the absence of additional information. Top tier newspapers like the Washington Post are supposed to be a bulwark against these falsehoods, by not publishing anything until it has been thoroughly fact checked against multiple sources. Yet, it appears this is not the case - in the rush to be the first to break a story and not be scooped, reporters even at the nation's most prestigious news outlets will take shortcuts and rush a story out the door. What would have happened in the Post had waited another day or two to collect responses from all involved, including Burlington Electric? It would have avoided publishing false information, but it also likely would have been scooped by another newspaper who wanted to be the first to break the story.

Indeed, "breaking news" is a tremendous problem for mainstream outlets in which they frequently end up propagating "fake news" in their rush to be the first to break a story. In a world beset by false and misleading news, do top tier news outlets have a professional responsibility to step back from breaking stories and only report on them after all details are known and they have had an opportunity to speak with all parties involved and understand more definitively what has happened? Financially this would likely be devastating in a share-first click-first world in which to the victor go the advertising dollars, but it would seem the only way to truly stop "fake news" from spreading.

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'Fake News' And How The Washington Post Rewrote Its Story On Russian Hacking Of The Power Grid

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What the Washington Post's rush to be the first to report on Russian hackers breaching the US power grid teaches us about how "breaking news" can all too often become "fake news" when we over-trust government sources and fail to verify facts

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See Liberal Facebook and Conservative Facebook, Side by Side

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I'm right, but you're not totally wrong (Links to resources)

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I'm right, but you're not totally wrong (Links to resources)

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Fighting Fake News: How libraries can lead the way on media literacy (Article)

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Fighting Fake News: How libraries can lead the way on media literacy (Article)

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Librarians-whether public, school, academic, or special-all seek to ensure that patrons who ask for help get accurate information.

Given the care that librarians bring to this task, the recent explosion in unverified, unsourced, and sometimes completely untrue news has been discouraging, to say the least. According to the Pew Research Center, a majority of US adults are getting their news in real time from their social media feeds. These are often uncurated spaces in which falsehoods thrive, as revealed during the 2016 election. To take just one example, Pope Francis did not endorse Donald Trump, but thousands of people shared the "news" that he had done so.

Completely fake news is at the extreme end of a continuum. Less blatant falsehoods involve only sharing the data that puts a proposal in its best light, a practice of which most politicians and interest group spokespeople are guilty.

The news-savvy consumer is able to distinguish fact from opinion and to discern the hallmarks of evasive language and half-truths. But growing evidence suggests that these skills are becoming rarer. A November 2016 study by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) showed that students have difficulty separating paid advertising from news reporting, and they are apt to overlook clear evidence of bias in the claims they encounter. These challenges persist from middle school to college.

According to SHEG Director Sam Wineburg, professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education, "nothing less than our capacity for online civic reasoning is at risk."

Librarians and journalists: natural allies

Librarians can help change this trend. "Librarians are natural allies for educators in helping students become critical news consumers," says Wineburg. The profession's deep commitment to verified sources and reliable information mirrors similar values-accountability for accuracy, careful research before drawing firm conclusions, and a willingness to correct errors-that drive responsible journalism.

One emerging solution among journalists is the Trust Project, an initiative of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara (Calif.) University.

Headed by longtime reporter Sally Lehrman, director of Santa Clara's journalism ethics program, the Trust Project has partnered with nearly 70 media organizations to develop a collection of color-coded digital "Trust Indicators" that signify reliable and responsible reporting. Indicators include a commitment to seeking diverse perspectives, linking out to credible sources of further information, offering clear markers regarding whether an article presents opinion or news, and providing information about an article's author. The complete set is available at the Trust Project website.

Still in the works for the project is computer code that will allow partner media organizations to note when they have achieved a Trust Indicator, which serves as a proxy for reliable journalism. This code should be broadly available by mid-2017. Services such as Facebook and Google would surface these materials more prominently in news feeds and search results, while readers would see clear visual icons that demonstrate fulfillment of the Trust Indicators. As Lehrman explains, "These icons would be cognitive shortcuts to route readers to more reliable sources of news."

She also notes a strong desire by consumers to be active participants in the shaping of the news, rather than merely a passive audience. In that spirit, she welcomes input and feedback from librarians about how to best achieve the aims of the Trust Project.

Direct collaboration with journalists is another route to increasing media literacy. For example, the Dallas Public Library (DPL) will host an eight-week training course in community journalism for high school students. Its "Storytellers without Borders" project, one of the winners of the 2016 Knight News Challenge, includes oversight from professional librarians as well as reporters at the Dallas Morning News. Students will rotate among three DPL branch locations that represent the socioeconomic and cultural diversity of the city. Journalists will mentor students on how to ask focused questions, while librarians will describe how to use research databases to find accurate information. Library staffers will also provide instruction on how to use multimedia editing tools. In April 2017 these budding digital journalists, with their new skills in the art of providing credible and engaging content, will showcase their efforts at the Dallas Book Festival.

Information literacy at your library

The Trust Project and "Storytellers without Borders" are high-profile efforts, but any library can lead educational programs about the importance of media literacy.

As the SHEG study reveals, this training should begin with young students and continue through college. Resources that range from free LibGuides to enhanced school curricula are available for libraries around the country.

Librarians at Indiana University East in Richmond have developed a LibGuide about how to identify fake news, complete with detailed images of what questions to ask while perusing a site. The News Literacy Project, founded by former Los Angeles Times reporter Alan Miller, offers a comprehensive curriculum of classroom, after-school, and e-learning programs for middle and high school students; the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook (N.Y.) University offers similar resources for teaching college students.

Despite the clear need for increased media literacy, one risk is that this topic will always be perceived as optional-nice to know but not essential. Wineburg argues that this is misguided. "Online civic literacy is a core skill that should be insinuated into the warp and woof of education as much as possible," he says. In a paper for College & Research Libraries News, Brian T. Sullivan, information literacy librarian, and Karen L. Porter, sociology professor, of Alfred (N.Y.) University map out how to convert those one-shot information literacy training sessions into full programs with embedded librarians.

Librarians can play a vital role in helping everyone, of any age, become critical and reflective news consumers. One positive outcome of the current furor about fake news may be that information literacy, for media and other types of content, will finally be recognized as a central skill of the digital age.

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Fighting Fake News | American Libraries Magazine

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Librarians-whether public, school, academic, or special-all seek to ensure that patrons who ask for help get accurate information. Given the care that librarians bring to this task, the recent explosion in unverified, unsourced, and sometimes completely untrue news has been discouraging, to say the least.

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Yes, Digital Literacy, But Which One? (Blog post)

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Yes, Digital Literacy, But Which One? (Blog post)

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One of the problems I've had for a while with traditional digital literacy programs is that they tend to see digital literacy as a separable skill from domain knowledge.

In the metaphor of most educators, there's a set of digital or information literacy skills, which is sort of like the factory process. And there's data, which is like raw material. You put the data through the critical literacy process and out comes useful information on the other side. You set up the infolit processes over a few days of instruction, and then you start running the raw material through the factory, for everything from newspaper articles on the deficit to studies on sickle cell anemia. Useful information, correctly weighted, comes out the other end. Hooray!

This traditional information/web literacy asks students to go to a random page and ask questions like "Who runs this page? What is their expertise? Do they have bias? Is information clearly presented?

You might even get an acronym, like RADCAB, which allows you to look at any resource and ascertain its usefulness to a task.

Or maybe, if you're in higher education, you'll get CRAAP:

I'm a fan of checklists, and heuristics, and I've got no problem with a good acronym

But let me tell you what is about to happen. We are faced with massive information literacy problems, as shown by the complete inability of students and adults to identify fake stories, misinformation, disinformation, and other forms of spin. And what I predict is that if you are in higher education every conference you go to for the next year will have panel members making passionate Churchillian speeches on how we need more information literacy, to much applause and the occassional whoop.

