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Media Literacy - Skonberg’s AP Government

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10 Types of Mis And Disinformation Infographic

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10 Types of Mis And Disinformation Infographic

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Three Historical Examples of “Fake News”

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History is littered with examples where the the facts were altered to suit a specific purpose. Here are three instances where falsified public accounts were used to chart the course of history

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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.

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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.

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Lead Stories is a fact checking website that uses the Trendolizer™ engine to detect the latest trending misinformation and hoaxes found on known disinformation sites & networks, prank generators and satirical websites. We believe fact checking and speed are the best weapons in the fight agains…

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

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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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Video: Fake news wasn’t the biggest media problem of 2016

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Video: Fake news wasn’t the biggest media problem of 2016

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Fake news wasn’t the biggest media problem of 2016

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Video: Trevor Noah on fake news and Donald Trump (HARDtalk) - BBC News

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Video: Trevor Noah on fake news and Donald Trump (HARDtalk) - BBC News

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Trevor Noah on fake news and Donald Trump (HARDtalk) - BBC News

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The Long and Brutal History of Fake News

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The Long and Brutal History of Fake News

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The fake news hit Trent, Italy, on Easter Sunday, 1475. A 2 ½-year-old child named Simonino had gone missing, and a Franciscan preacher, Bernardino da Feltre, gave a series of sermons claiming that the Jewish community had murdered the child, drained his blood and drunk it to celebrate Passover. The rumors spread fast. Before long da Feltre was claiming that the boy's body had been found in the basement of a Jewish house. In response, the Prince-Bishop of Trent Johannes IV Hinderbach immediately ordered the city's entire Jewish communityarrested and tortured. Fifteen of them were found guilty and burned at the stake. The story inspired surrounding communities to commit similar atrocities.

Recognizing a false story, the papacy intervened and attempted to stop both the story and the murders. But Hinderbach refused to meet the papal legate, and feeling threatened, simply spread more fake news stories about Jews drinking the blood of Christian children. In the end, the popular fervor supporting these anti-semitic "blood libel" stories made it impossible for the papacy to interfere with Hinderbach, who had Simonino canonized-Saint Simon-and attributed to him a hundred miracles. Today, historians have catalogued the fake stories of child-murdering, blood-drinking Jews, which have existed since the 12th century as part of thefoundation of anti-Semitism. And yet, one anti-Semitic website still claims the story is true and Simon is still a martyred saint. Some fake news never dies.

Over the past few months, "fake news" has been on the loose once again. From bogus stories about Hillary Clinton's imminent indictment to myths about a postal worker in Ohio destroying absentee ballots cast for Donald Trump, colorful and damagingtales have begun to circulate rapidly and widely on Twitter and Facebook. In some cases they have had violent results: Earlier this month a man armed with an AR-15 fired a shot inside a Washington, D.C., restaurant, claiming to be investigating (fake) reports that Clinton aide John Podesta was heading up a child abuse ring there.

But amid all the media handwringing about fake news and how to deal with it, one fact seems to have gotten lost: Fake news is not a new phenomenon. It has been around since news became a concept 500 years ago with the invention of print-a lot longer, in fact, than verified, "objective" news, which emerged in forcea little more than a century ago. From the start, fake news has tended to be sensationalist and extreme, designed to inflame passions and prejudices. And it has often provoked violence. The Nazi propaganda machine relied on the same sorts of fake stories about ritual Jewish drinking of childrens' blood that inspired Prince-Bishop Hinderbach in the 15th century. Perhaps most dangerous is how terrifyingly persistent and powerful fake news has proved to be. As Pope Sixtus IV found out, wild fake stories with roots in popular prejudice often prove too much for responsible authorities to handle. With the decline of trusted news establishments around the country, who's to stop them today?

***

Fake news took off at the same time that news began to circulate widely, after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1439. "Real" news was hard to verify in that era. There were plenty of news sources-from official publications by political and religious authorities, to eyewitness accounts from sailors and merchants-but no concept of journalistic ethics or objectivity. Readers in search of fact had to pay close attention. In the 16th century, those who wanted real news believed that leaked secret government reports were reliable sources, such as Venetian government correspondence, known as relazioni. But it wasn't long before leaked original documents were soon followed by fake relazioni leaks. By the 17th century, historians began to play a role in verifying the news by publishing their sources as verifiable footnotes. The trial over Galileo's findings in 1610 also created a desire for scientifically verifiable news and helped create influential scholarly news sources.

But as printing expanded, so flowed fake news, from spectacular stories of sea monsters and witches to claims that sinners were responsible for natural disasters. The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 was one of the more complex news stories of all time, with the church and many European authorities blaming the natural disaster on divine retribution against sinners. An entire genre of fake news pamphlets ( relações de sucessos) emerged in Portugal, claiming that some survivors owed their lives to an apparition of the Virgin Mary. These religiously inspired accounts of the earthquake sparked the famed Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire to attack religious explanations of natural events, and also made Voltaire into an activist against fake religious news.

There was a lot of it in that era. When, in 1761, Marc-Antoine Calas, the 22-year-oldson of a respected Protestant merchant in Toulouse, apparently committed suicide, Catholic activists spread news stories that Calas' father, Jean, had killed him because he wanted to convert to Catholicism. The local judicial authorities posted signs calling for legal witnesses to corroborate the account, successfully turning rumors into official facts, and, in turn, official news.

Jean Calas was convicted on the rumor-fueled testimony and was publicly and gruesomely tortured before being executed. Horrified at the atrocity, Voltaire wrote his own counterattacks dissecting the absurdity that young Calas would have a full understanding of the meaning of conversion and that his peaceable father would hang him for it. The Calas story eventually sparked outrage against such fake legal stories, torture and even execution. It became a touchstone for the Enlightenment itself.

Yet even the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment could not stop the flow of fake news. For example, in the years preceding the French Revolution, a cascade of pamphlets appeared in Paris exposing for the first time the details of the near-bankrupt government's spectacular budget deficit. Each came from a separate political camp, and each contradicted the other with different numbers, blaming the deficit on different finance ministers. Eventually, through government leaks and more and more verifiable accounts, enough information was made public for readers to glean a general sense of state finance; but, like today, readers had to be both skeptical and skilled to figure out the truth.

Even our glorified Founders were perpetrators of fake news for political means. To whip up revolutionary fervor, Ben Franklin himself concocted propaganda stories about murderous "scalping" Indians working in league with the British King George III. Other revolutionary leaders published fake propaganda stories that King George was sending thousands of foreign soldiers to slaughter the American patriots and turn the tide of the War of Independence to get people to enlist and support the revolutionary cause.

By the 1800s, fake news was back again, swirling around questions of race. Like Jewish blood libel, American racial sentiments and fears were powerful in producing false stories. One persistent "cottage industry" of fake news in antebellum America was stories of African-Americans spontaneously turning white. In other instances, fake news reports of slave uprisings or of crimes by slaves, led to terrible violence against African-Americans.

Sensationalism always sold well. By the early19th century, modern newspapers came on the scene, touting scoops and exposés, but also fake stories to increase circulation. The New York Sun's "Great Moon Hoax" of 1835 claimed that there was an alien civilization on the moon, and established the Sun as a leading, profitable newspaper. In 1844, anti-Catholic newspapers in Philadelphia falsely claimed that Irishmen were stealing bibles from public schools, leading to violent riots and attacks on Catholic churches. During the Gilded Age, yellow journalism flourished, using fake interviews, false experts and bogus stories to spark sympathy and rage as desired. Joseph Pulitzer's New York World published exaggerated crime dramas to sell papers. In the 1890s, plutocrats like William Randolph Hearst and his Morning Journal used exaggeration to help spark the Spanish-American War. When Hearst's correspondent in Havanawired that there would be no war, Hearst-the inspiration for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane -famously responded: "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war." Hearst published fake drawings of Cuban officials strip-searching American women-and he got his war.

One silver lining in this long and alarming history of fake news is yellow journalism and its results-from civil violence to war-caused a backlash, and sent the public in search of more objective news. It was this flourishing market that sparked the rise of relatively objective journalism as an industry in turn-of-the century America. For the first time,American papers hired reporters to cover local beats and statehouses, building a chain of trust between local, state and national reporters and the public.

While partisan reporting and sensationalism never went away (just check out supermarket newsstands), objective journalism did become a successful business model-and also, until recently, the dominant one. In 1896, Adolph Ochs purchased the New York Times, looking to produce a "facts"-based newspaper that would be useful to the wealthy investor class by providing reliable business information and general news. Ochs showed that news did not have to be sensationalist to be profitable, though the paper was accused of being a mouthpiece for "bondholders."

Of course, the objective journalism consensus had its hiccups.With the advent of World War II, and in light of the Nazi and Communist propaganda machines, there was concern about the U.S. government's wartime involvement in producing news propaganda. In the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy was accused of manipulating reporters like "Pavlov's dogs," but a New Yorker article from the period insisted that reporters should report and not "tell readers which 'facts' are really 'facts' and which are not." By the 1960s, a new generation of reporters signed on to report on "non establishment" stories. Many of these reporters questioned the very ideal of objectivity, yet, nonetheless, hewed to the basic guiding principle of reporting based on verifiable and reputable sources.

***

It wasn't until the rise of web-generated news that our era's journalistic norms were seriously challenged, and fake news became a powerful force again. Digital news, you might say, has brought yellow journalism back to the fore. For one, algorithms that create news feeds and compilations have no regard for accuracy and objectivity. At the same time, the digital news trend has decimated the force-measured in both money and manpower-of the traditional, objectively minded, independent press.

The Pew Research Center's "State of the Media 2016" paints a grim picture for most serious news organizations. Advertising revenue is down; staffs continue to get cut; the number of newspapers has declined by 100 since 2004. Between 2003 and 2014, with the decline of the printed press, the number of professional statehouse reporters dropped 35 percent. Professional local beat reporters are also a dying breed. These figures, trained in basic journalistic principles, were locally known and trusted. They could be found in bars and local schools and acted as the human link between statehouses, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. population. They were seen as local heroes. (Jimmy Stewart often played truth-obsessed newspaper reporters in films, like the 1948 thriller Call Northside 777.) But today, these popular role models and societal links are gone, and with them, a trusted filter within civil society-the sort of filter that can say with authority to fellow local citizens that fake news is not only fake, it is also potentially deadly.

Real news is not coming back in any tangible way on a competitive local level, or as a driver of opinion in a world where the majority of the population does not rely on professionally reported news sources and so much news is filtered via social media, and by governments. And as real news recedes, fake news will grow. We've seen the terrifying results this has had in the past-and our biggest challenge will be tofind a new way to combat the rising tide.

This article tagged under:

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The Long and Brutal History of Fake News

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The fake news hit Trent, Italy, on Easter Sunday, 1475. A 2 ½-year-old child named Simonino had gone missing, and a Franciscan preacher, Bernardino da Feltre, gave a series of sermons claiming that the Jewish community had murdered the child, drained his blood and drunk it to celebrate Passover.

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Study: Most Students Cannot Distinguish Fake and Real News

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Study: Most Students Cannot Distinguish Fake and Real News

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Study: Most Students Cannot Distinguish Fake and Real News

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Project Look Sharp Media Bias and Credibility Lessons

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Project Look Sharp Media Bias and Credibility Lessons

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Today's students will grow up to be the leaders who are tasked with building sustainable, equitable societies in an interconnected and interdependent world. To prepare them, today's educators need to teach the concepts of sustainability and social justice in an era overloaded with often conflicting media messages. Equally important, we need to foster in our students the day-to-day civics skills and emotional intelligence that will make it possible for them to co-create a thriving future

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Today's students will grow up to be the leaders who are tasked with building sustainable, equitable societies in an interconnected and interdependent world. To prepare them, today's educators need to teach the concepts of sustainability and social justice in an era overloaded with often conflicting media messages.

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Experts now recommend avoiding the term 'fake news', or at least limit its use, as the term 'fake news' is closely associated with politics, and this association can unhelpfully narrow the focus of the issue. The term 'false information' is preferable as it can refer to a diverse range of misinformation and disinformation covering topics such as health, environmental and economics across all platforms and genres, while 'fake news' is more narrowly understood as political news stories.

What is False Information?

Lots of things you read online especially in your social media feeds may appear to be true, often is not. False information is news, stories or hoaxes created to deliberately misinform or deceive readers. Usually, these stories are created to either influence people's views, push a political agenda or cause confusion and can often be a profitable business for online publishers. False information can deceive people by looking like trusted websites or using similar names and web addresses to reputable news organisations.

According to Martina Chapman (Media Literacy Expert), there are three elements to fake news; 'Mistrust, misinformation and manipulation'.

The Rise of False Information

False information is not new, however it has become a hot topic since 2017. Traditionally we got our news from trusted sources, journalists and media outlets that are required to follow strict codes of practice. However, the internet has enabled a whole new way to publish, share and consume information and news with very little regulation or editorial standards.

Many people now get news from social media sites and networks and often it can be difficult to tell whether stories are credible or not. Information overload and a general lack of understanding about how the internet works by people has also contributed to an increase in fake news or hoax stories. Social media sites can play a big part in increasing the reach of these type of stories.

The economics of social media favour gossip, novelty, speed and "shareability"' Simeon Yates

Types of False Information

There are differing opinions when it comes to identifying types of false information. However, when it comes to evaluating content online there are various types of false or misleading news we need to be aware of. These include:

1. Clickbait

These are stories that are deliberately fabricated to gain more website visitors and increase advertising revenue for websites. Clickbait stories use sensationalist headlines to grab attention and drive click-throughs to the publisher website, normally at the expense of truth or accuracy.

2. Propaganda

Stories that are created to deliberately mislead audiences, promote a biased point of view or particular political cause or agenda.

3. Satire/Parody

Lots of websites and social media accounts publish fake news stories for entertainment and parody. For example; The Onion, Waterford Whispers, The Daily Mash, etc.