But which information literacy do we need? Do we need more RADCAB? Do we need more CRAAP?

In reality, most literacies are heavily domain-dependent, and based not on skills, but on a body of knowledge that comes from mindful immersion in a context. For instance, which of these five sites are you going to trust most as a news (not opinion) sources?

Could you identify which of these sites was likely to be the most careful with facts? Which are right-wing and which are left wing? Which site is a white supremacist site?

It's worth noting if you were able to make those determinations you did it not using skills, but knowledge. When I saw that big "W" circled in that red field of a flag, for instance, my Nazi alarm bells went off. The mention of the "Illuminati" in source three tells me it's a New World Order conspiracy site. I know little things, like the word "Orwellian" is a judgmental word not usually found in straight news headlines. I've read enough news to know that headlines that have a lot of verbal redundancy ("fabricates entire story falsely claiming", for example, rather than "falsely claims") are generally not from traditional news sources, and that the term "Globalist" is generally not used outside opinion journalism and "war against humanity" is pitched at too high a rhetorical level.

We act like there's skills and a process, and there is, certainly. Asking the right question matters. Little tricks like looking up an author's credentials matters. CRAAP matters. And so on. But the person who has immersed themselves in the material of the news over time in a reflective way starts that process with three-quarters a race's head start. They look at a page and they already have a hypothesis they can test - "Is this site a New World Order conspiracy site?" The person without the background starts from nothing and nowhere.

Abstract skills aren't enough. RADCAB is not enough.

Government Slaves

I first really confronted this when I was helping out with digital fluency outcomes at Keene State about six years ago. One of the librarians there called me into a meeting. She was very concerned, because they ran an information literacy segment in classes and the students did well enough on the exercises, but when paper time came they were literally using sites that looked like this:

She was just gobsmacked by it. She didn't want to say - "Look, just don't use the internet, OK?" - but that was what she felt like after seeing this. It was crushing to spend two days talking authority and bias and relevance and the CRAAP test, having the students do well on small exercises, and then having students in the course of a project referencing sites like these. (I should say here that we can find lots of sites like this on the liberal side of the spectrum too, but under the Obama administration these particular sorts of sites thrived. We'll see what happens going forward from here.)

When I started talking to students about sites like this, I discovered there was a ton of basic knowledge that students didn't have that we take for granted. That FEMA banner is a red flag to me that this site is for people that buy into deep right wing conspiracies that the Obama Administration is going to round conservatives up into FEMA prison camps. The "Government Slaves" to me is a right-wing trope - not necessarily fringe, but Tea Party-ish at the least. Those sites in the top menu - Drudge, Breitbart, InfoWars, and ZeroHedge - are all a sort of conspiracy spectrum starting with alarmist but grounded (Drudge, ZeroHedge) to full on conspiracy sites (InfoWars). The stars on the side signal a sort of aggressive patriotism, and the layout of the site, the Courier typography, etc., is reminiscent of other conspiracy sites I have seen. The idea that cash/gold/silver is going to be "taken away" by the government is a prominent theme in some right-wing "prepper" communities.

Now we could find similar site on the left. My point here is not about the validity of the site. My point is that recognizing any one of these things as an indicator - FEMA, related sites, gold seizures, typography - would have allowed students to approach this site with a starting hypothesis of what the bias and aims of this site might be which they could then test. But students know none of these things. They don't know the whole FEMA conspiracy, or that some people on the right feel the government is so strong we are slaves to it. They don't know the who gold/prepper/cash thing. And honestly, if you start from not knowing any of this, why would this page look weird at all?

The Tree Octopus Problem

When I started looking at this problem in 2010, I happened upon an underappreciated blog post on critical thinking by, oddly enough, Robert Pondiscio.

I say "oddly enough", because Pondiscio is part of a movement I often find myself at odds with: the "cultural literacy" movement of E.D. Hirsch. That movement contended early on that our lack of common cultural knowledge was inhibiting our ability to discuss things rationally. With no common touchpoints, we might as well be speaking a different language.

The early implementations of that - complete with a somewhat white and male glossary of Things People Should Know - rubbed me the wrong way. And Hirsch himself was a strong adversary of the integrated project-based education I believe in, arguing the older system of studying a wide variety of things with a focus on the so-called "lower levels" of Bloom's Taxonomy was more effective than project-based deep dives. Here's Hirsch talking down a strong project-based focus in 2000:

To pursue a few projects in depth is thought to have the further advantage of helping students gain appropriate skills of inquiry and discovery in the various subject matters. One will learn how to think scientifically, mathematically, historically, and so on. One will learn, it is claimed, all-purpose, transferable skills such as questioning, analyzing, synthesizing, interpreting, evaluating, analogizing, and, of course, problem solving-important skills indeed, and well-educated people possess them. But the consensus view in psychology is that these skills are gained mainly through broad knowledge of a domain. Intellectual skills tend to be domain-specific.The all-too-frequent antithesis between skills and knowledge is facile and deplorable. ( Hirsch, 2000)

I've used project-based learning forever, and my whole schtick - the thing which I've being trying to get done in one way or another for 20 years now - is scalable, authentic, cross-insitutional project-based education. I'm looking to scale what Hirrch is looking to dismantle. So Hirsch is a hard pill to swallow in this regard.

But it's those last three lines that are the core of the understanding, and it's an understanding we can't afford to ignore: "[T]he consensus view in psychology is that these skills are gained mainly through broad knowledge of a domain. Intellectual skills tend to be domain-specific. The all-too-frequent antithesis between skills and knowledge is facile and deplorable."

Robert Pondiscio, who works with Hirsch, shows specifically how this maps out in information literacy. Reviewing the 21st century skills agenda that had been released back in 2009, he notes the critical literacy outcome example:

Outcome: Evaluate information critically and competently. Example: Students are given a teacher-generated list of websites that are a mixture of legitimate and hoax sites. Students apply a website evaluation framework such as RADCAB (www.radcab.com) to write an explanation for deciding whether each site is credible or not.

Pondiscio then applies the RADCAB method to a popular assignment of the time. There is a hoax site called the Tree Octopus often used by educators - teachers send students to it and have them try to evaluate whether it is real.

Unfortunately, as Pondiscio points out, any quick application of RADCAB or any other "skills only" based heuristic will pass this site with flying colors

The rubric also tells us we are research pros if we "look for copyright information or 'last updated' information" in the source. Very well: The tree octopus site was created in 1998 and updated within the last two months, so it must be a current source of tree octopus information. We are also research pros if we "look for the authority behind the information on a website because I know if affects the accuracy of the information found there." Merely looking for the authority tells us nothing about its value, but let's dig deeper. The authority behind the site is the "Kelvinic University branch of the Wild Haggis Conservation Society." Sounds credible. It is, after all, a university, and one only has to go the extra mile to be a Level 4, or "Totally Rad Researcher." The Tree Octopus site even carries an endorsement from Greenpeas.org, and I've heard of them (haven't I?) and links to the scientific-sounding "Cephalopod News."

If you want to know the real way to evaluate the site, claims Pondiscio, it's not by doing something, it's by knowing something:

It's possible to spend countless hours looking at the various RADCAB categories without getting the joke. Unless, of course, you actually know something about cephalopods - such as the fact that they are marine invertebrates that would have a tough time surviving or even maintaining their shape out of the water - then the hoax is transparent.

And, in fact, when we shake our heads at those silly students believing in the Tree Octopus, we're not surprised at the fact they didn't look for authority or check the latest update. We're disappointed that they don't understand the improbability of a cephalopod making the leap to being an amphibious creature without significant evolutionary changes. We're amazed that they believe that long ago a common cephalopod ancestor split off into two branches, one in the ocean, and one in the forest, and they evolved in approximately the same way in polar opposite environments

That's the weird thing about the Tree Octopus. And that's what would make any informed viewer look a bit more deeply at it, not RADCAB analysis, not CRAAP, and not some generalized principles.