4. Sloppy Journalism

Sometimes reporters or journalists may publish a story with unreliable information or without checking all of the facts which can mislead audiences. For example, during the U.S. elections, fashion retailer Urban Outfitters published an Election Day Guide, the guide contained incorrect information telling voters that they needed a 'voter registration card'. This is not required by any state in the U.S. for voting.

5. Misleading Headings

Stories that are not completely false can be distorted using misleading or sensationalist headlines. These types of news can spread quickly on social media sites where only headlines and small snippets of the full article are displayed on audience newsfeeds.

6. Biased/Slanted News

Many people are drawn to news or stories that confirm their own beliefs or biases and fake news can prey on these biases. Social media news feeds tend to display news and articles that they think we will like based on our personalised searches.

7. Imposter Content

When genuine sources are impersonated with false, made-up sources. This is dangerous as it relates to information with no factual basis being presented in the style of a credible news source or article to make it look like a legitimate source.

8. Manipulated Content

When real information or imagery is manipulated to deceive, as with a doctored photo or video. This can be used to mislead people or create a false narrative about something or someone.

T he False Information Business Model

The internet and social media have made it very easy for anyone to publish content on a website, blog or social media profile and potentially reach large audiences. With so many people now getting news from social media sites, many content creators/publishers have used this to their advantage.

False information can be a profitable business, generating large sums of advertising revenue for publishers who create and publish stories that go viral. The more clicks a story gets, the more money online publishers make through advertising revenue and for many publishers social media is an ideal platform to share content and drive web traffic.

False Information, Social Media, and the Filter Bubble

In a recent article on media literacy, Hugh Linehan noted; "Media is no longer passively consumed - it's created, shared, liked, commented on, attacked and defended in all sorts of different ways by hundreds of millions of people. And the algorithms used by the most powerful tech companies - Google and Facebook in particular - are brilliantly designed to personalise and tailor these services to each user's profile."

When we go online or login to a social network we are generally presented with news, articles and content based on our own searches online. This type of content tends to reflect our own likes, views and beliefs and therefore isolating us from differing views and opinions. This is often referred to as a filter bubble.

What can we do about False Information?

Google and Facebook have announced new measures to tackle fake news with the introduction of reporting and flagging tools. Media organisations like the BBC and Channel 4 have also established fact checking sites While these are welcome developments, digital media literacy and developing skills to critically evaluate information are essential skills for anyone navigating the internet and especially for young people.

The vast amount of information available online and rise in fake news highlights the need for critical thinking. Children need to develop critical thinking from an early age. This is a key skill for young people to develop as they enter into third level education and prepare themselves for the workplace.

How to spot False Information?

Anyone can fall for false information online. There are a number of things to watch out for when evaluating content online.
1.Who is sharing the story?
Check if the the social media account sharing the post is verified. Most public figures and media outlets display a "blue badge or check mark" which means the account has been authenticated. This can mean the content of the post is more likely to be reliable, although not always.
2. Take a closer look
Check the source of the story, do you recognise the website? Is it a credible/reliable source? If you are unfamiliar with the site, look in the about section or find out more information about the author.

3. Look beyond the headline
Check the entire article, many fake news stories use sensationalist or shocking headlines to grab attention. Often the headlines of fake new stories are in all caps and use exclamation points.

4. Check other sources
Are other reputable news/media outlets reporting on the story? Are there any sources in the story? If so, check they are reliable or if they even exist!

5. Check the facts
Stories with false information often contain incorrect dates or altered timelines. It is also a good idea to check when the article was published, is it current or an old news story?

6. Check your biases
Are your own views or beliefs affecting your judgement of a news feature or report?

7. Is it a joke?
Satirical sites are popular online and sometimes it is not always clear whether a story is just a joke or parody... Check the website, is it known for satire or creating funny stories?

Useful Resources:

Be Media Smart - www.bemediasmart.ie #StopThinkCheck

Developed by Media Literacy Ireland, Be Media Smart offers useful tips and guidance on how to tell the difference between reliable and accurate information and or deliberately false or misleading information.

Media Literacy Ireland - www.medialiteracyireland.ie

Facilitated by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, MLI is a network of volunteer members coming from a large number of sectors, organisations and interests, working together to empower people to make informed media choices about the media content and services that they consume, create, and disseminate across all platforms. The MLI offers useful media literacy resources, research, and news.

Fact checking sites

Snopes: snopes.com/

PolitiFact: politifact.com

Fact Check: factcheck.org/

BBC Reality Check: bbc.com/news/reality-check

Channel 4 Fact Check: channel4.com/news/factcheck

Reverse image search from Google: google.com/reverse-image-search

Deep Fakes and Visual Deception

Deepfakes are fake videos created using digital software, machine learning and face swapping. Deepfakes are computer-created artificial videos in which images are combined to create new footage that depicts events, statements or action that never actually happened. The results can be quite convincing. Deep fakes differ from other forms of false information by being very difficult to identify as false.

Find out more in Explained: What Are Deepfakes?

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Explained: What is Fake news? | Social Media and Filter Bubbles

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Fake news is news or stories created to deliberately misinform or deceive readers. Fake news is often created to influence views or for political motives.

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Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Fake News

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Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Fake News

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Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication

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The Concerns Over Fake News

Fake news was named the word of the year in by the Collins Dictionary. In , the usage of the term had increased by 365% since (Collins Dictionary, 2017). The American presidential election in put the phenomenon on the international agenda. Websites with fabricated content gained massive attention, such as the story that falsely claimed that the Pope endorsed the republican candidate Donald Trump (Ritchie, 2016). Shortly after, President Donald Trump politicized the term and used it to discredit established media outlets. But even though the term seems fairly new, the phenomena it covers are old. Manipulation, disinformation, falseness, rumors, conspiracy theories-actions and behaviors which are frequently associated with the term-have existed as long as humans have communicated. The novelty of the term in this context relates to how false or misleading information is produced, distributed and consumed through digital communication technology. Additionally, new communication technologies have made it easier to manipulate the news format, thus simultaneously benefitting and undermining news media's credibility.

The challenges that lies, propaganda, and fake news represent for open societies have been recognized for several decades. In a column published for The Atlantic in , Walter Lippmann set out a comprehensive view of the problems that propaganda posed for modern Western society (Sproule, 1997, p. 12). Lippmann argued that the basic problem of democracy was to protect news-the source of public opinion-from the taint of propaganda, and no modern society lacking the wherewithal to detect lies could call itself free (Lippmann, 1922). Without reliable information, it will be hard for democracies to function. Fake news and disinformation are symbols of a larger societal problem: the manipulation of public opinion to affect the real world (Gu, Kropotov, & Yarochkin, 2017). But even though disinformation is a historic phenomenon, each new communication technology allows for new ways to manipulate and amplify disinformation to people and societies. Following novel digital communication technologies requires new ways to tackle the challenges compared to earlier communication technologies.

False information dressed as news has created serious concerns in many countries. Some researchers have called it information pollution (Wardle & Hossein, 2017), media manipulation (Warwick & Lewis, 2017), or information warfare (Khaldarova & Pantti, 2016). A common concern is a strong anxiety that false information is polluting the public sphere and damaging democracy. As argued by Warwick and Lewis, "media manipulation may contribute to decreased trust of mainstream media, increased misinformation, and further radicalization" (, p. 1). Even when disinformation has been revealed and debunked, it may continue to shape people's attitudes (Thorson, 2016).

Additionally, politicians and other powerful actors have appropriated the term to characterize media coverage they do not like. Most famously, the American President Donald Trump has numerous times labeled media outlets such as CNN or The New York Times as fake news. As reported by the New York Times, in countries where press freedom is restricted or under considerable threat-such as Russia, China, Turkey, Libya, Poland, Hungary, Thailand, Somalia and others-political leaders have invoked fake news as justification for beating back media scrutiny (Erlanger, 2017). By suggesting that news cannot be trusted and by labelling it fake news, politicians deliberately undermine trust in journalism and news outlets, one of the core institutions in democratic nations based on free speech and a free press.

The concerns over fake news are plentiful, and of necessity, this article is limited to describing research on fake news from a media perspective. Different types of media manipulation exist, and are studied within psychology, political communication, warfare, marketing, and information technology, to mention a few areas. For practical reasons, it has not been possible to cover them all here. Along the same lines, fake news addresses several specific issues within media and journalism studies, such as objectivity, bias, and journalistic authority, but this article will not engage extensively in these important and widespread debates here.

Previous research has identified different frameworks for studying fake news, some of which will be addressed in the following sections. These include categories such as types, elements and phases (Wardle & Hossein, 2017); process, product, and public (Westlund, 2017); and six types of fake news (Tandoc, Lim, & Ling, 2018). Building on the aforementioned frameworks, this article will examine four core terms in relation to fake news: How fake news has been characterized, created, circulated and countered.

Characterization: The Origin of the Term and Definition

The term fake news has roots back to the 1890s (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2018). For more than a century, it has been used to indicate falsehood printed as news. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary cites newspapers such as The Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, The Kearney Daily Hub, and The Buffalo Commercial that all used the term fake news in articles from and in connection with false information. But the phenomenon appeared even earlier, and historian Jacob Soll ( 2016) traces its origin back to Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in . He explains that as printing expanded, so did fake news, appearing as spectacular stories of sea monsters and witches or claims that sinners were responsible for natural disasters. All this began to spread after Gutenberg. "Real" news was hard to verify in that era, even though there were many news sources. The concept of journalistic ethics or objectivity was still not developed.

Fake stories have historically been produced to sell newspapers (e.g., The Great Moon Hoax about observation by astronomers of the bizarre life on the moon, published by The New York Sun, ), to entertain (e.g., The War of the Worlds, Orson Welles' radio adaptation in of H. G. Wells' drama from ), or to create fear and anger (e.g., the so-called "blood libel" story from Trent, Italy, which claimed that the Jewish community had murdered a two-and-a-half-year-old Christian boy, ) (Umberti, 2016).

These accounts give an indication of how the historic evolution of fake news is also related to the development of journalism as a profession, such as methods of verification and codes of ethics. They also indicate that fake news is not a new thing, neither as a term nor as a phenomenon. But the surge in the use of the term worldwide has created epistemological discussions of how digital disinformation dressed as news should be understood.

Even though the term has deep historical roots, newer definitions of fake news have been suggested in recent years to better reflect the challenges posed by new communication technologies. Recently, the term has been used to describe a wide range of disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation (Wardle & Hossein, 2017), ranging from lies, conspiracy theories, and propaganda to mistakes and entertainment. As stated by Marwick and Lewis, "fake news is a contested term, but generally refers to a wide range of disinformation and misinformation circulating online and in the media" (, p. 44). This section will outline three elements frequently found in the definitions of fake news: the news format (false information masqueraded as news), the degree of falsity (partly or completely false information), and the intention behind it (to mislead readers and users for political or economic purposes).

The existing definitions are preoccupied with the format, but the main concern with disinformation is the quality of the information, or rather lack thereof. The news format is just one of many ways to get false or misleading information to spread online. Nevertheless, the news format has been a recurring theme in the current definitions, such as here: fake news is false stories that appear to be news, spread on the Internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke (Cambridge Dictionary, 2018). Similarly, Allcott and Gentzkow have defined fake news as "news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers" (, p. 13). Tandoc, Lim, and Ling have examined the existing literature and identified six types of fake news described in the research literature, and two of them, news satire and news parody are particularly related to the news format. The four other types are news fabrication, photo manipulation, advertising and public relations, and propaganda (Tandoc, Lim, & Ling, 2018). News satire is described as mock news programs, which typically use humor or exaggeration to present audiences with news updates. Differing from a typical news broadcast, news satire promotes itself as delivering entertainment first and foremost, rather than information, and the hosts are calling themselves comedians, not journalists. The satire in the Daily Show with John Stewart and the (Stephen) Colbert Report, both American, is based on actual events, but the news format is fake.

Similar to news satire, news parody is mimicking news stories in humorous ways, but the main difference is that the news stories are entirely fictional, such as in the American mock news site The Onion. News parody and satire can serve as watchdogs, both of the political establishment, but also of news media. News parody and news satire are also similar in the sense that both the author and the reader or viewer share the joke.

Nevertheless, there are many problems with the term fake news, and one of them is the close connection to news as a format and as an independent institution. The European Union (EU) report from the independent High Level Expert Group on fake news and online disinformation suggests abandoning the term fake news altogether (HLEG, 2018). As the term is inadequate and misleading to explain the complexity of the situation, the report rather suggests using the term disinformation, which can be defined as "false, inaccurate, or misleading information designed, presented and promoted to intentionally cause public harm or for profit" (, p. 10). Disinformation is clearly a more precise term to use to discuss false or misleading information, without alluding to the news format or the institution of news. But in order to more correctly reflect how this phenomenon has been covered in the research literature, this article will use both the terms fake news and disinformation.

Continuing with the intention behind fake news, political or economic motives are often mentioned as typical intentions. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism defines fake news as "false information knowingly circulated with specific strategic intent-either political or commercial. Such content typically masquerades as legitimate news reports while trafficking in conspiracy theories or other matters laden with emotional appeals that confirm existing beliefs" (RISJ, 2017). Along the same line, Silverman describes fake news as "completely false information that was created for financial gain" (Silverman, 2016), such as sensational clickbait articles attempting to lure readers to click and share. But also advertising is mentioned in the research literature as a type of fake news. Advertising and public relations refers to how advertising materials in the guise of genuine news reports are published as news. Fake news in this form is defined as when public relations practitioners adopt the practices or appearance of journalists in order to insert marketing or other persuasive messages into news media (Nelson & Park, 2015), for example as native advertising. Native advertising looks like news articles, but is paid by a sponsor. The obscuration of its origins may mislead audiences into believing that the news produced is entirely free of bias. The clear emphasis on financial gain is a distinction with regard to public relations or advertising-related fake news versus other types of fake news. This content is often based on facts, albeit in an incomplete set, often concentrating on the positive aspects of the product or company being advertised and takes advantage of the legitimacy of the news format.