To Gain Web Literacy You Have to Learn the Web

There's a second point here, because what a web literate person would actually do on finding this is not blindly go through a checklist, but execute a web search on Tree Octopus. Doing that would reveal a Snopes page on it, which the web literate person would click on and see this:

Why would they click Snopes instead of other web search results? Is it because of Relevance, or Currency? Do you have some special skill that makes that particular result stand out to you?

No, it's because you know that Snopes is historically a good site to resolve hoaxes. If it was a political question you might choose Politifact. If it wasn't a hoax, but a question that needed answering, you might go to Stack Exchange. For a quote, Quote Investigator is a good resource with a solid history. Again, it's not skills, exactly. It's knowledge, the same sort of knowledge that allows a researcher in their field to quickly find relevant information to a task.

But let's say you went to Wikipedia instead of Snopes. And again, you found it was labelled a hoax there:

Well, to be extra sure, you'd click the history and see if there were any recent reversions or updates, especially by anonymous accounts. This is Wikipedia, of course:

Looking at this we can see that this page has had a grand total of seven characters changed or added in the past six months, and almost all were routine "bot" edits. Additionally we see this page has a long edit history - with hundreds of edits since 2010. The page is probably reliable in this context.

Don't know what Wikipedia bots are, or what they do? Honestly, that's a far greater web literacy problem than applying "currency" to Wikipedia articles.

Incidentally, "currency" in our RADCAB rubric gets Wikipedia backwards. If we had arrived at this Wikipedia page in 2010, for example, on February 28th from about 6:31 p.m. to 6:33 p.m. we would have found a page updated seconds ago. But in Wikipedia, that can often mean trouble, so we would have checked "Compare Revisions" and found that minutes ago the assertions the page made were reversed to say that the Tree Octopus was real:

Furthermore, it's an edit from an anonymous source, as you can tell from the IP address at the top (65.186.215.54). The recency of the edit, especially from an anonymous source, makes this a questionable source at this particular moment.

Incidentally, in a tribute to the efficiency of Wikipedia, this edit that asserts the Tree Octopus is real is up for less than 120 seconds before an editor sees the prank and reverts it.

How are you supposed to know this stuff? Edit histories, bots, character counts as an activity check, recency issues in Wikipedia, compare revisions, etc? How are you going to know to choose Snopes over "MyFactCheck.com"?

Through a general skills checklist? Through a rubric?

The radical idea I'd propose is that someone would tell you these things, the secret knowledge that allows web literate people to check these things quickly. That secret knowledge includes things like revision histories, but also domain knowledge - that Snopes is a good hoax checker, and Quote Investigator is a good source for checking quotes. It includes specific hacks to do reverse image searches to see if an image is real, using specific software such as TinEye or Google Reverse Image Search.

Further, the student would understand basic things like "How web sites make money" so they could understand the incentives for lies and spin, and how those incentives differ from site to site, depending on the revenue model.

In other words, just as on the domain knowledge side we want enough knowledge to quickly identify whether news items pass the smell test, on the technical side we don't want just abstract information literacy principles, but concrete web research methods and well-known markers of information quality on the web.

We Don't Need More Information Literacy. We Need a New Information Literacy.

So back to those inevitable calls for more information literacy and the inevitable waves of applause.

We do need more education to focus on information literacy, but we can't do it the way we have done it up to now. We need to come down from that Bloom's Taxonomy peak and teach students basic things about the web and the domains they evaluate so that they have some actual tools and knowledge to deal with larger questions effectively.

I'll give an example. Recently there was a spate of stories about a study that found that students couldn't differentiate "sponsored content" from native content. Many thinkpieces that followed talked about this as a failure of general literacy. We must build our student's general critical thinking skills! To the Tree Octopus, my friends!

The study authors had a different idea. The solution, they wrote, was to have students read the web like fact-checkers. But to do that we have to look at what makes fact-checkers effective vs. students. Look, for example, at one of the tasks the students failed at - identifying the quality of a tweet on gun control:

As the study authors note, a literate response would note two things:

The tweet is from Move On, and concerns a study commissioned by Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, and this may indicate some bias, but

The poll they link to is by Public Policy Polling, a reputable third party third party polling outfit, which lends some legitimacy to the find.

The undergraduates here did not do well. Here's how they struggled:

An interesting trend that emerged from our think-aloud interviews was that more than half of students failed to click on the link provided within the tweet. Some of these students did not click on any links and simply scrolled up and down within the tweet. Other students tried to do outside web searches. However, searches for "CAP" (the Center for American Progress's acronym, which is included in the tweet's graphic) did not produce useful information.

You see both sides of the equation in this tweet. A fact checker clicks links, obviously. And while that seems obvious, keep in mind it never occurred to half the students.

But the second part is interesting too - the students had trouble finding the Center for American Progress because they didn't know "CAP". There's a technical aspect here, because if they just scoped their search correctly - well, here's my first pass at a search:

So one piece of this is students need to know how to use search. But the other piece is they need to be able to recognize that we call this policy area "gun control". That sounds weird, but again, consider that most of these students couldn't figure that out.

And honestly, if you fact check on the internet long, you'll end up knowing what MoveOn is and what the Center for American Progress is. Real fact-checkers don't have to check those things, because any person that tracks these issues is going to bump into a handful of think tanks quite a bit. Learning what organizations like CAP, Brookings, Cato, AEI, and Heritage are about is actually part of the literacy, not a result of it.

Instead of these very specific pieces of knowledge and domain specific skills, what did the students give back to the researchers as method and insight? They gave them information literacy platitudes:

Many students made broad statements about the limitations of polling or the dangers of social media content instead of investigating the particulars of the organizations involved in this tweet.

You see the students here applying the tools that information literacy has given them. Be skeptical! Bias happens! Social media is not trustworthy!

And like most general-level information literacy tools, such platitudes are not useful. They need to know to click the link. They need to know what a think tank is. They need to know how to scope a search, and recognize the common term for this policy area is "gun control". But we haven't given them this, we've given them high level abstract concepts that never get down to the ground truth of what's going on.

Fukashima Flowers

You see this time and time again. Consider the Fukashima Flowers task from the same study:

My first thought on this is not "Is this good evidence?" My first thought is "Is this a hoax?" So I go to Snopes:

And there I get a good overview of issue. The photo is real, and it's from an area around Fukashima. But the process it shows is fasciation, and, while rare, fasciation occurs all around the world.

Do I want to stop there? Maybe not. Maybe I look into fasciation rates and see how abnormal this is. Or maybe I dig deeper into known impacts of radiation. But I've already got a better foothold on this by following the admonition "Check Snopes first" than any acronym of abstract principles would give me.

Do the students check Snopes? No, of course not. They apply their abstract reasoning skills, to disappointing results:

On the other hand, nearly 40% of students argued that the post provided strong evidence because it presented pictorial evidence about conditions near the power plant. A quarter of the students argued that the post did not provide strong evidence, but only because it showed flowers and not other plants or animals that may have been affected by the nuclear radiation.

I know Bloom's Taxonomy has fallen out of favor recently in the circles to which I belong. But this is an extremely good example of what happens when you jump to criticism before taking time to acquire knowledge. The students above are critical thinkers. They just don't have any tools or facts to think critically with.

Now maybe in another world Snopes doesn't have this story. I get that you can't always go to Snopes. And maybe googling "Fukushima Flowers" doesn't give you good sources. Well, then you have to know reverse image search. Or you might need to know how to translate foreign news sources. Or you might need to get the latest take on the flowers by limiting a Google News search by date.

My point is not that you don't have to deal with questions of bias, or relevancy, or currency. You're absolutely going to confront these issues. But confronting these issues without domain knowledge or a toolkit of specific technical resources and tricks is just as likely to pull you further away from the truth than towards it.

What Do Real Fact-Checkers and Journalists Do?

Journalists often have to verify material under tight deadlines. What tricks do they use?

Consider this question: you get a video like this that purports to have taken place in Portland, July 2016, where a man pulls a gun on Black Lives Matter protesters. Is this really from Portland? Really from that date, and associated with that particular protest? Or is this a recycled video being falsely associated with a recent event?

Now this video has been out for a while, and its authenticity has been resolved. You can look it up and see if it was correctly labelled if you want. But when it first came out, what were some tricks of the trade? Do they use RADCAB?

No, they use a toolbox of specific strategies, some of which may encode principles of RADCAB, bit all of which are a lot more specific and physical than "critical thinking".

Here's what the Digital Verification Handbook out of the European Journalism Centre suggests, for example, about verifying the date of an event on YouTube:

Be aware that YouTube date stamps its video using Pacific Standard Time. This can sometimes mean that video appears to have been uploaded before an event took place.

Another way to help ascertain date is by using weather information. Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge engine that, among other things, allows you to check weather from a particular date. (Simply type in a phrase such as "What was the weather in Caracas on September 24, 2013" to get a result.) This can be combined with tweets and data from local weather forecasters, as well as other uploads from the same location on the same day, to cross-reference weather.

You may not realize this, but rainy and cloudy days are actually quite rare in Portland in July - it rains here for like nine months of the year, but the summers are famously dry, with clear sky after clear sky. Yet the weather in this video is cloudy and on the verge of raining. That's weird, and worth looking into.

We check it out in Wolfram Alpha:

And it turns out the weather fits! That's a point in this video's favor. And it took two seconds to check.

The handbook is also specific about the process for different types of content. For most content, finding the original source is the first step. Many pictures (for example, the "Fukushima flowers") exist on a platform or account that was not the original source, thus making it hard to ascertain the provenance of the image. In the case of the Fukushima flowers did you ever wonder why the poster of the photo posted in English, rather than Japanese, and had an English username?

A web illiterate person might assume that this was game over for the flowers, because what Japanese person is going to have a name like PleaseGoogleShakerAamer?

But as the handbook discusses, this isn't necessarily meaningful. Photos propagate across multiple platforms very quickly once the photo becomes popular, as people steal it to try to build up their status, or get ad-click-throughs. A viral photo may exist in hundreds of different knock-off versions. Since this is User-Generated Content (UGC), the handbook explains the first step is to track it down to its source, and to do that you use a suite of tools, including reverse image search.

And when we do that we a screen cap of a Twitter image that is older than the picture we are looking at and uses Japanese, which, lets face it makes more sense:

(BTW, notice that to know to look for Japanese we have to know that the Fukushima disaster happened in Japan. Again, knowledge matters.)

Once we have that screen cap we can trace it to the account and look up the original with Google translate on. In doing so we find out this is resident of the Fukushima area who has been trying to document possible effects of radiation in their area. They actually post a lot on information on the photo in their feed as they discuss it with various reporters, so we can find out that these were seen in another person's garden, and even see that the photographer had taken a photo before they bloomed, a month earlier, which reduces the likelihood that this is a photo manipulation somewhat dramatically:

Even here, the author notes that they know it is a known mutation of such things. And they give the radiation level of that part of Japan in microsieverts which allows you to check it against health recommendation charts.

A month later they check back in on the flowers and post the famous photo. But immediately after they say this:

In other words, three tweets after the famous photo the tweeter gives you the word of what this is called (fasciation) and even though the rest of the text is garbled by the translator that's a word you can plug into Google to better understand the phenomenon:

So here's a question: does your digital literacy program look like this? Is it detective work that uses a combination of domain knowledge and tricks of the trade to hunt down an answer?

Or does it consist of students staring at a page and asking abstract questions about it?

It's not that I don't believe in the questions - I do. But ultimately the two things that are going to get you an answer on Fukushima Flowers are digital fact-checking strategies and some biology domain knowledge. Without those you're going nowhere.

Conclusion: Domain-Grounded Digital Literacy That Thinks Like the Web

I didn't sit down to write a 5,000 word post, and yet I'm feeling I've only scratched the surface here.

What is the digital literacy I want?

I want something that is actually digital, something that deals with the particular affordances of the web, and gives students a knowledge of how to use specific web tools and techniques.

I want something that recognizes that domain knowledge is crucial to literacy, something that puts an end to helicopter-dropping students into broadly different domains.

I want a literacy that at least considers the possibility that students in an American democracy should know what the Center for American Progress and Cato are, a literacy that considers that we might teach these things directly, rather than expecting them to RADCAB their way to it on an individual basis. It might also make sense (crazy, I know!) that students understand the various ideologies and internet cultures that underlie a lot of what they see online, rather than fumbling their way toward it individually.

I think I want less CRAAP and more process. As I look at my own process with fact-checking, for example, I see models such as Guided Inquiry being far more helpful - systems that help me understand what the next steps are, rather than abstract rubric of quality. And I think what we find when we look at the work of real-life fact-checkers is that this process shifts based on what you're looking at, so the process has to be artifact-aware: This is how you verify a user-generated video for example, not "here's things to think about when you evaluate stuff."

To the extent we do use CRAAP, or RADCAB, or CARS or other models out there, I'd like us to focus specifically on the methods that the web uses to signal these sorts of things. For example, the "S" in CARS is support, which tends to mean certain things in traditional textual environments. But we're on the web and awful lot of "support" is tied up in the idea of hyperlinks to supporting sources, and the particular ways that page authors tie claims to resources. This seems obvious, I suppose, but remember that in evaluating the gun control claim in the Stanford study, over half the students didn't even click the link to the supporting resource. Many corporations, for business reasons, have been downplaying links, and it is is having bad effects. True digital literacy would teach students that links are still the mechanism through which the web builds trust and confidence.

Above all, I just want something that gets to a level of specificity that I seldom see digital literacy programs get to. Not just "this is what you should value", but rather, "these are the tools and specific facts that are going to help you act on those values". Not just "this is what the web is", but "let's pull apart the guts of the web and see how we get a reliable publication date". It's by learning this stuff on a granular level that we form the larger understandings - when you know the difference between a fake news site and an advocacy blog, or understand how to use the Wayback Machine to pull up a deleted web page - these tools and process raise the questions that larger theories can answer.

But to get there, you have to start with stuff a lot more specific and domain-informed than the usual CRAAP.
(How's that for an ending? If anyone wants a version of this for another publication or keynote, let me know - we need to be raising these questions, and that means talking to lots of people)

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One of the problems I've had for a while with traditional digital literacy programs is that they tend to see digital literacy as a separable skill from domain knowledge. In the metaphor of most educators, there's a set of digital or information literacy skills, which is sort of like the factory process.

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2016 Lie of the year: Fake news (Article)

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2016 Lie of the year: Fake news (Article)

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Ignoring the facts has long been a staple of political speech. Every day, politicians overstate some statistic, distort their opponents' positions, or simply tell out-and-out whoppers. Surrogates and pundits spread the spin.

Then there's fake news, the phenomenon that is now sweeping, well, the news. Fake news is made-up stuff, masterfully manipulated to look like credible journalistic reports that are easily spread online to large audiences willing to believe the fictions and spread the word.

In 2016, the prevalence of political fact abuse - promulgated by the words of two polarizing presidential candidates and their passionate supporters - gave rise to a spreading of fake news with unprecedented impunity.

Fake news: Hillary Clinton is running a child sex ring out of a pizza shop.

Fake news: Democrats want to impose Islamic law in Florida.

Fake news: Thousands of people at a Donald Trump rally in Manhattan chanted, "We hate Muslims, we hate blacks, we want our great country back."

None of those stories - and there are so many more like them - is remotely true.

Fake news found a willing enabler in Trump, who at times uttered outrageous falsehoods and legitimized made-up reports. Clinton emboldened her detractors and turned off undecideds with a lawyerly parsing of facts that left many feeling that she was lying. Her enemies ran wild.