When news stories are created by a political entity to influence or mislead public perception, it is often described as propaganda. The overt purpose is to benefit a public figure, organization or government. There can be an overlap between propaganda and advertising. Similar to advertising, propaganda is often based on facts, but includes bias to promote a particular site or perspective. The goal is to persuade, rather than to inform, and, differing from advertising, the emphasis is not on financial gain, but on political influence, such as the Russian Channel One which is found to have published factually untrue news stories to influence public perception of Russia's actions (Khaldarov & Pantti, 2016).

Lastly, the degree of falsity or fakeness is included in the definition by Benkler, Faris, Roberts, and Zuckerman: "Rather than 'fake news' in the sense of wholly fabricated falsities, many of the most-shared stories can more accurately be understood as disinformation: the purposeful construction of true or partly true bits of information into a message that is, at its core, misleading" (, p. 2). News fabrication is an example of articles that have no factual basis but are published in the style of news articles to create legitimacy. It closely mimics legacy news, and the producer of the items often has the intention to deceive, either for political or financial reasons. Once the reader suspends credulity and accepts the legitimacy of the source, they are more likely to trust the item and not seek verification. This category has a similarity with news parody, except that the reader does not have the implicit agreement with the author that the "news" item is false. Similarly for visual content, photo manipulation of real images or videos creates a false narrative. Typically, fake news appearing in photo manipulations features pictures from one context used in another context, such as the circulation of manipulated photos that were circulated on Twitter during Hurricane Sandy, which hit the United States in . While the three previous categories referred to text-based items, this category describes visual news.

Building on these existing definitions, this article proposes to define fake news as "complete or partly false information, (often) appearing as news, and typically expressed as textual, visual or graphical content with an intention to mislead or confuse users." The facticity and the intention to deceive are often used in the research literature to differentiate between different types of disinformation types, here presented as a typology of fake news to summarize research on fake news from (Tandoc, Lim, & Ling, 2018, see also Hedman [ 2018] for a similar typology of fake news). (See Table 1.)

Table 1. Typology of Fake News

Source: Tandoc, Lim, and Ling ( 2018).

This attempt to classify different information types is useful, but not sufficient to properly address the concerns over fake news. For the rest of the article, the types of fake news related to misinformation-exemplified in the previous discussion as news satire and news parody where the inaccuracy is unintentional (Jack, 2017) or not created with the intention of causing harm (Wardle & Hossein, 2017; HLEG, 2018)-will not be further discussed.

Likewise, journalistic mistakes will neither be included in the ensuing description of fake news. Journalists do make mistakes, and news might occasionally be biased, exaggerated, inaccurate, and sensationalist. But journalistic errors are not fake news, they are mistakes, created without intention to mislead or harm. Furthermore, journalists make choices for what stories to write, which sources to interview, which angles to use-choices that might come across as controversial. As Schudson wrote "we didn't say journalists fake the news, we said journalists make the news" (, p. 263, my italic). News is a constructed reality possessing its own internal validity (Tuchman, 1976, p. 97), but at the same time, journalism is regulated by ethical codes of conduct, requiring journalists to seek the truth and report on it.

Thus, in the following discussion, this chapter will mainly focus on fake news understood as disinformation: "false, inaccurate, or misleading information designed, presented and promoted to intentionally cause public harm or for profit" (HLEG, 2018). The following section will address the creators of fake news.

Creation: The Production of Fake News

Identifying the creators of disinformation and fake news, as well as their motivation, has been a major concern in recent media reports and academic articles about the phenomenon. Often it can be unclear who has produced the disinformation, but actors ranging from governments, organizations, companies, and individuals have been identified as creators of fake news. Some push fake news to make money, others do it to spread their world views, while trolls do it for the fun of it. It has been suggested that understanding the motivation behind fake news is crucial to combat it. Identifying the motivation or intention behind the fake news production is thus of crucial importance. Typically, three main motivations have been identified: Political, financial, and social (Wardle & Hossein, 2017, p. 26; Warwick & Lewis, 2017, p. 27). In the following section, creators of fake news and different actors and their motivations will be characterized.

Political

A political or ideological motivation has been identified in heavily circulated fake news stories recently (Woolley & Guilbeault, 2017). Political disinformation is often called propaganda, and political actors who produce disinformation masqueraded as news intend to influence public perception, either on specific issues, individuals, or perceptions of the world. The Latin origin of propaganda is "to propagate" or "to sow," and the historic meaning of the word was fairly neutral-to disseminate or promote particular ideas (Jowett & O'Donnell, 2012). But the term lost its neutral meaning in when the Roman Catholic Church used the term to propagate the Catholic faith and oppose Protestantism. Propaganda is defined as "the deliberate, systemic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist" (Jowett & O'Donnell, 2012, p. 7), and propaganda can thus be understood as a deliberate attempt to alter or maintain a power balance, advantageous to the propagandist. To identify a message as propaganda is to suggest something negative and dishonest, and synonyms to the word propaganda are therefore lies, distortion, deceit, manipulation, mind control, psychological warfare, and brainwashing (Jowett & O'Donnell, 2012).

Political propaganda can also be called strategic narratives, which can be seen as a tool for political actors to articulate a position on a specific issue and to shape perceptions and actions (Roselle, Miskimmon, & O'Loughlin, 2014). Information operations is a similar term used by Facebook to describe actions taken by organized actors to distort domestic or foreign political sentiment, most frequently to achieve a strategic and/or geopolitical outcome (Weedon, Nuland, & Stamos, 2017). These operations can use a combination of methods, according to Facebook, such as false news, disinformation, or networks of fake accounts aimed at manipulating public opinion.

Russia and China have been described as particularly active governmental actors producing and spreading political disinformation (Wardle & Hossein, 2017; Khaldarova & Pantti, 2016; Soldatov & Borogan, 2015). But these are not the only governmental actors applying fake news and disinformation. The use of fake news, automated bot accounts, and other manipulation methods gained particular attention in the United States in , but manipulation and disinformation tactics played an important role in elections in at least 17 other countries over the past year, among them Venezuela, the Philippines and Turkey, according to the Freedom of the Net report (). But also European countries are applying digital operations to influence perception or persuade specific individuals. In the United Kingdom, cyber troops have been known to create and upload YouTube videos that "contain persuasive messages" under online aliases, and this content creation amounts to more than just a comment on a blog or social media feed, but instead includes the creation of content such as blog posts, YouTube videos, fake news stories, pictures, or memes that help promote the government's political agenda (Benedictus, 2016; Bradshaw & Howard, 2017). In an American study about fake news' agenda-setting power, Vargo, Guo, and Amazeen found that partisan media are intricately entwined with fake news (). During the three years studied (), partisan media seemed particularly attentive to fake news coverage on topics such as border issues, international relations, and religion (Vargo, Guo, & Amazeen, 2017, p. 16). Political disinformation is of huge concern due to the challenges it poses for societies. New sophisticated technologies to produce and distribute political disinformation make it harder to detect and combat the manipulations, both for journalists, fact checkers, and citizens, but also for civil society and established democratic institutions.

The Freedom of the Net report found that the number of governments attempting to control online discussions in this manner has risen each year since Freedom House began systematically tracking the phenomenon in . But over the last few years, the practice has become significantly more widespread and technically sophisticated, with "bots, propaganda producers, and fake news outlets exploiting social media and search algorithms to ensure high visibility and seamless integration with trusted content" (Kelly, 2017, p. 4).

The European Union considers the Russian disinformation efforts so aggressive that they created a website in , EU vs. Disinformation, "to better forecast, address and respond to pro-Kremlin disinformation" (EU vs. Disinfo, 2018). The EU has expressed clear concerns about increasing disinformation and propaganda activities from Russia, where the purpose is to maintain or increase Russia's influence to weaken and split the EU. Similarly, the Ukrainian crowdsourcing site StopFake was launched in to fight disinformation emanating from Russian media and other actors on the Internet (Khaldarov & Pantti, 2016). Often, intermediaries operate on behalf of governmental actors, as in the case of the Russian television channel, Channel One, which is known as a proxy for Russian strategic narrative (Khaldarov & Pantti, 2016, p. 293). Political disinformation efforts like these are typically used to sow mistrust and confusion about what sources of information are authentic, making people confused about what and whom to believe in. In the long run it can diminish trust in central institutions, such as news media.

Financial

Fake news produced for financial gain might seem like a relative new dimension of disinformation (Tandoc Jr., Lim, & Ling, 2018), but it has historic similarities with what is called yellow journalism. Yellow journalism is often associated with misconduct of newsgathering (Campbell, 2001), and the term is used to describe the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. Both papers were accused by critics of sensationalizing the news, to create war hysteria and stimulate morbid curiosity in murders, seductions, drunkenness, and immorality in order to drive up circulation (Campbell, 2001, p. 40). False, sensationalist content is creating attention and curiosity in the as well, but this time measured through web traffic and social shares.

One of the most infamous recent examples of fake news produced for financial gain involves the teenagers from a town in Veles, Macedonia, who churned out sensationalist stories about the American presidential candidates in to earn cash from advertising (Kirby, 2016; Subramanian, 2017). They were seeking money rather than political influence, and figured out that publishing pro-Trump content generated more advertising revenue than pro-Clinton content (Warwick & Lewis, 2017, p. 31). This observation was confirmed in a study of the most shared news stories during the same election campaign, which showed that false stories, outperformed real news stories on Facebook, indeed three of the most shared false election stories were overtly pro-Donald Trump or anti-Hillary Clinton (Silverman, 2016). Creators of fake news motivated by financial opportunities have diverse backgrounds and are ranging from the teenagers in Macedonia, start-ups in the Philippines, a 38-year man old from Arizona, and Russian troll armies, to mention a few (Caron, 2017; Hern, Duncan, & Bengtsson, 2017).

Factually inaccurate, often deceptive content produced by people seeking money is also encouraged by the algorithms on social media platforms. A post with many likes, shares, or comments is more likely to be further liked, shared, and commented on, as popularity on social media is a self-fulfilling cycle, one that lends well to the propagation of unverified information (Tandoc, Lim, & Ling, 2018; Thorson, 2016). Facebook is in the business of letting people share things they are interested in, and their business model relies on people clicking, sharing, and engaging with content-regardless of veracity (Solon, 2016).

Social

Social needs might also be motivations for producing fake news and disinformation, such as status, attention, identity building, or entertainment. Actors may create and share disinformation to gain acceptance within online communities or to earn fame (Wardle & Hossein, 2017, p. 36). Social media users are incentivized through likes, shares, and comments to "create content that will resonate with their friends, followers and groups," and media manipulation might be a way to gain statues and express identity (Warwick & Lewis, 2017, p. 31). Warwick and Lewis have examined how disinformation from American far-right communities such as the so-called alt-right can express insights into these communities' shared identity: "Taken as a whole, these communities may feel that by manipulating media outlets, they gain some status and a measure of control over an entrenched and powerful institution, which many of them distrust and dislike" (Warwick & Lewis, 2017, p. 31). The expression "I did it for the lulz" indicates that trolling Internet users might post racist or sexist content, but claim to do so merely as a way to generate lulz through the offense of others.

Applying an approach in which news reading is seen as a ritualistic and dramatic act can make it easier to understand why certain types of disinformation is consumed and shared. Wardle and Hossein argue that we should understand communication as a ritual along the lines of James Carey ( 1989), rather than the more traditional understanding of communication as transmission of information. According to Carey, communication is not the act of imparting information, but rather the representation of shared beliefs-communication draws people together in fellowship and commonality. Thus, news reading and writing is a ritualistic and dramatic act where a particular view of the world is portrayed and confirmed. By producing and sharing fake news (with a particular slant), users are connecting with other users. And digital and social media allow for effective tools to amplify fake news to large networks worldwide, which brings us to the next section.

Circulation and Distribution of Fake News

Social media have proved effective distribution channels for false information (Warwick & Lewis, 2017). Studies have shown that fake news stories were more shared on social media than articles from edited news media (Silverman, 2016). The power of fake news and disinformation lies in how well it can penetrate social spheres. Two aspects are crucial to comprehend the circulation of false information: Technology and trust. In the following section, we will look into how technology and trust (or rather distrust) impact how disinformation spreads.

Technology

Social and digital communication technologies such as social networks, blogs, and wikis are powerful tools for users to publish, distribute, and consume information-decentralized compared to previous mass media technologies. It thus seems easier for false or misleading information to enter the public sphere in many countries through digital, social media. The democratization of online content production has greatly diminished the news media's traditional grip of information (Nielsen, 2017). To reach a global audience through digital media is possible. While editors and publishers were the main gatekeepers of information in the time of mass media, tech platforms and algorithms are the new gatekeepers (Lewis, 2018). Particularly, Facebook has a unique role in amplifying information. Social media, especially Facebook, has become an important entrance point for news in many countries: more than half of online users or 54%, across 36 countries say they use social media as a source of news each week (Newman, Fletcher, Kalogeropoulos, Levy, & Nielsen, 2017, p. 10). Furthermore, in a study that examined the exposure to misinformation during the American election campaign in , the researchers found that Facebook was a key vector of exposure to fake news (Guess, Nyhan, & Reifler, 2018).

Secondly, the technological development has democratized the production of fake news. When supposedly everyone can publish (false) information that looks like news, and spread it to large groups of people online, it becomes harder to differentiate between false and trusted information. Fake accounts and pages on social media are blurring the conceptualization of information sources (Tandoc, Lim, & Ling, 2018, p. 3). Digital amplifiers such as bots (i.e., automated Twitter accounts) have been used to give an illusion that fake or partly fake stories are widely circulated. A study that analyzed 14 million Twitter messages with 400,000 claims, found evidence of how social bots played a disproportionate role in spreading and repeating misinformation during the American election (Shao, Ciampaglia, Varol, Flammini, & Menczer, 2017). Bots target users with many followers through replies and mentions, and may disguise their geographic locations. Studies have also shown how Facebook's algorithm periodically trends fake news after the company fired its human editors (Dewey, 2016).