Each year, PolitiFact awards a "Lie of the Year" to take stock of a misrepresentation that arguably beats all others in its impact or ridiculousness. In 2016: where to start? With such a deep backlash against being truthful in political speech, no one person (though there are world-class frontrunners) and no one political claim perfectly stands out as the dust settles from an extraordinary campaign.

Because of its powerful symbolism in an election year filled with rampant and outrageous lying -- PolitiFact is naming Fake News the 2016 "winner."

Oxford Dictionaries selected " post-truth" as its word of the year and defined it as the state of affairs when "objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief."

Fake news is the boldest sign of a post-truth society. When we can't agree on basic facts -- or even that there are such things as facts -- how do we talk to each other?

It's a media ecosystem where "everything is true and nothing is true," said President Barack Obama in an postelection interview with the New Yorker. "And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal - that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation," he said.

For those who care about accuracy and evidence, it's time to recognize that something really has gone off course.
What made 2016 different
Bad information has always lived online. Before fake news, there were electronic message boards where people shared conspiracy theories and emails instructing you to FORWARD THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW!!! Before the computer, there were anonymous pamphlets and chain letters sent through the mail.

But in 2016, most viral lies spread on Facebook. They were reinforced by Google searches, in which stories from dubious sites jumped to the top of your screen based on traffic.

Bad actors would create fictitious Web pages that people couldn't resist sharing: claims that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump, or that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS, or that she helped fund ISIS. (None of those things is true.)

The popular website BuzzFeed analyzed the interest in these fake stories and found that they got more shares, reactions and comments during the final three months of the campaign than real stories from the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN, for example.

Craig Silverman, a Toronto-based journalist with a long track record of reporting on misinformation and media errors, headed up BuzzFeed's analysis of fake news on Facebook during the 2016 election.

"Conspiracy theories, hoaxes, anonymous messaging ... these things have always been around and circulating," said Silverman, now BuzzFeed's media editor. "But Facebook is a game changer because of its size."

With 1.79 billion people around the world using Facebook each month, Facebook dwarfs other online platforms. Hoping to encourage people to be better informed, Facebook after the 2012 election introduced new tools explicitly aimed at helping users read news and share stories. Ironically, Facebook's technology and good intentions fueled the rise of fake news in 2016.

Creators of fake news found that they could capture so much interest that they could make money off fake news through automated advertising that rewards high traffic to their sites. A man running a string of fake news sites from the Los Angeles suburbs told NPR he made between $10,000 and $30,000 a month. A computer science student in the former Soviet republic of Georgia told the New York Times that creating a new website and filling it with both real stories and fake news that flattered Trump was a "gold mine."

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, said the fake news problem on the site has been overblown. "There have been claims that it swayed the election, and we don't think it swayed the election,'' she said on the show recently. "But we take that responsibility really seriously. And we're looking at things, like working with third parties, helping to label false news, doing the things we can do to make it clearer what's a hoax on Facebook."
Well-wishers left flowers and notes outside Comet Ping Pong, the pizza restaurant in Washington that was the target of fake news stories linking it to a child sex trafficking ring. (AP)​Tracking and checking fake news
Fake news swims in the same electronic currents as everyday exaggerations, hard-charging opinion and political hyperbole. That makes it seem normal, even when it's just crazy, made-up stories that develop under the radar before blowing up into viral memes.

Take, for example, the rumor that Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, were running a child sex ring out of a pizza shop. BuzzFeed reported that the rumor seemed to start from a Twitter account associated with white supremacy.

From there, users on the online forums 4chan and Reddit argued (perhaps facetiously) that evidence for the theory was to be found in Podesta's stolen emails, which WikiLeaks had posted on the Internet weeks before. Podesta's repeated use of the word "pizza" in his email was a code word for pedophilia, they theorized, and Comet Ping Pong housed secret rooms to imprison children. Fake news sites, such as YourNewsWire.com, tap-news.com and USA Newsflash, turned the story into Facebook posts that earned roughly 100,000 interactions per post.

Other fake news had less convoluted origins. Paul Horner runs a string of websites, some looking deceptively like mainstream news organizations. He created a post that said protesters at Trump rallies were paid $3,500 to disrupt the rally as a dirty tricks plot. He told the Washington Post he knew it wasn't true but wrote it as a parody that could make him money if people actually believed it. "I just wanted to make fun of that insane belief, but it took off," he said.

What happened next is classic: Trump himself repeated the claim about paid protesters at a rally.

In fact, all campaign long - and since the election - people of stature and education have repeated fake stories. Trump's nominee for national security adviser, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, repeated the false claim that Florida Democratic senators voted to impose Islamic Sharia law in the Sunshine State ( Pants on Fire). Flynn's son, who had a role on the transition team, repeated the Clinton "pizzagate" rumor.

So you can only blame the Internet to a point.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speak during the second presidential debate at Washington University in St. Louis on Oct. 9, 2016. (New York Times)The 2016 election, a bridge to fake news
The PolitiFact staff debated a number of other specific claims as possible lies of the year. (Our annual poll of readers showed they were sick of the whole election. Readers voted the 2016 election itself as the biggest falsehood of the year.)

We considered Clinton's defensive statements about her emails. She said she "never received nor sent any material that was marked classified" on her private email server while secretary of state. That was False; some classified material did end up there.

She said that FBI director James "Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I've said is consistent with what I have told the American people." Pants on Fire. Comey called her actions careless and was careful not to endorse her comments.

As for Trump, who took Lie of the Year honors in 2015 for his body of work, there were many possibilities. Since the Tampa Bay Times started PolitiFact in 2007, no other major politician has a worse record for accuracy, with more than 70 percent of his claims rated Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire.

This year's unfounded Trump claims included:

That he opposed the war in Iraq before it started. This is False, even though he made the claim again and again.

That widespread voter fraud is happening in the United States. This is Pants on Fire; both Democratic and Republican election officials say it's not true. Trump said it during the election when he was down in the polls, and he said it after he won, too.

That Ted Cruz's father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy: Pants on Fire. Trump seems to have gotten this one from a report in the supermarket tabloid the National Enquirer.

On Election Day, when asked if Trump was honest and trustworthy, 64 percent of voters said no, according to exit polls. But when asked if Clinton was honest and trustworthy, voters were almost equally dubious; 61 percent said no.

Clinton's PolitiFact scorecard reflected much more accuracy than Trump's, but her detractors saw it more as calculation than candor.

"There was a large part of the Democratic primary electorate who had concerns about the secretary's veracity and forthrightness," said Jeff Weaver, Bernie Sanders' campaign manager, once the election was over.

Trump won thanks to the voters who said he was the better candidate to bring about change.

"This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally," said former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski at a postelection forum. "The American people didn't. They understood it. They understood that sometimes - when you have a conversation with people, whether it's around the dinner table or at a bar - you're going to say things, and sometimes you don't have all the facts to back it up."

Or put another way (with apologies to Billy Joel), to some voters, even when Trump may be wrong, he may be right.
We can't handle the truth
Throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump was blasted for his falsehoods. But buoyed by those who saw him as more authentic than choreographed pols, he took a bold approach to truthfulness - essentially saying: Catch me if you can - and even if you do, it doesn't matter.

That's a dangerous state for fact-checkers -- and a free society -- to be in, said Jacob T. Levy, a libertarian and political scientist at McGill University.

"The fact-checking model presumes that all audiences are equally interested in the truth and all politicians are concerned about being caught lying. But 2016 exploded that," he said. "Trump exposed a way in which it can't work, which is when you overwhelm the system with a repeated refusal to be embarrassed about saying things are not true. That suggests something new and dangerous."

In the weeks since the election, a public conversation has emerged about post-truth politics, specifically how to encourage truth and bat down falsehoods.

"What we need to do is to figure out a way to deploy the weapons of truth as effectively as other people are deploying the weapons of dissembling," said Politico senior political correspondent Glenn Thrush on a recent episode of the Diane Rehm Show.