Facebook initially refused to accept that the platform had a role in spreading fake news during the American election, and founder Mark Zuckerberg said that is was a "pretty crazy idea" if fake news on Facebook had influenced the election in any way (Zuckerberg, 2016a). For years, Zuckerberg has insisted that Facebook is a technology company, not a media company with all the editorial responsibilities it entails. But eventually, he admitted in that Facebook had a greater responsibility to the public than just being a tech company. Zuckerberg ( 2016b) wrote on his Facebook page: "While we don't write the news stories you read and share, we also recognize we're more than just a distributor of news. We're a new kind of platform for public discourse-and that means we have a new kind of responsibility to enable people to have the most meaningful conversations, and to build a space where people can be informed." Facebook has also realized that the platform can be misused by foreign powers through "information operations," as Facebook labeled it in published report (Weedon, Nuland, & Stamos, 2017). While traditional security on Facebook has focused on abusive behavior, such as account hacking, malware, spam, and financial scams, Facebook has increasingly expanded the focus to include more subtle and insidious forms of misuse, including attempts to manipulate civic discourse and deceive people.

Similarly, YouTube's recommendation algorithm has been accused of promoting conspiracy theories and for fueling disinformation during the American election (Lewis, 2018). YouTube is described as one of the largest and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence, but when studying YouTube's recommended videos, Guillaume Chaslot, a former Google engineer, found that "YouTube systematically amplifies video that are divisive, sensational and conspiratorial" (Lewis, 2018). YouTube's recommendation system is optimized for people to spend as much time as possible to watch videos. Similar to studies of Facebook, YouTube's algorithm was pushing videos that were helpful to Donald Trump and damaging to Hillary Clinton. According to Chaslot's study, YouTube's algorithm does not appear to be optimizing for what is truthful, balanced, or healthy for democracy (Lewis, 2018).

The biggest online platforms have deployed several attempts to combat the spread of false information on their platforms. Facebook has attempted to reduce financial incentives to create fake news websites, to flag fake news circulating in the newsfeed by cooperating with professional fact checkers, and to mark trusted news sources (Solon, 2016; Mosseri, 2018). On Twitter, more than 13,000 Russian-based bot accounts have been identified in , and more than 670,000 users in the United States interacted with one of these accounts during the election season (Martineau, 2018). Twitter has since emailed nearly 678,000 users that may have inadvertently interacted with now-suspended accounts believed to have been linked to a Russian propaganda outfit called the Internet Research Agency (Vanian, 2018). Google argues that they have implemented structural changes in search algorithms to surface more high-quality content from the web while preventing the spread of offensive or clearly misleading content (Gomes, 2017). The company is also blocking websites from showing up in search results on Google News when they mask their country of origin or misrepresent their purpose.

Digital and social media have lowered the threshold for creating and circulating information-also disinformation and fake news. Additionally, low or declining trust in news media has been mentioned as another reason for the spread of fake news. These and other developments within journalism's business model, have made it increasingly important for journalists and newsrooms to be transparent and build trust among readers.

Trust

Trust in information and news media is of paramount importance. Fake news is thus problematic for several reasons. Foremost, because it makes people confused about which information to trust or not. Two surveys, one from the United States (Barthel, Mitchell, & Holcomb, 2016) and another from Sweden (Ahlin & Benzler, 2017), showed that respectively 88% and 76% of the respondents replied that fake news made them very or somehow confused about basic facts (Ahlin & Benzler, 2017; Barthel, Mitchell, & Holcomb, 2016). If people are unable to differentiate between what is verified or false, whether one can trust news or not, it makes people confused about the state of affairs, particularly during an election when voters need reliable information to make an important political decision. But low trust in information and news media can also make it more likely for people to spread fake news and disinformation. As argued by some researchers, the declining trust in mainstream media could be both a cause and a consequence of fake news gaining more traction (Allcot & Gentzkow, 2017, p. 215).

According to Reuters Digital News Report, trust in news varies strongly among countries, with the US news consumers placed among the lowest trusting. While 47 and 57% of the respondents in respectively Norway and Denmark and 41% of the respondents in Sweden agree that you can trust news most of time, American respondents have less trust in news-only 34% agree that you can trust news most of the time (Newman et al., 2017). If people have low trust in news from mainstream media, which is the case in the United States, it might be more relevant for them to search out information from alternative sources. The partisan difference is particularly strong among American news consumers, and represented a new low in media trust among Republicans: only 14% had great or fair amount of trust in mass media while 51% of Democrats had trust in media (Swift, 2016). Even for Google, the partisan divide creates problems. Apparently, Google's search algorithms have problems ranking truthful information when two groups oppose each other, and it is easier for Google's algorithms to handle false or unreliable information when there is a greater consensus; it is more challenging to separate truth from misinformation when views are diametrically opposed (Tung, 2017).

Fake news masquerading as legitimate news is not only a problem for people consuming it, it might also undermine journalism's legitimacy and trustworthiness. News is expected to provide "independent, reliable, accurate, and comprehensive information" (Kovach & Rosenstiels, 2007, p. 11), and news is normatively based on the truth, which makes the term fake news an oxymoron. Nevertheless, the term fake news has also been appropriated by politicians around the world to describe news organizations whose coverage they find disagreeable, thus using fake news as a weapon against newsrooms.

As of , President Donald Trump had tweeted 181 times about fake news in the 388 past days, one of his most tweeted terms, according to the Trump Twitter Archive. President Trump routinely invokes the phrase "fake news" as a rhetorical tool to undermine opponents, rally his political base, and to discredit mainstream American media that is aggressively investigating his presidency (Erlanger, 2017). Around the world, authoritarians, populists and other political leaders have seized on the phrase fake news as a tool for attacking their critics and, in some cases, deliberately undermining the institutions of democracy-often inspired by Trump. In countries where press freedom is restricted or under considerable threat-including Russia, China, Turkey, Libya, Poland, Hungary, Thailand, Somalia, and others-political leaders have invoked fake news as justification for beating back media scrutiny (Erlanger, 2017).

The concerns over fake news are growing, also for the weaponized use of fake news by politicians to undermine independent media and trust in journalism. The last section will focus on some of the attempts to counter fake news in the light of Lippmann's insight: "no modern society lacking the wherewithal to detect lies could call itself free" (Lippmann, 1922).

Countering Fake News

After the spread of fake news, disinformation, and their problematic consequences has been identified, many attempts to counter fake news have been employed in different countries. We can differentiate between efforts directed toward legal, financial, and technical aspects to individuals' media and information literacy and new fact-checking services. In , the European Commission appointed 38 experts to a new High Level Group on fake news and online disinformation to advise the commission on how to understand and tackle the phenomenon of fake news and disinformation (HLEG, 2018). The group clearly advices against simplistic solutions, such as censorship of free speech. As disinformation is a multifaceted and evolving problem, the report suggested focusing the response on five pillars: (1) enhance transparency of the digital information ecosystem; (2) promote media and information literacy to counter disinformation and help users navigate the digital media environment; (3) develop tools for empowering users and journalists to tackle disinformation and foster a positive engagement with fast-evolving information technologies; (4) safeguard the diversity and sustainability of the European news media ecosystem; (5) promote continued research on the impact of disinformation in Europe to evaluate the measures taken by different actors and constantly adjust the necessary responses (HLEG, 2018, p. 35).

Nevertheless, several countries have tried to ban fake news by introducing new legal measures. Germany introduced a new law in to combat hate speech. The new law, Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, or NetzDG, demands that social media sites move quickly to remove hate speech, fake news, and illegal material (BBC, 2018). Social networks and media sites with more than 2 million members will fall under the law's provisions. The law gives social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube 24 hours to act after they have been told about law-breaking material. Sites that do not remove "obviously illegal" posts could face fines of up to 50m euro ($65m). Social networks and media sites with more than 2 million members will fall under the law's provisions. A similar legal measure is introduced in France, where President Emmanuel Macron has proposed a law to ban fake news on the Internet during the French election campaign. Macron wants France's media watchdog CSA to have the power to fight destabilization attempts by TV stations controlled or influenced by foreign states (Nielsen, 2018). In Ireland, a new bill has been introduced that is intended to make political advertising on social media more transparent. In Italy, the government has launched an online service aimed at cracking down on fake news (Guiffrida, 2018).

The legal measures put forward in Europe are not unproblematic. The German law has been controversial, as it has already created problems by confusing satire with hate speech. The concern regarding the approaches in Germany, Italy, France, and Ireland are that legal solutions to combat fake news and disinformation could lead to inadvertent censorship or curtail free speech.

The aforementioned legal efforts in Europe differ from the approach in the United States, where corporate efforts are mainly suggested to tackle the problems of fake news and disinformation online (Schiffrin, 2017). Other approaches are directed toward limiting the financial motivation for creators of fake news through advertising. Facebook and Google have attempted to reduce financial incentives to create fake news websites by restricting ads on fake news sites and prohibiting fake news sites from using their ad network-respectively Adsense and Audience Network (Love & Cooke, 2016). The activist group Sleeping Giants has attempted to combat fake news sites by going after the site's advertisers. Programmatic ad buying, which is digital purchasing of advertisement, many companies don't know where their advertisements appear around the web. Sleeping Giants communicates with companies and nonprofit groups whose ads appear on sites often known for false or misleading content, and encourages them to remove their ads from the sites.

Other approaches to combat and counter fake news have been directed at the users-readers, viewers, and listeners of information. Media literacy and education can help children and students to navigate between trusted and less trusted sources online. Governmental programs have been developed in several countries, for example in Italy to train students to recognize and counter fake news and conspiracy theories. During an expert meeting organized by the Nordic council, one of the suggestions from the expert group was to increase media and information literacy (MIL) in schools, to develop critical media users who can recognize disinformation (Bjerregård, Jensen, & Wadbring, 2017).

The spread of fake news has also triggered the establishment of new fact-checker services. The Norwegian fact-checking site Faktisk.no was initiated by four competing media organizations in (NRK, TV2, VG, Dagbladet) to "disclose and prevent the spread of fictitious content that appear as real news" (Faktisk, 2017). In addition to the increased attention to fake news and disinformation, the national election in Norway in was another reason why Faktisk was established. Similarly in Sweden, four competing media organizations (DN, SvD, SR och SVT) decided to create a fact checking service in , Faktakollen, to counter fake news, particularly ahead of the national election in Sweden (Kihlström, 2018). The two new Nordic fact-checking services add to a growing list of international fact-checking services. As of , there are about 140 fact-checking services worldwide, according to Reporters' Lab at Duke University, the most comprehensive database for global fact-checking sites (Reporter's Lab, 2018).

Even though many of these attempts to counter and fight fake news and disinformation are promising, more needs to be done in this area. The spread of fake news and disinformation is an evolving, dynamic problem, and a single solution is not enough to combat it once and for all, which will be further discussed in the concluding section.

Future Challenges From Fake News

This article has discussed fake news and disinformation in relation to the four Cs: characterization, creation, circulation, and countering. Disinformation is not a new phenomenon, but new communication technologies have made it easier than ever to produce and distribute falsehood and lies, dressed up as news to gain trustworthiness. The societal concerns that disinformation raises are numerous, as this article has outlined. Nevertheless, there are more unanswered questions than solutions for how to tackle this problem. Further research on the scale and scope of disinformation in different countries is necessary in order to better describe the magnitude and characteristics of the problem. For students of journalism, the debate about disinformation has been a valuable reminder of the roots of journalism: critical evaluation of information and sources, accountability, and ethical codes of conduct. Increased efforts to enhance transparency, both in platforms information ecology as well as in journalistic methods, can in the long run increase trust in how information is handled and amplified by platforms and newsrooms. New tools and methods-including media and information literacy-to identify and detect manipulated content, either as text, images, videos, or audio, are needed to counter manipulation attempts by different actors. Rather than enforcing laws to abolish fake news, which has become a politicized term, political actors and institutions should recognize that they have an important role to play in improving the quality of the information ecosystem, through financing research and supporting independent media and by sharing data with the public.

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Fake news is not new, but the American presidential election in 2016 placed the phenomenon squarely onto the international agenda. Manipulation, disinformation, falseness, rumors, conspiracy theories-actions and behaviors that are frequently associated with the term-have existed as long as humans have communicated.

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Published August 29, 2018

Why Should I Care About Fake News?

Fake news has been a serious issue in American and international society lately. It's a major problem in politics, media (both digital and traditional), national security, and it affects our view of the world and our discussions with other people. As we prepare for new elections, assess our reliance on social media, or have daily conversations with friends and colleagues, concerns that fake news affects society are important.

July 31, 2018: Facebook says it has uncovered a coordinated disinformation operation ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.
The Washington Post and several other news organizations reported on July 31, 2018, that

"Facebook has shut down a sophisticated disinformation operation on its platform that engaged in divisive messaging...that could affect the November election. It also...questions whether other technology companies are still being used as conduits for disinformation, as Google, Twitter and others were around the last election."

August 20, 2018: Its president and chief legal officer, Brad Smith, reported that Microsoft recently thwarted new efforts to establish fake websites, as well.
"We're concerned that these and other attempts pose security threats to a broadening array of groups connected with both American political parties in the run-up to the 2018 elections," he said in his blog.

Social media companies and Congress have already done a lot to expose the problem and remove foreign fake news accounts from certain platforms. But the problems persist. Foreign agents are still active.

But fake news isn't all foreign, and it isn't all political. It didn't start out that way, and it's not gone yet.

Ann Coulter tweeted a fake news story from YourNewsWire.com which falsely claimed that all of Mexico lowered the age of consent.

Another actual (fake) story on YourNewsWire.com, a notorious fake news website.

Fake news comes through a complex of commercial, political, psychological, social, and computer-scientific factors that make it hard to grasp in its totality. And the topic has been politicized-individuals use the term, "fake news," to undermine reporting that's damaging to their own version of events.

It's also hard to talk about because people think it doesn't affect themselves, that it only affects other people. And, like the perception of media bias that occurs everywhere [1], individuals think that people on the "other" side of the political spectrum make fake news, believe fake news, and pass along fake news, and that their side doesn't. (Rigorous research has shown that political fake news in the 2016 Presidential campaign was largely pro-Trump. But many of the most recent Russian fake news efforts are portraying anti-Trump events, and continuing to fan the flames about ongoing "hot-button issues" in American society and culture.) But it's not the Russians' doing alone-American social media users click on it, consume it, like it, and share it. No one side is innocent in this mess, no matter what political side you're on, and it's important to try to be objective about it.

It's not just an American problem. Fake news has led to violence in India and Myanmar. It played a part in the UK's Brexit vote, and is expected to interfere in upcoming elections in many countries. Indeed, on August 21, 2018,

"Facebook said that it had identified multiple new influence campaigns that were aimed at misleading people around the world...trying to sow misinformation. The activity originated in Iran and Russia, Facebook said. The latest campaigns appeared to be similar to those of past operations on the social network: to distribute false news that might cause confusion among people, and to alter people's thinking," according to the New York Times.

That's why it's time for a clear and balanced presentation, based on the best academic research and most reliable reporting. What exactly is fake news? How did it develop? How does it operate? Can it really affect elections, and inflame (or suppress) social conflicts and violence? What's been done to curb its influence, and do these measures work? What can each of us do right now to reduce the problem? Because fake news so often spreads through social media, it relies on friends posting, sharing, retweeting and otherwise passing it on to other friends and followers, everyone has a role to play in spreading or halting fake news, and we have some realistic suggestions for you that can help you to prevent its spread throughout your own digital networks and reduce its effects on people's thinking.

"And if you're going to stand up successfully and defend a democracy against these kinds of foreign attacks, we need to bring people together. And we can only bring people together if everyone is in the know about what's going on. And this is an important moment across political parties, across the political community and with the tech sector, where, with more knowledge, we can start to take broader and more systemic steps to respond to these kinds of problems."

Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, August 21, 2018
National Public Radio

Our website has the following sections that you can read independently or in any order.

1. What is Fake News

2. A Brief History of Fake News

3. Where Does Fake News Come From?

4. The Danger of Fake News in Inflaming or Suppressing Social Conflict

5. The Danger of Fake News to Our Election

6. How is Fake News Spread? Bots, People like You, Trolls, and Microtargeting

7. Why We Fall for Fake News

8. Protecting Ourselves from Fake News: Fact-Checkers and their Limitations

9. Protecting Ourselves from Fake News: Games that Teach about Fake News

10. What Can I Do Today?

[1] A. C. Gunther, "Biased Press or Biased Public? Attitudes Toward Media Coverage of Social groups," Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 56, no. 2, pp. 147-167, Jan. 1992.

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Published August 29, 2018 Fake news has been a serious issue in American and international society lately. It's a major problem in politics, media (both digital and traditional), national security, and it affects our view of the world and our discussions with other people.

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The (almost) complete history of 'fake news'

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The (almost) complete history of 'fake news'

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The (almost) complete history of 'fake news'

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In record time, the phrase morphed from a description of a social media phenomenon into a journalistic cliche and an angry political slur. How did the term "fake news" evolve - and what's next in the world of disinformation?

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Meet the Macedonian Teens Who Mastered Fake News and Corrupted the US Election

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Meet the Macedonian Teens Who Mastered Fake News and Corrupted the US Election

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Inside the Macedonian

Fake-News Complex

Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex

The first article about Donald Trump that Boris ever published described how, during a campaign rally in North Carolina, the candidate slapped a man in the audience for disagreeing with him. This never happened, of course. Boris had found the article somewhere online, and he needed to feed his website, Daily Interesting Things, so he appropriated the text, down to its last misbegotten comma. He posted the link on Facebook, seeding it within various groups devoted to American politics; to his astonishment, it was shared around 800 times. That month-February 2016-Boris made more than $150 off the Google ads on his website. Considering this to be the best possible use of his time, he stopped going to high school.

Boris isn't his real name. He prefers the anonymity because he doesn't want to break ranks with the other people in his town of Veles, in the Balkan nation of Macedonia. Nobody here wants to dwell on Trump anymore. Veles has the feel of a small community clamming up out of a suspicion that it's being talked about for all the wrong reasons.

In the final weeks of the US presidential election, Veles attained a weird infamy in the most powerful nation on earth; stories in The Guardian and on BuzzFeed revealed that the Macedonian town of 55,000 was the registered home of at least 100 pro-Trump websites, many of them filled with sensationalist, utterly fake news. (The imminent criminal indictment of Hillary Clinton was a popular theme; another was the pope's approval of Trump.) The sites' ample traffic was rewarded handsomely by automated advertising engines, like Google's AdSense. An article in The New Yorker described how President Barack Obama himself spent a day in the final week of the campaign talking "almost obsessively" about Veles and its "digital gold rush."

Within Veles itself, the young entrepreneurs behind these websites became subjects of tantalizing intrigue. Between August and November, Boris earned nearly $16,000 off his two pro-Trump websites. The average monthly salary in Macedonia is $371.

Boris is 18 years old, a lean, slouching youth with gray eyes, hair mowed close to his skull, and the rudiments of a beard. When he isn't smoking a cigarette, he's lighting one. He listens to a lot of gangsta rap: the Notorious B.I.G., Puff Daddy, Wu-Tang Clan; after watching Notorious, the 2009 biopic of B.I.G., he decided he would like to visit Brooklyn, a New York City borough he imagines overrun more by gangsters than hipsters. He is an affable raconteur, with a droll sense of humor and a clear-eyed view of himself and his town. Someday he wants to leave Veles, because of how little there is to do. You can live with your parents and have them pay for your evenings in a bar, or you can bus tables in a café. If you're a gym rat, you might work security. A few factories on the outskirts of town still offer regular employment, but nothing lavish. "We can't make money here with a real job," Boris says. "This Google AdSense work is not a real job."

At best, Boris' English is halting and fractured-certainly not good enough to turn out five to 10 articles about Trump and Clinton every day for weeks on end. Fortunately for him, the election summoned forth the energies of countless alt-right websites in the US, which manufactured white-label falsehoods disguised as news on an industrial scale. Across the spectrum of right-wing media-from Trump's own concise lies on Twitter to the organized prevarication of Breitbart News and NationalReport.net-ideology beat back the truth. What Veles produced, though, was something more extreme still: an enterprise of cool, pure amorality, free not only of ideology but of any concern or feeling about the substance of the election. These Macedonians on Facebook didn't care if Trump won or lost the White House. They only wanted pocket money to pay for things-a car, watches, better cell phones, more drinks at the bar. This is the arrhythmic, disturbing heart of the affair: that the internet made it so simple for these young men to finance their material whims and that their actions helped deliver such momentous consequences.

SCROLL DOWN

Veles lies plumb in the center of Macedonia, on either side of the Vardar River, and its red-shingle-roofed buildings appear to be climbing the slopes of low knuckled hills. It was once a town of modest glory, turning out revolutionaries and intellectuals and alive with industry. One of its largest factories, a ceramic works named Porcelanka, employed 4,000 people. For a time, its residents recall with perverse pride, Veles was the second-most polluted town in the former Yugoslavia.

After Macedonia became independent in 1991, though, Veles began to decline. The factories closed; the jobs evaporated. The local soccer team, FK Borec, won so infrequently that it was dropped from the first division to the third. The town's only movie theater folded a decade and a half ago. Its downtown withered. Briefly, in the mid-2000s, the economy shook itself awake when a few men splashed around money they'd made selling heroin in Germany and Austria, but the police soon broke up that drug ring and Veles returned to its state of morose dilapidation.

For Boris, growing up here, Veles didn't have much to offer. His father worked for the town as a plumber. Like other kids, Boris wandered around up near the old Ottoman clock tower or down by the river, loitering in one coffee bar after another. He played soccer but later discovered that he was more proficient at the videogame version of the sport. He joined a Counter-Strike club: nine or 10 teenagers gathered in a room, sitting behind their laptops and shooting each other up.

One day a couple of summers ago, Boris was walking to school when he saw a BMW 4 Series parked by the side of the road. "What the fuck?" he thought. "My favorite car is in this town?"

He asked around, but no one seemed to know who owned the BMW. Later, in a café, he met a Counter-Strike acquaintance named Aleksandar Velkovski. "Aleksandar, I saw this BMW 4," Boris told him. Velkovski revealed that the car was his. He'd bought it, he said, with the money he made off his website.

In Veles, Aleksandar and Borce Velkovski are so renowned for the health food website they started that they're known as the Healthy Brothers. HealthyFoodHouse.com is a jumble of diet and beauty advice, natural remedies, and other nostrums. It gorges on advertising as it counsels readers to put a bar of soap under their bedsheets to relieve nightly leg cramps or to improve their red-blood-cell count with homemade beet syrup. Somehow the website's Facebook page has drawn 2 million followers; more than 10 million unique visitors come to HealthyFoodHouse.com every month.

After seeing the BMW, Boris decided to start some websites of his own. He already knew there was money to be made off the internet; for a while, when he was 17, he'd been one of the many peons around the world laboring online for MicroWorkers.com, earning something like a tenth of a cent for liking a YouTube video or leaving a comment. Now he bought a succession of domains from GoDaddy-GossipKnowledge.com, then DailyInterestingThings.com-built basic WordPress sites, and stuffed them with sports, celebrity, health, and political news, the articles all pilfered from elsewhere. (Boris pulls out his phone and logs into WordPress to show that he does, in fact, own the sites he mentions.) When the piece about Trump slapping a man turned briefly white-hot, he sensed the intrinsic viral potential in the American election and founded NewYorkTimesPolitics.com, a website that resembled The New York Times homepage and carried plagiarized articles on American politics. The Times sent Boris a cease-and-desist order; Boris received the email when he was out somewhere, and he was so terrified that he took down the website right away, from his phone. In August, Boris set up PoliticsHall.com, and a couple of months later, he added USAPolitics.co to his portfolio. That was when the money really began to roll in.

Boris developed a routine. Several times a day he dredged the internet for pro-Trump articles and copied them into one of his two websites; if JavaScript prevented an easy copy-paste, he opened a Notepad file and typed the articles out. After publishing a piece, he shared the link in Facebook groups with names like My America, My Home; the Deplorables; and Friends Who Support President Donald J. Trump. Trump groups seemed to have hundreds of thousands more members than Clinton groups, which made it simpler to propel an article into virality. (For a week in July, he experimented with fake news extolling Bernie Sanders. "Bernie Sanders supporters are among the smartest people I've seen," he says. "They don't believe anything. The post must have proof for them to believe it.") He posted under his own name but also under the guise of one of 200 or so bogus Facebook profiles that he'd purchased for this purpose. (A fake profile with a Russian name cost about 10 cents; for an American name, the price went up to 50 cents.) The most shares one of his posts ever aggregated, across various Facebook groups, was 1,200; Boris dimly recalls only that the post had something to do with Trump's proposed wall on the Mexican border. Boris learned tricks to better monetize his websites: big ads breaking the text up, for instance, so that one in five visitors to a page would end up clicking on an ad. His RPM-revenue per 1,000 impressions-hovered around $15, he says. He fed the beast with diligence. "At night I would make four or five posts to share the next day. When I woke up, I shared them. I went to drink coffee, came back home, found new articles, posted those articles on the website, and shared them. Then I went out with friends, came back home, found articles, and shared them to Facebook."

When his ad engines started to pay out, Boris bought himself things: new clothes, an Acer laptop to replace his old Toshiba, a vacation at a resort on Lake Ohrid. His phone carries a photographic record of the life he could briefly afford. "It was like: 'Buy! Buy! Buy!'" At one point, practically all of Boris' friends had set up similar websites, and they all had money to blow. As a posse, they'd go to one of Veles' three nightclubs-Tarantino or Club Avangard or Club Drama-and order $100 bottles of Moët to shake and spray. "I don't drink champagne," Boris says. "I bought it for spraying. All eyes on me!" It was nothing but the best for Boris. "Moët! Moët! Roberto Cavalli! Jack Daniel's!" he says, making a gesture with his hand as if hailing a bartender. "It's part of life. You must live once."

Boris still goes to the clubs, but he says he has lost his taste for expensive things. "It isn't interesting anymore." Which is just as well, because on November 24, after an eruption of concern about the malign effects of fake news, Google suspended the ads from his websites. The last item Boris posted to USAPolitics.co was a poll that inquired: "Do you support immediate deportation of all criminal illegals?" In one of the Facebook groups where Boris shared the link, the post received 292 shares and 361 responses. It looked like another blockbuster from USAPolitics.co. But then the Google ads vanished, so Boris lost interest and consigned his websites to the deep oblivion of the internet.

SCROLL DOWN

In Macedonia, wringing money out of web advertising is a game that long predated Trump's bid for the presidency-and will probably outlast it as well, despite Google's and Facebook's postelection attempts to crack down. Mirko Ceselkoski began to play in the early 2000s. He built seven or eight websites-about muscle cars or celebrities or superyachts, all oriented toward the American reader, because an American reader is roughly three times more valuable than a non-American one. For five or six hours of daily toil, Ceselkoski says, you can earn approximately $1,000 a month. Many Macedonians can spare the time; the unemployment rate is around 24 percent.

Ceselkoski turned to coaching in 2011-first with a six-week classroom course in the Macedonian capital of Skopje, where he lives, and now online, in dense three-week modules. For around $425, his students learn how to prepare, populate, and promote their websites. A full third of the syllabus is dedicated to the mastery of Facebook. The Healthy Brothers once took Ceselkoski's course. So did, in early 2016, a few members of the Veles squad who went on to operate pro-Trump sites. They surprised him. "I never instructed my students to write fake stories," he says. "Maybe they discovered they could get away with this kind of practice and increase their virality." He sounded like a delighted physics professor talking about how a pupil had stumbled upon a brand-new law of thermodynamics. After the election some of Ceselkoski's students called him, panicking because Google had yanked its advertising without paying them all the money they had already earned. One young man, Ceselkoski says, believed he was owed more than $60,000.

Ceselkoski was visiting Las Vegas around the time of the election, and Trump's victory stunned him. He thought about the website operators in Veles. "It's possible, maybe, they changed a few percentages."