While Trump garners much support with his party, some conservatives say he needs to be confronted on his falsehoods, because they lead to authoritarianism. People who are credulous enough to believe fake news will also believe and follow elected officials who lie.

Evan McMullin of Utah, a former CIA officer, ran for president as a conservative independent alternative to Trump and has been warning fellow conservatives to support factual accuracy as a means of resisting government coercion.

McMullin listed on Twitter 10 ways average Americans can resist authoritarianism, including following many credible sources of news. "Be very well-informed and learn to discern truth from untruth," he said.

Brendan Nyhan, a professor at Dartmouth College who studies fact-checking, said that studies show people are willing to update some of their beliefs if presented with contradictory information. Fact-checkers and people who care about democratic governance have to keep asserting the importance of accurate information, even as the media figures out new ways to tell the truth in more compelling ways.

"There's a real darkness here if we give up on facts," Nyhan said. "Standing up for facts is a kind of patriotic act, and a necessary one."
Sign up for the PolitiFact email newsletter at bit.ly/politifactemail.

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PolitiFact - 2016 Lie of the Year: Fake news

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Ignoring the facts has long been a staple of political speech. Every day, politicians overstate some statistic, distort their opponents' positions, or simply tell out-and-out whoppers. Surrogates and pundits spread the spin. Then there's fake news, the phenomenon that is now sweeping, well, the news.

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Information literacy and fake news (Article + resources)

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Information literacy and fake news (Article + resources)

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ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Candice Benjes-Small, Head of Information Literacy and Faculty Outreach, and Scott Dunn, Associate Professor of Communication, at Radford University.
One day in September, a relative emailed me a link and asked, "Should I share this on Facebook?" I took a look at the linked article, which had an extremely loaded-language headline and made some brutal accusations about one of the presidential candidates. I didn't recognize the news source hosting the article, and none of the more mainstream news sites mentioned the story. I visited my go-to fact checkers, like PolitiFact and Snopes, but found nothing about the article topic or the site. I told my relative that I couldn't verify anything in the story or the site, so I recommended she not share it further through social media.

I didn't know it at the time, but this was my first real engagement with what came to be called "fake news." Since the election, much has been written about this phenomena, with Politifact calling it the 2016 Lie of the Year. Librarians have pointed out that acceptance of fake news shows a weakness of information literacy skills, and have published suggestions on how libraries can counteract fake news here and here (to name just a few). The Stanford study has added fuel to the discussion, suggesting university students have very weak evaluation skills.

Of course, as just about any instruction librarian will tell you, source evaluation is a complex skill. As Mike Caulfield so eloquently argues in his piece, Yes, Digital Literacy. But Which One?, an information seeker needs a certain amount of subject expertise to truly judge whether a source on the topic is credible. And in this NSFW article, Chuck Wendig explores some of the problems of convincing people to read an article that goes against their worldview with an open mind.

But as an instruction librarian, I'm not ready to throw in the towel. Our students are going to read fake news, and I think we can encourage them to approach sources critically. As I posted to the ILI-Listserv in September 2016:
We have a solid lesson plan for evaluating Web sites but I'm looking for one that focuses on news sites. For example, there were a lot of conflicting reports about what actually happened during Trump's visit to Flint last week. How could the average person figure out which story to trust? What can we teach in a one-shot that would help students to evaluate the media?... My ideal lesson plan could be taught to freshmen in a 50-minute workshop, would be very hands-on, and would not leave them thinking, "All media are biased, therefore you can't trust any of them."
I discussed my quest with a few colleagues. My conversation with Dr. Scott Dunn, professor of communication, was the one that gave me the most traction. Scott's research interests include politics and mass media, so he had been watching the fake news about the presidential election with interest. He understood my concerns that common suggestions for evaluating sources often centered on superficial characteristics, such as whether the site looked professional, or used criteria which were not as appropriate for news sites, like the URL's top-level domain name (.com, .edu, .org). I proposed that readers needed to analyze the content of the stories themselves and look for hallmarks of quality, but I wasn't sure what those might be, or what would be realistic to expect from your average, non-expert reader.

We first grappled with a definition for "fake news." While it initially seemed to mean hyperpartisan stories, did it also include intentionally fake ones, like the satirical Onion? What about stories that turned out to be false, such as The Washington Post's (now corrected) story about Russians hacking into the electric grid? More recently, people have begun using the phrase "fake news" whenever a story doesn't fit their world view. As Margaret Sullivan wrote in her piece, It's time to retire the tainted term fake news, "Faster than you could say 'Pizzagate,' the label has been co-opted to mean any number of completely different things: Liberal claptrap. Or opinion from left-of-center. Or simply anything in the realm of news that the observer doesn't like to hear."

Rather than focus on identifying fake news, then, we decided it made more sense to teach students how to recognize good journalism. This dovetailed well with my initial instinct to focus on the quality of the content. Scott and I, with some help from the Stony Brook University's Center for News Literacy, developed these tips:

1. Avoid judgments based solely on the source. Immediately following the election, there were numerous attempts to quantify which sites were trustworthy, such as Melissa Zimdars' False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical "News" Sources and infographics that attempted to showcase media outlets' biases. The methodology used to classify sources is often opaque, and it's impossible for anyone to keep up with all the Websites purporting to be news. Many sites may also have a range of credibility. Buzzfeed has published some strong political pieces, but it also pushes listicles and silly quizzes, making it hard to say it's always an authoritative source.

2. Refer to the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics. While it is written for journalists, many of the principles are ones a reader can identify in a story, such as whether the author seemed to verify facts; took care not to oversimplify or sensationalize a story, even in its headline; and explained why anonymous sources needed to be unnamed.

3. Differentiate between perspective and bias. Having and writing from a point of view is not the same as cherry picking your facts and twisting a story unfairly. We should be able to read something that doesn't fit our own world view with an open mind, and not automatically reject it as "biased." We should also help learners understand the difference between editorials and commentaries, which are intended to be argumentative and express strong opinions, and news stories, which should not. Good news journalism will not mix the two.

4. Find the original source of the story. Many sites will harvest news stories and then repackage them without any additional research or reporting. Like a game of telephone, the farther away you get from the original report, the more mangled and corrupted the story becomes. Often the original story will be linked, so you can just click to access it. Encourage students to read this story, rather than relying on the secondary telling.

5. Check your passion. If a story incites you, it may be too good or too outrageous to be true. For example, the pope did not endorse Trump OR Bernie Sanders. These stories can be created by satirical sites and then picked up by other outlets, which treat them as straight news; or they can emerge from the darker Web, feeding conspiracy theories like Pizzagate. Fact checking is essential for readers of these stories, using all of the above best practices.

Now how could I put all of this into a one-shot? In addition to my online research, I talked through my (somewhat stream of consciousness) thoughts with the other members of the library instruction team, who provided strong feedback and guidance. I collaborated with my colleague, Alyssa Archer, who brought her experience with critical pedagogy to the final lesson plan. All that was left for us to try teaching it! I'm pleased to share that Alyssa and I taught the class multiple times in the fall, and have shared the resulting lesson plan, Evaluating news sites: Credible or clickbait? on Project CORA. We weren't able to include all of the tips, but we continue to discuss how to incorporate them in future workshops.

I feel like the "fake news" phenomena is one that just keeps morphing and growing. I could probably write a whole lot more about this but I'm more interested in hearing what you think. How do you think information literacy can counteract the post-fact narratives- if it can at all? What tools and techniques do you recommend?

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ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Candice Benjes-Small, Head of Information Literacy and Faculty Outreach, and Scott Dunn, Associate Professor of Communication, at Radford University. One day in September, a relative emailed me a link and asked, "Should I share this on Facebook?"

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ISTE Standards for students (Curricular resource)

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ISTE Standards for students (Curricular resource)

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The ISTE Student Standards guide educators toward student-driven learning practices that prepare students to thrive in an evolving technological landscape.

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

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

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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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Stanford researchers find students have trouble judging the credibility of information online (Article)

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Stanford researchers find students have trouble judging the credibility of information online (Article)

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Stanford researchers find students have trouble judging the credibility of information online

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Education scholars say youth are duped by sponsored content and don’t always recognize political bias of social messages.

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NCTE Framework for 21st century curriculum and assessment (Curricular resource)

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NCTE Framework for 21st century curriculum and assessment (Curricular resource)

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Please share your insights using this FlipGrid!!!

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Please share your insights using this FlipGrid!!!

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Click on the image below and please respond to the video prompt!

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Web literacy for student fact-checkers (Resource)

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Web literacy for student fact-checkers (Resource)

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Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers - Simple Book Production

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Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers by Michael A. Caulfield is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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Kathy Schrock's Guide to evaluating sources (Resource)

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Kathy Schrock's Guide to evaluating sources (Resource)

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Critical evaluation forms and information

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"Fake News: Why We Fall For It (Article)

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"Fake News: Why We Fall For It (Article)

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I think of myself as a relatively intelligent person, and yet, like many, I fell for this meme when it turned up in social media. The iconic image of the conspiracy theorist used to be a loner holed up in a cabin in the woods or in his mother's basement. In isolation, he could construct his theories drawing connections between unrelated events without the benefit of a challenging questioner.

Ironically, we create similar insular worlds through our use of social media. We seek out like-minded people to share ideas that confirm biases we may not even be aware we have.

Two common phenomena contribute to our inability to catch on to our biases, making us prey to fake news: implicit bias and confirmation bias.
Implicit Bias
Implicit bias refers to the idea that as humans we have a tendency to group people into categories. We are inclined to trust people we consider a member of our own group more than those of a different group. The word implicit indicates that it is a bias that influences us without our knowing it.

As a liberal, I identify with other liberals. I received this bit of fake news from a member of my own group, which led me to trust it. Also, as a liberal, I have an implicit bias regarding Republicans. It wasn't a leap to imagine that Donald Trump was using his purported belief in Republican's gullibility to gain power. Who has egg on his face now?

As we all have groups that we belong to, we all have implicit biases. This is one of the reasons why we need others to help call us out, especially members of groups to which we don't belong. They are more likely to perceive our biases.
Confirmation Bias
I was also susceptible to this piece of fake news because it confirmed what I already thought, my confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias refers to our tendency to seek out information that confirms what we already know or believe to be true. We are likely to believe "facts" that conform to our beliefs. More startling, we may actually turn a blind eye to facts that contradict our beliefs. We usually think of seeing as believing, but in this case, we don't see what we don't already believe.

I always believed that Donald Trump was in the Presidential race for his own gain. Also, he didn't seem to be ideologically wedded to either party. He had been a campaign contributor to both over the years. So, when I saw this meme I didn't even question that it could not be real. I overlooked the fact that the photograph depicts him 10 years younger than the date stated and that publishing such a statement would be obviously counterproductive for a Presidential bid. It simply confirmed what I already thought, and I bought it.
A Lethal Combination
When implicit biases and confirmation biases work together, their potential to lead us astray increases exponentially. As our implicit bias leads us to trust and view more positively those of our own group, we become more insulated, only hearing from people of our own group. As those of our own group share our beliefs, they share "facts" that confirm our beliefs. It is a feedback loop, and we end up living in a bubble.
Enter Social Media
Social media works on these biases like steroids, making us susceptible to being seduced into alternative realities constructed by conspiracy theorists. Online we tend to associate with the people who have the same political leanings as we do. This is our implicit bias at work. When our "friends" send us fake news articles that conform to what we already believe, reflecting our confirmation bias, we are likely to buy the "information" wholesale. Moreover, audience optimization in sites like Facebook, ensures that we are fed the news we tend to read, this news further confirms our biases.

Pizzagate is another good example. Negative beliefs about the Democrats led some Republicans to believe a fake news story about a child sex ring being run out of a pizza restaurant with ties to the Democratic Party. One person was so persuaded and outraged, he showed up with a rifle to investigate.

We no longer need to be holed up in a log cabin or socially isolated. We can live in the biggest city in the country, and as long as we keep our faces buried in our smart phones, we will feel connected to the group we belong to and read the information we want to believe. And we will be sitting ducks for anyone who wants to feed us fake news!

We owe it to ourselves to be receptive to people from different groups and with different ideas. They can help us question our assumptions. Sometimes we need a reality check, most often when we don't even know it.

When sharing "news" on social media, a good rule of thumb is to check it out before you share it. Here are some guidelines from the Huffington Post.

David Braucher, L.C.S.W, Ph.D., is a graduate of The William Alanson White Institute. He is on the Editorial Board of the journal, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and Associate Editor of the blog, Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Action. He has lectured at the NYU School of Social Work and written on relationships. He is in private practice in The West Village/Chelsea in Manhattan. Visit his webpage: www.drbraucher.com.

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I think of myself as a relatively intelligent person, and yet, like many, I fell for this meme when it turned up in social media. The iconic image of the conspiracy theorist used to be a loner holed up in a cabin in the woods or in his mother's basement.

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You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you (Comic)

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You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you (Comic)

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You're not going to believe what I'm about to tell you (classroom-friendly version) - The Oatmeal

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This is a classroom-friendly (no cuss words) comic about the backfire effect.

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Why facts don't change our minds (Article)

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Why facts don't change our minds (Article)

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Among the many, many issues our forebears didn't worry about were the deterrent effects of capital punishment and the ideal attributes of a firefighter. Nor did they have to contend with fabricated studies, or fake news, or Twitter. It's no wonder, then, that today reason often seems to fail us. As Mercier and Sperber write, "This is one of many cases in which the environment changed too quickly for natural selection to catch up."

Steven Sloman, a professor at Brown, and Philip Fernbach, a professor at the University of Colorado, are also cognitive scientists. They, too, believe sociability is the key to how the human mind functions or, perhaps more pertinently, malfunctions. They begin their book, "The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone" (Riverhead), with a look at toilets.

Virtually everyone in the United States, and indeed throughout the developed world, is familiar with toilets. A typical flush toilet has a ceramic bowl filled with water. When the handle is depressed, or the button pushed, the water-and everything that's been deposited in it-gets sucked into a pipe and from there into the sewage system. But how does this actually happen?

In a study conducted at Yale, graduate students were asked to rate their understanding of everyday devices, including toilets, zippers, and cylinder locks. They were then asked to write detailed, step-by-step explanations of how the devices work, and to rate their understanding again. Apparently, the effort revealed to the students their own ignorance, because their self-assessments dropped. (Toilets, it turns out, are more complicated than they appear.)

Sloman and Fernbach see this effect, which they call the "illusion of explanatory depth," just about everywhere. People believe that they know way more than they actually do. What allows us to persist in this belief is other people. In the case of my toilet, someone else designed it so that I can operate it easily. This is something humans are very good at. We've been relying on one another's expertise ever since we figured out how to hunt together, which was probably a key development in our evolutionary history. So well do we collaborate, Sloman and Fernbach argue, that we can hardly tell where our own understanding ends and others' begins.

"One implication of the naturalness with which we divide cognitive labor," they write, is that there's "no sharp boundary between one person's ideas and knowledge" and "those of other members" of the group.

This borderlessness, or, if you prefer, confusion, is also crucial to what we consider progress. As people invented new tools for new ways of living, they simultaneously created new realms of ignorance; if everyone had insisted on, say, mastering the principles of metalworking before picking up a knife, the Bronze Age wouldn't have amounted to much. When it comes to new technologies, incomplete understanding is empowering.