Here's how advertisers follow you around the web-and how their money flows to fake news sites. -Davey Alba

Boris will have none of that. The so-called news he and his colleagues were filching was already on American websites, heating up the American bloodstream. How could their duplications of these articles, on their rinky-dink websites, upset the election of such a powerful country? "If Americans wanted Hillary Clinton to win, Hillary Clinton would have won. They voted for Donald Trump. Donald Trump won." But now that everything has come to pass, Boris finds it difficult not to care about the result. "Some crazy man has won the election. Maybe the guy will start World War III."

He sits in a coffee bar on a December afternoon, two days after a parliamentary election in Macedonia. Here too a minor pestilence of fake news swept through the campaigns. Websites run out of Serbia and Croatia alleged that the leftist opposition leader, Zoran Zaev, wanted to divide the country between Macedonians and ethnic Albanians. Voters got taken in; Zaev's coalition lost, narrowly. Boris feels disenchanted with the whole process. There is too much politics in life, he thinks. "People are fighting each other. One brother is for one party, the other brother is for the other party, they argue." He shakes his head. "The media is washing our brains, and the people are following like sheep."

Boris' days are now consummately unoccupied. Mostly, he and his friends convene in this coffee bar or in one of the others clustered on the same street. They always pick a table on the veranda, despite the cold, so that they can smoke and smoke. They fiddle with their phones for about the same proportion of time that they spend talking to one another. Boris hasn't yet considered returning to school, but he thinks, vaguely, that he wants to study coding and go on to work at a company like Microsoft or Apple. First, though, he wants to construct more websites. Facebook and Google have unveiled new systems for screening out misinformation, but they're not built for catching every low-level fib circulating around the internet. Boris won't focus on political fake news, in all probability-but there are plenty of other topics of interest, plenty of websites from which to swipe content, and plenty of potential readers around the world who may click in sufficient numbers to finally buy him his BMW.

Samanth Subramanian (@samanth_s) is a Dublin correspondent for The National.
This story is part of our special coverage of The News in Crisis.

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Meet the Macedonian Teens Who Mastered Fake News and Corrupted the US Election

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Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex The first article about Donald Trump that Boris ever published described how, during a campaign rally in North Carolina, the candidate slapped a man in the audience for disagreeing with him. This never happened, of course.

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Inside a Fake News Sausage Factory: ‘This Is All About Income’ (Published 2016)

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A computer science student in a former Soviet republic found there was money to be made in mixing real and made-up stories, as long as they were pro-Trump.

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The spread of true and false news online

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The spread of true and false news online

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Six Easy Ways to Tell If That Viral Story Is a Hoax

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Six Easy Ways to Tell If That Viral Story Is a Hoax

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"And so it begins ... ISIS flag among refugees in Germany fighting the police," blared the headline on the Conservative Post; "with this new leaked picture, everything seems confirmed". The image in question purported to show a group of Syrian refugees holding ISIS flags and attacking German police officers.

For those resistant to accepting refugees into Europe, this story was a godsend. The photo quickly spread across social media, propelled by far-right groups such as the English Defence League and . At the time of writing, the page claims to have been shared over 300,000 times.

The problem is, the photo is three years old, and has precious little to do with the refugee crisis. In fact, it from a confrontation between members of the far-right Pro NRW party and muslim counter-protesters, which took place in Bonn, back in 2012. A number of news outlets tried to highlight the hoax, including , the Independent and , as did numerous Twitter users.

But news in the digital age spreads faster than ever, and so do lies and hoaxes. Just like retractions and corrections in newspapers, online rebuttals often make rather less of a splash than the original misinformation. As I have argued elsewhere, digital verification skills are essential for today's journalists, and academic institutions are starting to provide the necessary training.

But ordinary people are also starting to take a more sophisticated approach to the content they view online. It's no longer enough to read the news - now, we want to understand the processes behind it. Fortunately, there are a few relatively effective verification techniques, which do not require specialist knowledge or costly software. Outlined below are six free, simple tools that any curious news reader can use to verify digital media.

Reverse image search

Not only is a reverse image search one of the simplest verification tools, it's also the one that showed the "leaked" ISIS refugee photo was a fake. Both of the most popular services, Google Images and , found pages containing this image dating back to mid-2012. As the screenshot below shows, the "ISIS refugee" story could be debunked in less than a second.

When a link to the story was posted to Reddit, sceptical users swiftly took to Google to query it. Soon, one reported back: "Google Image Search says the photo is from 2012".

YouTube DataViewer

When watching the latest viral video on YouTube, it's important to be on the look-out for "scrapes": a scrape is an old video, which has been downloaded from YouTube and re-uploaded by someone who fraudulently claims to be the original eyewitness, or asserts that the video depicts a new event.

Amnesty International has a simple but incredibly useful tool called YouTube DataViewer. Once you've entered the video's URL, this tool will extract the clip's upload time and all associated thumbnail images. This information - which isn't readily accessible via YouTube itself - enables you to launch a two-pronged verification search.

If multiple versions of the same video are hosted on YouTube, the date enables you to identify the earliest upload. This is most likely to be the original. The thumbnails can also be used in a reverse image search to find web pages containing the video, offering a quick and powerful method for identifying older versions or uses of the same video.

Jeffrey's Exif Viewer

Photos, videos and audio taken with digital cameras and smartphones contain Exchangeable Image File (EXIF) information: this is vital metadata about the make of the camera used, and the date, time and location the media was created. This information can be very useful if you're suspicious of the creator's account of the content's origins. In such situations, EXIF readers such as Jeffrey's Exif Viewer allow you upload or enter the URL of an image and view its metadata.

Below is the EXIF data of a photograph I took of a bus crash in Poole in August 2014. It's very comprehensive; had I claimed the photo was taken, say, last week in Swanage, it would be very simple to disprove. It is worth noting that while Facebook, Instagram and Twitter remove EXIF data when content is uploaded to their servers, media shared via platforms such as Flickr and WhatsApp still contain it.

FotoForensics

FotoForensics is a tool that uses error level analysis (ELA) to identify parts of an image that may have been modified or "photoshopped". This tool allows you to either upload, or enter the URL of a suspicious image and will then highlight areas where disparities in quality suggest alterations may have been made. It also provides a number of sharing options, which are useful for challenging the recirculation of inaccurate information, because they allow you to provide a direct link to your FotoForensics analysis page.

WolframAlpha

WolframAlpha is a "computational knowledge engine", which allows you to check weather conditions in at a specific time and place. You can search it using criteria such as "weather in London at 2pm on 16 July, 2014". So if, for example, a photo of a freak snowstorm has been shared to your timeline, and WolframAlpha reports that it was 27 degrees and clear when the photo was purportedly taken, then alarm bells ought to be ringing.

Online maps

Identifying the location of a suspicious photo or video is a crucial part of the verification process. Google Street View, Google Earth (a source of historical satellite images) and (a crowd-sourced version of Google Maps, featuring additional information) are all excellent tools for undertaking this kind of detective work.

You should identify whether there are any reference points to compare, check whether distinctive landmarks match up and see if the landscape is the same. These three criteria are frequently used to cross-reference videos or photos, in order to verify whether or not they were indeed shot in the location the uploader claims.

Google Earth, in particular, has been put to incredible use use by Elliot Higgins AKA Brown Moses, of Bellingcat - a site for investigative citizen journalism.

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Six Easy Ways to Tell If That Viral Story Is a Hoax

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"And so it begins ... ISIS flag among refugees in Germany fighting the police," blared the headline on the Conservative Post; "with this new leaked picture, everything seems confirmed". The image in question purported to show a group of Syrian refugees holding ISIS flags and attacking German police officers.

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The general secretary of the National Education Union (NEU) told BBC Breakfast that the government had "slashed the schools building budget".

"Total under-investment over the past 13 years stands at £34.8bn", Daniel Kebede said.

The NEU says if that budget had been held at the level set in last few years of the Labour government and kept up with rising prices, it would have averaged about £2.7bn more each year - or a total of almost £35bn over the 13-year period.

This figure doesn't just cover schools but also nurseries, universities and the department itself, as well as other investments such as IT systems.

The independent Institute for Fiscal Studies told us that it is fair to say that this type of spend has fallen since 2010.

The Department for Education's own records also suggest that it has led to "under-investment" in repair and rebuilding, although not by as much as claimed by the NEU.

Back in 2020, the department said it needed £4bn a year over five years to start to bring schools up to scratch, and even more after that, once school rebuilding programmes get under way.

However, they have been given less: only £3 billion a year for the past two years.

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A Chrome extension that shows an icon denoting the political bias for the current page.

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This extension shows an icon denoting the political bias for the current page.

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TinEye Reverse Image Search--See where images are found online

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TinEye Reverse Image Search--See where images are found online

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TinEye is an image search and recognition company. We are experts in computer vision, pattern recognition, neural networks, and machine learning.

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Get the tool! It's free!

Details about the tool

This toolkit is provided by the InVID european project to help journalists to verify content on social networks (please note that external InVID services used via this interface, such as those presented under the Analysis and Keyframes tabs, are not open-sourced). It has been designed as a verification "Swiss army knife" helping journalists to save time and be more efficient in their fact-checking and debunking tasks on social networks especially when verifying videos and images.

The provided tools allow you to quickly get contextual information on Facebook and YouTube videos, to perform reverse image search on Google, Baidu or Yandex search engines, to fragment videos from various platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Daily Motion) into keyframes, to enhance and explore keyframes and images through a magnifying lens, to query Twitter more efficiently through time intervals and many other filters, to read video and image metadata, to check the video copyrights, and to apply forensic filters on still images. The main features of the toolkit are explained below, and in the following tutorial video.

Access menu

This is a new feature (supported in v0.59) to access the InVID plugin and to help journalists to retrieve video and image URLs within the code of a web page. After clicking on the InVID plugin button of the browser menu, the user is showed the following menu.

Open InVID launches the plugin

Video Urls displays the URL of a video present on a web page

Image Urls displays the URL of an image present on a web page

Below, there is an example of how the URL of an Instagram video can be retrieved using the newly added functionality.

Main features

The first Analysis tab allows you to query the InVID context aggregation and analysis service developed by CERTH-ITI. In a nutshell, this service is an enhanced metadata viewer for YouTube, Facebook and Twitter videos that allows you to retrieve contextual information, location (if detected), most interesting comments, apply reverse image search and check for tweets on the video (on YouTube). Be aware that the service may take some time if the video processed has a lot of comments. A new feature (a reprocess button) allows you to refresh the analysis.

The second Keyframe tab is an iframe opening the website of CERTH-ITI on video fragmentation. It allows you to copy a video URL (from Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, DailyMotion or Dropbox) or upload a video file (in mp4, webm, avi, mov, wmv, ogv, mpg, flv, and mkv format) in order to segment it in keyframes which then can be searched with a right click on Google, Yandex, Tineye and Baidu images. Our service extracts a rich set of keyframes (depending on the variation of the visual content of the video) and therefore gives the opportunity to enhance the video reverse image search. Those are the real video keyframes that differ from the thumbnails served by Youtube or Facebook. Last but not least, to strengthen more the reverse image search process, the service provides more keyframes on demand, after clicking on the "More keyframes" button that is placed at the end of the initially provided collections of keyframes.

The Thumbnails tab allows you to quickly trigger a reverse image search on Google, Bing, Tineye or Yandex Images with the four thumbnails extracted from a Youtube video. Up to four tabs (according to the number of thumbnails available) are opened automatically in your browser with the results of the reverse search while the four thumbnails are also displayed in the plugin page. This tab is somewhat redundant with what can be done with the Analysis tab but it is very fast and efficient if you just need to look whether a Youtube video has already been published previously. Please note that the Chinese search engine Baidu is not implemented here because it is filtering out Youtube content.

The Search tab allows to enhance a Twitter advanced search for keywords or hashtag using the since and until operators, either separately or together to query within a time interval, up to the minute. It translates automatically the calendar date, hour and minutes into an unix timestamp to facilitate the query, e.g. of first eyewitness pictures or videos within a time range just after a breaking news event. We have also added other features from Twitter advanced such geocode, near, from, language and various filter operators.

The Magnifier lens tab allows you to display an image through its url and to zoom or apply a magnifying lens on the image, or/and to enhance it through a bicubic algorithm to help you discover implicit knowledge such as written words, signs, banners ... You can either enter the image url, upload an image from your local drive with the local file button, or drag and drop an image in another tab within your browser and copy and paste the local url. Once the image is displayed from an url, you can also perform a Google, Yandex, Tineye and Baidu reverse image search on it or use the Image forensic service designed by ITI and DW in the Reveal European project. If you are using a local image or you have modified any image (sharp, flip, bicubic), you can either download your modified image or copy a new url to paste it in google images tab which opens in your browser (watch the video below). This feature also supports links of stored images in Dropbox and Google drive.

The Metadata tab allows you to check the Exif metadata of a picture in jpeg format or metadata of a vidéo in mp4/m4v format, either through a link either through a local file. If geocoordinates are available in the picture metadata, a geolocalise button is provided automatically pointing to this location on Google map.

The Video Rights tab provides access to the InVID Rights Management application. This service gets a link to a YouTube, Facebook or Twitter video and retrieves metadata about its rights, unless access is restricted by the content uploader or the social network. First of all it provides the user with a summary of the reuse conditions, as defined by the social network the video is published in. If other reuses are intended, it is recommended to contact the content uploader. This can be done directly or under the guidance of the InVID Rights Management Tool (through the provided links). The latter facilitates contacting the uploader, confirming authorship, or managing the negotiation of the reuse conditions. Alternatively, the Video Rights tab includes information about copyright exceptions if it is not possible to get consent from the author, as the use by the press exception or fair use/fair dealing.

The Forensic tab is an iframe opening the still images forensic service developed by CERTH-ITI in a previous european project on social media verification, Reveal.

The Contextual menu (opens after right clicking on an image or a video url) allows you to trigger functionalities of this plugin on a still image or on a youtube video link. On an image, a right click will propose you either to inspect more closely areas of the image using the Magnifier, to evaluate the image using the Forensics filters, or to launch a reverse image search using several search engines. On a video link, a right click will propose you under the InVID menu to trigger either InVID video analysis or the Youtube thumbnail reverse search (for a Youtube video).

Licence

This toolkit is provided in open source via GitHub ( https://github.com/AFP-Medialab/invid-verification-plugin/), under an MIT licence.

Download / Access the tool

Version history

Version 0.71 (Date of release: June 7, 2019): A redesign of the InVID verification plugin, which is now maintained and enhanced within the WeVerify H2020 project (under grant agreement N° 825297). This version includes: i) Facebook authentication in the Analysis feature to be able to process Facebook public videos, ii) Classroom and Interactive pages and iii) updated Tutorial (each feature has now a video tutorial in each language, available by clicking on the (i) button next to the corresponding tool).

Version 0.68 (Date of release: January 25, 2019): New beta release of the plugin, which contains some bug fixes that prevented the analysis of locally stored videos with the Keyframes tool.

Version 0.67 (Date of release: December 20, 2018): New beta release of the plugin, which i) integrates the Keyframes and Forensic tools directly through their APIs, ii) contains a crop function to the Magnifier, iii) is translated also in Spanish.

Version 0.66 (Date of release: October 29, 2018): New beta release of the plugin, which has some bugs fixed in the Magnifier and Metadata tools.

Version 0.65 (Date of release: October 8, 2018): New beta release of the plugin, which i) has some bugs fixed in the (Contextual) Analysis tool and ii) contains some improvements in the Metadata tool.

Version 0.64 (Date of release: September 14, 2018): New beta release of the plugin, which i) integrates the new Video Rights tool that enables the user to the check the video copyrights and ensure authorized video re-use, ii) includes the new and improved version of the (Contextual) Analysis tool, iii) contains a mechanism for handling "time_continue" YouTube URLs, and iv) allows better integration with Google analytics.

Version 0.62 (Date of release: July 13, 2018): New beta release of the plugin, which i) includes a GDPR-compatible cookie consent, ii) offers the Forensic functionality also via the contextual menu, iii) enables reverse image search using the KarmaDecay and the Bing search engines via the contextual menu, iv) has a bug fixed in the Contextual Analysis tool.

Version 0.60 (Date of release: January 31, 2018): Fixed bug in the Analysis tab of the plugin.

Version 0.59 (Date or release: January 26, 2018): New beta release of the plugin, which i) provides a new launch popup menu with two options to find out videos and images urls in the current page code (this is to help journalists identify the video link on Instagram, Vimeo, Liveleak... that can be opened in a new tab for download or directly used in the Keyframes features), ii) supports YouTube shorteners in all corresponding functions, iii) contains an enhanced contextual menu (with filters to avoid displaying a function that does not work properly), iv) offers a preview of picture for Metadata and support of Dropbox and GDrive URLs, v) includes a new API for Analysis with Twitter support, vi) integrates Tineye as reverse search engine in all tabs where reverse search is applied, vii) offers a link to timaanddate.com to " convert to local time " feature in Analysis, viii) enables filtering of YouTube URLs in the Thumbnails feature.

Version 0.58 (Date of release: November 20, 2017): New beta release of the plugin, which i) integrates an improved version of the video contextual verification tool that supports UTC time conversion, multilingual comment detection and verification and progressive display of results, ii) allows the application of reverse image search on YouTube thumbnails through the Bing engine, iii) includes an extended version of the video keyframe extraction tool that offers additional keyframes for reverse keyframe search, iv) provides an improved presentation of the collected image/video metadata, v) integrates Google Analytics for gathering information about its use (related privacy disclaimer has been added in the "About" tab), and vi) contains a tutorial that presents the functionalities of plugin.

Version 0.56 (Date of release: October 3, 2017): New beta release of the plugin, which i) contains a feedback mechanism (connected with a Slack channel) for instant reporting of issues regarding the functionality of the different components of the tool, ii) integrates a survey concerning the use of the tool, iii) offers the new "flip" filter of the Magnifier, that creates a mirrored instance of the given image and allows to download this instance or directly use it for reverse image search, and iv) permits the application of the Magnifier on images stored in Google drive (through the share link) or in Dropbox.

Version 0.55 (Date of release: August 4, 2017): New beta release of the plugin, which contains an updated version of the video fragmentation and keyframe reverse search component, and a newly added button in Metadata tab, that opens a Google Map centered on the geo coordinates of the image (if available)

Version 0.54 (Date of release: July 12, 2017): Open beta release of the plugin, which contains functionalities for contextual analysis, video fragmentation and keyframe/thumbnail reverse search, advanced Twitter search, image magnification, metadata analysis and forensic analysis.

Initial versions (v0.1-v0.5) of the plugin have been developed by AFP Medialab (Denis Teyssou, Jean-Michel Leung).

Contact

For any feedback (bugs, enhancement, suggestions) please email us at invid-verification-plugin@iti.gr.

Disclaimer

This software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringement. In no event shall the authors or copyright holders be liable for any claim, damages or other liability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising from, out of or in connection with the software or the use or other dealings in the software.

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InVID Verification Plugin - InVID project

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A verification "Swiss army knife" helping journalists to save time and be more efficient in their fact-checking and debunking tasks on social networks.

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We are the most comprehensive media bias resource on the internet. Don't be fooled by Fake News sources. Search Media Bias. View Fact Checks. Breaking News.

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Managing Editor and Publisher - Hartwell, GA (30643)Community Newspapers, Inc. WUNC Part-time Social Media Podcast Producer: Poetry Cafe - Chapel Hill, NC (27517)WUNC - FM Director, Program Management - Saint Petersburg, FL (33701)The Poynter Institute Misinformation and Fact-checking Reporter - Washington, DC (20001)The Poynter Institute PolitiFact Reporter - Washington, DC (20001)The Poynter Institute MULTI-PLATFORM JOURNALIST - Paducah, KY (42003)WPSD-TV, LLC.

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AllSides | Shows headlines and links to news stories from publications across the political spectrum

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AllSides | Shows headlines and links to news stories from publications across the political spectrum

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Shows headlines and links to news stories from publications across the political spectrum

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AllSides Headline Roundups™ bring you top news stories from the left, center and right of the political spectrum - side-by-side so you can see the full picture.

We rotate the order of headlines to avoid biasing our coverage in favor of the left, which otherwise would always be listed first.

Learn how AllSides provides balanced news

MSNBC (Left bias) announced it's canceling opinion commentator Mehdi Hasan's Sunday night show on Thursday, drawing opinions from journalists and media outlets. For Context: Hasan is known...

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AllSides | Balanced news via media bias ratings for an unbiased news perspective

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We use media bias ratings to provide balanced news, perspectives and issues across the political spectrum. Unbiased news coverage doesn't exist - there is no such thing as unbiased news or t

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Visualize the spread of information on Twitter.

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Checking the truth behind the political rhetoric.

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Fact-checking journalism is the heart of PolitiFact. Our core principles are independence, transparency, fairness, thorough reporting and clear writing. The reason we publish is to give citizens the information they need to govern themselves in a democracy.

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PolitiFact is a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others on its Truth-O-Meter.

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A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

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The definitive Internet reference source for researching urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.

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In the age of fake news, here's how schools are teaching kids to think like fact-checkers

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In the age of fake news, here's how schools are teaching kids to think like fact-checkers

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The photograph shows three malformed daisies, warped as if plucked from a Salvador Dali painting. An accompanying caption claims that the photo was taken near the site of the Fukushima nuclear explosion in Japan, noting, "This is what happens when flowers get nuclear birth defects."

In 2015, 170 American high-school students were asked a simple question: Does the photo provide evidence that the caption is true?

The image looked sketchy, to say the least. It was posted on Imgur, a photo-sharing platform, by a user with the handle "pleasegoogleShakerAamerpleasegoogleDavidKelly." It had no attribution as to the photographer, original publisher, or location. And yet, when asked whether the photo provided evidence that the Fukushima nuclear explosion caused malformations in daisies, nearly 40% of the students said yes. (As an aside, the photo was indeed real -but scientists say it's unlikely the malformations were caused by radiation.)

The experiment was part of a larger study conducted by researchers from Stanford University's History Education Group (HEG), who set out to measure what they called "civic online reasoning"-that is, young people's ability to judge the credibility of the information they find online. To do this, they designed 56 different assessments for students in middle schools, high schools, and colleges across 12 states. The researchers say they collected 7,804 student responses.

In their own words, the researchers initially found themselves "rejecting ideas for tasks because we thought they would be too easy"-in other words, that students would find it obvious whether or not information was reliable. They could not have been more wrong. After an initial pilot round, the researchers realized that most students lacked the basic ability to recognize credible information or partisan junk online, or to tell sponsored content apart from real articles. As the team later wrote in their ,"many assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally savvy about what they find there. Our work shows the opposite."

The Stanford study confirms what many teachers know to be true: Today's students are not prepared to deal with the flood of information coming at them from their various digital devices. The stakes of the problem are high. As the past few years have shown, biased reporting and outright fake news have the potential to impact elections and referendums or lead to tragic, real-life consequences, as with the online spread of the #Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which led to a shooting at a DC pizzeria by a man who was convinced that Hillary Clinton ran a child-trafficking ring there. As the Stanford researchers wrote in their report, "democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish."

Schools in states like California, , , , , and more are now at the center of a nascent effort to teach kids at a young age how to evaluate the stories they encounter online, as teachers, school districts, and nonprofits attempt to design curricula, apps, and assessments that can prepare students to become more critical consumers of information.

The lure of fake news

In the wake of the 2016 election, it's easy to think of the problem as a simple binary between real and fake news. If we could just teach kids to tell those two apart, the thinking goes, the problem would be solved.

But Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford University and the founder of HEG, says it's far more complicated than that. "'Fake news' conjures up Russian bots and troll farms in Saint Petersburg," he says. The real problem, he says, is "how do we know who is producing the information that we're consuming, and secondly, is that information reliable?"

For example, in Europe, there's Russia Today and Sputnik, two government-funded news outlets. Both spread fake stories or unsubstantiated rumors about European politicians and regularly "pump out gloom about Europe, cheer about Russia and boosterism for pro-Russian populist parties," according to The Economist (paywall). Russia Today and Sputnik may seem to have the trappings of respectability, with sizable newsrooms churning out content translated into five languages. But their articles are motivated by a government agenda.

Meanwhile, it's true that social media and the ubiquity of digital platforms have made spreading false or biased information easier. But the core issue isn't just technology-and neither can it be solved with better fake-news filters or algorithms. As Richard Hornik, director of overseas partnership programs at the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University, explains, "this is a human problem. This is us."

In other words, people seem to be irresistibly drawn to fake news. Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic that "Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories" because humans are drawn to those stories' sense of novelty and the strong emotions they elicit, from fear to disgust and surprise. As the authors of a large MIT study wrote in 2018, fake news does so well online "because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it."

What's more, "fake news is nothing new," says Kelly Mendoza, senior director for education programs at Common Sense Education, an educator-focused branch of the digital nonprofit Common Sense Media. In 1672, King Charles II of England issued a "Proclamation To Restrain the Spreading of False News." And during World War II, Nazi-run broadcasters spread fake news about the war to occupied people across Europe. As Jackie Mansky in Smithsonian, "[Fake news has] been part of the conversation as far back as the birth of the free press." Still, says Mendoza, "we are at a unique moment because when something was on print, it could only spread so far and wide ... And now, digitally, information can spread exponentially and it's really easy to spread something that's not true."

The real problem is that we haven't developed the skills to absorb, assess, and sort the unprecedented amounts of information coming from new technologies. We are letting our digital platforms, from our phones to our computers and social media, rule us. Or, as Wineburg says, "The tools right now have an upper hand."

The problem with checklists

At the policy level, several state legislatures, including New Mexico, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and California, have passed laws calling on schools to teach media and news literacy. But critics have said funding for these programs is in short supply, and teachers are already overworked.

Some private foundations and nonprofits like Common Sense Education have developed checklists and other kinds of resources for educators to teach their students how to spot fake or biased information online. Those checklists, including the (pdf) and the AAOCC criteria, focus on evaluating a given information source's authority, credibility, currency, and purpose. They provide up to 30 questions, like "Is the author qualified to write on the topic?" or "Does the writing use inflammatory or biased language?"

But some teachers say these resources aren't really helping their students. As Joanna Petrone, a teacher in California, in The Outline:

"To the extent that teachers and librarians have been training students to spot "fake news" and evaluate websites, we have been doing so using an outdated checklist approach that does more harm than good. Checklists...provide students with long lists of items for them to check off to verify a website as credible, but many of the items on the list can be poor indicators of reliability and even mislead students into a false sense of confidence in their own abilities to spot a lie."

For example, in a 2017 working paper, Wineburg and his colleague Sarah McGrew studied the fact-checking process of 10 PhD historians, 10 professional fact-checkers, and 25 Stanford University undergraduate students. They found that the professional fact-checkers were about twice as successful as historians at evaluating the trustworthiness of two different online sources on school bullying, and five times more successful than students.

The authors explained that fact-checkers practiced " lateral reading," meaning that they checked other available resources instead of staying only on the site at hand. That, they concluded, is a practice at odds with available fake-news checklists, which focus on the outward characteristics of a website, like its "about" page or its logo, and don't encourage students to look for outside sources. "Designating an author, throwing together a reference list, and making sure a site is free of typos doesn't confer credibility," they write. "When the Internet is characterized by polished web design, search engine optimization, and organizations vying to appear trustworthy, such guidelines create a false sense of security."

Moreover, as Petrone have pointed out, the checklists available to teachers often focus on abstract skills like critical thinking, which Wineburg says is not the right way to go. "The people who say 'all we need are critical thinkers,' I'm sorry, I could [...] raise Socrates from the dead and he still wouldn't know how to choose keywords, and he would know nothing about search engine optimization, and he would not know how to interpret the difference between a '.org' and a '.com.'"

Ultimately, as Petrone , 21st-century citizens need more than a checklist-they "need a functioning bullshit detector."