Where it gets us into trouble, according to Sloman and Fernbach, is in the political domain. It's one thing for me to flush a toilet without knowing how it operates, and another for me to favor (or oppose) an immigration ban without knowing what I'm talking about. Sloman and Fernbach cite a survey conducted in 2014, not long after Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. Respondents were asked how they thought the U.S. should react, and also whether they could identify Ukraine on a map. The farther off base they were about the geography, the more likely they were to favor military intervention. (Respondents were so unsure of Ukraine's location that the median guess was wrong by eighteen hundred miles, roughly the distance from Kiev to Madrid.)

Surveys on many other issues have yielded similarly dismaying results. "As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding," Sloman and Fernbach write. And here our dependence on other minds reinforces the problem. If your position on, say, the Affordable Care Act is baseless and I rely on it, then my opinion is also baseless. When I talk to Tom and he decides he agrees with me, his opinion is also baseless, but now that the three of us concur we feel that much more smug about our views. If we all now dismiss as unconvincing any information that contradicts our opinion, you get, well, the Trump Administration.

"This is how a community of knowledge can become dangerous," Sloman and Fernbach observe. The two have performed their own version of the toilet experiment, substituting public policy for household gadgets. In a study conducted in 2012, they asked people for their stance on questions like: Should there be a single-payer health-care system? Or merit-based pay for teachers? Participants were asked to rate their positions depending on how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the proposals. Next, they were instructed to explain, in as much detail as they could, the impacts of implementing each one. Most people at this point ran into trouble. Asked once again to rate their views, they ratcheted down the intensity, so that they either agreed or disagreed less vehemently.

Sloman and Fernbach see in this result a little candle for a dark world. If we-or our friends or the pundits on CNN-spent less time pontificating and more trying to work through the implications of policy proposals, we'd realize how clueless we are and moderate our views. This, they write, "may be the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people's attitudes."

One way to look at science is as a system that corrects for people's natural inclinations. In a well-run laboratory, there's no room for myside bias; the results have to be reproducible in other laboratories, by researchers who have no motive to confirm them. And this, it could be argued, is why the system has proved so successful. At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place.

In "Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us" (Oxford), Jack Gorman, a psychiatrist, and his daughter, Sara Gorman, a public-health specialist, probe the gap between what science tells us and what we tell ourselves. Their concern is with those persistent beliefs which are not just demonstrably false but also potentially deadly, like the conviction that vaccines are hazardous. Of course, what's hazardous is not being vaccinated; that's why vaccines were created in the first place. "Immunization is one of the triumphs of modern medicine," the Gormans note. But no matter how many scientific studies conclude that vaccines are safe, and that there's no link between immunizations and autism, anti-vaxxers remain unmoved. (They can now count on their side-sort of-Donald Trump, who has said that, although he and his wife had their son, Barron, vaccinated, they refused to do so on the timetable recommended by pediatricians.)

The Gormans, too, argue that ways of thinking that now seem self-destructive must at some point have been adaptive. And they, too, dedicate many pages to confirmation bias, which, they claim, has a physiological component. They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure-a rush of dopamine-when processing information that supports their beliefs. "It feels good to 'stick to our guns' even if we are wrong," they observe.

The Gormans don't just want to catalogue the ways we go wrong; they want to correct for them. There must be some way, they maintain, to convince people that vaccines are good for kids, and handguns are dangerous. (Another widespread but statistically insupportable belief they'd like to discredit is that owning a gun makes you safer.) But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn't seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. "The challenge that remains," they write toward the end of their book, "is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief."

"The Enigma of Reason," "The Knowledge Illusion," and "Denying to the Grave" were all written before the November election. And yet they anticipate Kellyanne Conway and the rise of "alternative facts." These days, it can feel as if the entire country has been given over to a vast psychological experiment being run either by no one or by Steve Bannon. Rational agents would be able to think their way to a solution. But, on this matter, the literature is not reassuring. ♦

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New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.

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C3 Framework for Social Studies State Standards (Curricular resource)

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C3 Framework for Social Studies State Standards (Curricular resource)

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Your filter bubble is destroying democracy (Article)

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Your filter bubble is destroying democracy (Article)

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On November 7, 2016, the day before the US election, I compared the number of social media followers, website performance, and Google search statistics of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. I was shocked when the data revealed the extent of Trump's popularity. He had more followers across all social platforms and his posts had much higher engagement rates. I noticed that the second most popular article shared on social media in the last six months with words "Donald Trump" in the headline, "Why I'm Voting For Donald Trump", had been shared 1.5 million times. Yet that story never made it into my Facebook newsfeed. I asked many of my liberal New York friends, and they all said they never seen it.

WIRED OPINION

About

Mostafa M. El-Bermawy (@mbermawy) is vice president of marketing at WorkZone, a project management software company in Philadelphia.

The global village that was once the internet was has been replaced by digital islands of isolation that are drifting further apart each day. From your Facebook feed to your Google Search, as your experience online grows increasingly personalized, the internet's islands keep getting more segregated and sound proofed. The internet that helped elect Barack Obama in 2008 and was used during Arab spring in 2011 is different from the internet that led to Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.

According to Pew Research, 61 percent of millennials use Facebook as their primary source for news about politics and government, but Facebook refuses to acknowledge its identity as a news source. Rather, it maintains its focus on boosting ad serving volume and engagement rates.

Our Facebook feeds are personalized based on past clicks and likes behavior, so we mostly consume political content that are similar to our views. Without realizing it, we develop tunnel vision. Rarely will our Facebook comfort zones expose us to opposing views, and as a result we eventually become victims to our own biases.

As a liberal New Yorker, a few months ago my Facebook feed was filled with #ImWithHer or #FeelTheBern content in addition to some 'Obama is the greatest' headlines, which I was happy to see. I engaged with the content, and I was siloed as a result. When we moved to the debates my feed turned into discussions of Trump scandals and why we should all be with her. I only saw articles from liberal media such as the New York Times and Washington Post. While I know it's important to be skeptical of the media, even a critical eye grows less keen the more it is ambushed with one-sided propaganda.

I'm convinced that Clinton was the better option, but I haven't seen enough content on my Facebook feed that seriously challenged my beliefs. I often find myself going out of my way to read sites like Fox News, which never appeared on my newsfeed even though it gets more than 65 million monthly visits and millions of social shares.

Our digital social existence has turned into a huge echo chamber, where we mostly discuss similar views with like-minded peers and miserably fail to penetrate other social bubbles that are often misled by fear and xenophobia. This is especially damaging because peer views and referrals are the strongest, most convincing form of marketing.

As a Muslim, an African Arab, and an immigrant, I will probably be among those most impacted by Trump's presidency, but I refuse to believe that half of America is racist. I think that many Trump voters would have re-thought their vote if they had heard the views of close friends who would be directly impacted by Trump policies. When Fox News tells me how awful a president Obama has been, it is different from my friend in Michigan who tells me how life under Obama has been getting worse and why he seeks change.

Facebook is not alone in this. Google also filters the search results based on your location and previous searches and clicks. The social bubbles that Facebook and Google have designed for us are shaping the reality of your America. We only see and hear what we like. Until the election results, a little more than half of us didn't realize that the other half of the country was frustrated enough to elect Trump. We all thought that Clinton would easily crush Trump this election, given how much crazy shit the guy has said. This includes polls by mathematicians who must have developed their biases somewhere.

Many real-life communities are already segregated by color, class, political, and cultural views. Facebook, Google and other networks are our online communities, and they are similarly segregated. We need to remind ourselves that there are humans on the other side of the screen who want to be heard and can think and feel like us while at the same time reaching different conclusions. The internet did a better job of fostering cross community conversation eight years ago when Obama was first elected. America was better off because of it.

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Your Filter Bubble is Destroying Democracy

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On November 7, 2016, the day before the US election, I compared the number of social media followers, website performance, and Google search statistics of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. I was shocked when the data revealed the extent of Trump's popularity. He had more followers across all social platforms and his posts had much higher engagement rates.

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Beware online "filter bubbles" (TED Talk)

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Beware online "filter bubbles" (TED Talk)

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As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there’s a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a “filter bubble” and don’t get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.