Building a bullshit detector

A better approach, according to experts like Hornik, would be to teach kids at a young age the skills of lateral learning, including how to "interrogate information instead of simply consuming it," "verify information before sharing it," "reject rank and popularity as a proxy for reliability," "understand that the sender of information is often not its source," and "acknowledge the implicit prejudices we all carry." Anything short of that is a waste of time and resources.

"There's been a lot of initiatives, there's a lot of money being spent, but I don't think it's being spent in the right places to do the right things," Hornik explains. He says more pilot programs need to be developed and tested for their efficacy by a "central clearing house" as part of a "national, coordinated effort."

In the short term, experts say schools should teach kids the basic skills of fact-checking and train teachers to apply that knowledge to classroom learning across every subject. Schools that offer some sort of news literacy curriculum usually do so as a standalone course, or as part of the school's civics curriculum. But fake news plagues every single field of study, from math to history to natural sciences, and schools need to think about how this problem affects every part of their curriculum. In a math class, this may mean teaching students how to recognize a deceptively-framed chart. In a history class, students might analyze war-time propaganda to learn how information can be weaponized.

Another possible model can be drawn from interdisciplinary programs that go beyond focusing on news literacy skills, showing students how search optimization and algorithms shape the content they see online and teaching them to recognize why their brains are more vulnerable to articles that trigger emotional responses. For example, in Ukraine, a nonprofit called IREX designed a program called Learn to Discern (L2D), which sought to train people to spot manipulative headlines and content and to look at the ownership structure of major newspapers in order to better understand "how the news media industry is structured and operates." In a follow-up assessment given to 412 people, the group found that there was a difference between those who took the L2D training and those in the control group who didn't. When shown some articles and asked to evaluate what was true and what was questionable, 63.8% of those who went through L2D answered correctly, compared to 56.5% of the control group.

As Hornik points out in an article for the Harvard Business Review, "That's not much improvement." But it's a start. After all, researchers at the Center of News Literacy at Stony Brook University found that the effects from their programming faded within a year of participants taking the course or training. (Though another more recent assessment found that the effects of the literacy curriculum did not fade over time.) The IREX assessment was conducted a year and a half after the initial training.

This bleeds into a larger question: How can we know how well any of these programs are working, and which ones are working the best? Experts differ in their answers-though they all agree that changing students' news consumption practices will take years. Says Wineburg: "We need the educational equivalent of the human genome project, which involved billions of dollars, a decade of work, thousands of scientists, and international cooperation."

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In the age of fake news, here's how schools are teaching kids to think like fact-checkers

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Fact-checkers practice "lateral reading"-meaning that they verify information by parsing a variety of resources.

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As the national attention to fake news and the debate over what to do about it continue, one place many are looking for solutions is in the classroom.

Since a recent Stanford study showed that students at practically all grade levels can't determine fake news from the real stuff, the push to teach media literacy has gained new momentum. The study showed that while students absorb media constantly, they often lack the critical thinking skills needed to tell fake news from the real stuff.

Teachers are taking up the challenge to change that. NPR Ed put out a social media call asking how educators are teaching fake news and media literacy, and we got a lot of responses. Here's a sampling from around the country:
Fake news "Simon Says"
In Scott Bedley's version of Simon Says, it's not those two magic words that keep you in the game, but deciding correctly whether a news story is real or not.

To start off the game, Bedley sends his fifth-graders at Plaza Vista School in Irvine, Calif., an article to read on their laptops. He gives them about three minutes to make their decision - they have to read the story carefully, examine its source and use their judgment. Those who think the article is false, stand up. The "true" believers stay in their seats.

Bedley says he's been trying to teach his students for a while to look carefully at what they're reading and where it comes from. He's got a seven-point checklist his students can follow:

1. Do you know who the source is, or was it created by a common or well-known source? Example National Geographic, Discovery, etc.
2. How does it compare to what you already know?
3. Does the information make sense? Do you understand the information?
4. Can you verify that the information agrees with three or more other sources that are also reliable?
5. Have experts in the field been connected to it or authored the information?
6. How current is the information?
7. Does it have a copyright?
Subtle changes
Bedley also teamed up recently with Todd Flory at Wheatland Elementary School in Wichita, Kan., to do a fake news challenge via Skype. Flory's fourth-graders chose two real articles and wrote a fake article of their own. Then, they presented them to Bedley's class in California.

The fifth-graders had four minutes to do some extra research based on the presentations, and then they decided which article out of the three were fake. Most importantly, they had to explain why they thought it was fake. Otherwise, no points.

Flory says writing the fake news article was more difficult for his students than they expected because they had to make it believable.

"It really hammered home the idea to them that fake news doesn't have to be too sensational," he says. "It can be a very subtle change, but that subtle change can have big consequences."

Every Friday, Flory's class participates in what he calls Genius Hour. His students propose a question to answer through online research. But before they took to the Internet, Flory had to walk his students through the steps: What are reliable and trusted websites? How do you effectively search on the Internet and verify information?

He uses Skype to connect his students with researchers and scientists from all over the world. He calls this "authentic research."

"It's so much more powerful for them to do some of this authentic research when they're able to hear from a scientist who's seeing firsthand the effects of climate change," Flory says. This year's class got to talk to a penguin scientist.

Flory says he's not only teaching his students effective media literacy skills; he is also helping them to be better citizens through global engagement and interaction.
Let them eat fake (news)
Remember Marie Antoinette and "Let them eat cake" - her famous line about the poor that got her in all that trouble?

Thing is, it never happened. Fake news!

For Diane Morey and her ninth-graders at Danvers High School in Danvers, Mass., that's a teachable moment.

"The media of the day didn't have Facebook, Twitter or partisan websites," Morey says. "But they did have pamphlets."

She shows her class cartoons and pamphlets from the French Revolutionary period that criticized Antoinette, and then discusses the conclusions that were made from those sources. She also includes a primary source: a letter written by Antoinette.

Morey says history is rich with examples of fake news, and since source analysis is the core of her lesson plans, she doesn't need a textbook.

"We don't study [history] to memorize Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI," she explains. "We're studying this because we can see this happening in the current-day political climate."

Morey encourages students to bring in examples of articles from today's news that don't ring true.

"Once you expose it to them," she says, "it's like a game for them, seeing, 'Hey, I'm not sure I can trust this.' "
Extra layers
For 13 years, Larry Ferlazzo has been teaching kids who are learning English how to read and write. Now, he's adding another layer: helping them figure out if what they're reading is true.

Ferlazzo teaches at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, Calif. He's also a blogger and journalist.

Last month, he wrote a lesson plan on addressing fake news to English language learners (ELLs), which was published in The New York Times.

He says media literacy is especially important for ELLs for two reasons. First, they're not fluent in the language they're reading, adding an extra level of difficulty in deciding what to believe. On top of that, false or exaggerated news about immigration could have a major impact on their lives.

His lesson starts off with a few examples of reliable and fake news. Then, some basic journalism stuff: Students identify the different parts of the news, from the "lede" to quotations. They enter all that into a diagram on paper so they have a visual representation of what they're reading.

That diagram eventually becomes a guide for students to write their own fake news lede that they can share with other classmates or post on a class blog.
Media consumers and contributors
In 2015, Spencer Brayton and his colleague Natasha Casey revamped a media literacy course for students at Blackburn College in Carlinville, Ill. Brayton says the key is the critical approach.

"Students come in expecting that we're going to lecture," Brayton explains. "But we have them think about certain power structures in how information is produced and how it reaches them. If they're going to understand how they're going to take it in, then they have to know how the news is going to be produced."

To take the class, students need a Twitter account. From the very first week, they are asked to follow five to 10 accounts on Twitter that promote media and information literacy, like Media Literacy Now or Renee Hobbs.

As they follow these posts and add additional ones, the goal is that they'll start to recognize fake news and other biases or viewpoints in media.

By the end of the course, Brayton says students begin to see themselves not only as creators of information, but as credible sources of information too.

The Twitter assignments encourage his students to engage with social media - retweeting, following and commenting - which Brayton says helps his students see how they play a role in spreading information to other media consumers. That means they have to take what they share more seriously.

"In looking at this issue, people seem to want a quick solution to fake news, but I'm not sure there is a solution (at least an easy one)," Brayton writes in an email. "Students need to recognize that these skills and ideas need to stay with them through adulthood, but that's easier said than done - we all fall into this trap."

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As the national attention to fake news and the debate over what to do about it continue, one place many are looking for solutions is in the classroom. Since a recent Stanford study showed that students at practically all grade levels can't determine fake news from the real stuff, the push to teach media literacy has gained new momentum.

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The Remedy for the Spread of Fake News? History Teachers

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The Remedy for the Spread of Fake News? History Teachers

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Few people would approach a complete stranger on the street for information about the pressing issues of the day, and yet that is just how many behave on the internet. In the wake of the 2016 election, reporting from Buzzfeed and other outlets has made it increasingly clear that the American voter is woefully lacking in the skills needed to judge the veracity of a news website. Among the many headlines from fake news websites were reports that Pope Francis endorsed President-elect Trump, that Hillary Clinton used a body double throughout the campaign and sold weapons to ISIS.

The founders and authors of these fake news promulgators craft their stories for the sole purpose of maximizing visitor hits to in turn generate massive revenue. Their deceptions play to readers' worst fears regardless of whether the writers themselves subscribe to the political leanings of the article's content. "It is not intended to pose an alternative truth," writes author Neal Gabler, "as if there could be such a thing, but to destroy truth altogether, to set us adrift in a world of belief without facts, a world where there is no defense against lies." In comparison with news outlets (and other sites) that offer ideologically biased takes on the most pressing issues of the day, fake news operations occupy a unique place on the web and constitute an obvious and menacing threat to unsuspecting visitors. The inability of so many readers to distinguish between the two, and knowing when to steer clear of a website altogether, is undoubtedly concerning.

For those of us on the frontlines of education, especially for history teachers, this problem is nothing new, given the ways in which the rise of the internet has transformed the teaching of the subject over the past 15 years. Students and teachers now have access to a vast amount of information about the past, but few know how to discern what is reliable and what is not.

The problem surfaced for me in 2001 when a student handed in a research paper on the early history of the Ku Klux Klan that minimized the level of racial violence during Reconstruction and characterized their relationship with black Southerners as overall positive. The sources were drawn almost entirely from websites published by individual Klan chapters. The student had not thought about the obvious bias of the website or whether it constituted a legitimate historical source. The experience served as an important learning experience for the students, but even more so for me.

Even as late as 2001, my students still relied primarily on printed materials compared to Internet sources. Librarians maintained control over new additions to the stacks, allowing for a certain level of quality control, but with each passing year the availability of faster personal computers, handheld devices and increased access to the web provided students with easier access to information about an ever-expanding number of historical subjects. Students and teachers benefited immensely from this increased access. Teachers could now introduce their students to a deep well of primary sources and historical figures that never made it into textbooks. Opportunities for students to conduct their own research through primary and secondary sources was soon limitless, defined only by the time they are willing to spend researching.

On the other hand, the technology quickly outpaced educators' ability to police or even guide students as to how best to search and assess online information. An unsubstantiated narrative, perpetuated by the media, that children are digital natives, naturally hardwired to understand how to use computers, helped to exacerbate the problem even further. Students were left to figure it out on their own as schools gradually cut back on the purchase of additional printed sources or purged their collections entirely. Where once librarians taught students how to research, few schools appreciated the important role they could play in educating students how to search and assess information on the Web. A recent study of Internet literacy among students by the Stanford History Education Group shows that they are incapable of "distinguishing advertisements from news articles or identifying where information came from."

There is no denying that access to primary sources from the Library of Congress and other research institutions, along with secondary sources from the scholarly community, has enriched the teaching of history, but their availability means little if they cannot be accessed or distinguished from the vast amount of misinformation that awaits the uneducated user online.

In 2008, George Mason University professor T. Mills Kelly created a course called "Lying About the Past" in which students were encouraged to create fake websites about a historical subject. Students worked on creating a fake Wikipedia page, blog, and videos about Edward Owens, a fictitious Virginia oyster fisherman who took up piracy in the Chesapeake Bay in the 1870s. This fake historical narrative was complemented by fake primary sources, including Owens's "legal will." Although the project was met with some skepticism and even more serious charges by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Kelly hoped his students "would become much more skeptical consumers of online information."

It's difficult to imagine a more effective method of driving home such an important lesson. In the years since Mills first taught the class, opportunities to publish and share information online has expanded even further through Facebook, YouTube and Twitter and blogging platforms such as WordPress and Medium. Opportunities to publish can be an empowering experience. History teachers who embrace these digital tools can shift from assignments that would never see the outside of their classroom's walls to projects that have the potential to reach a wide public audience. Educators can engage students about the ethical responsibilities related to how information should be published on the web.

But if the public is left unprepared and without the skills needed to determine what is real and what is suspect, there can be real consequences. Consider for instance the publication of Our Virginia: Past and Present a fourth-grade textbook written by Joy Masoff. First discovered by William and Mary historian Carol Sheriff, whose child was then in the fourth grade, the chapter on the Civil War included a statement that "thousands of Southerner blacks fought in Confederate ranks, including two battalions under the command of Stonewall Jackson." The myth of the Confederate black soldier is an insidious one, traced back to the late 1970s and a small group of Confederate heritage advocates who hoped to distance the history of the Confederacy from slavery. If black men fought as soldiers in the army, they argued, than it would be difficult to maintain that the Confederacy fought to protect and expand the institution of slavery. Not a single academic historian came forward in support of the textbook's claim. Later it was learned that Masoff had discovered the information on a website published by the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

There are thousands of websites published by individuals and organizations who believe black Confederate soldiers existed. Websites such as the Petersburg Express, for example, includes photographs and even primary sources that to the uneducated may appear legitimate. The purveyors of these stories often insist that they are providing a public service by uncovering accounts that academic historians have intentionally ignored. Regardless of the motivation for publishing the material in question, these websites present visitors with some of the same challenges as fake news sites.

The history classroom is an ideal place in which to teach students how to search and evaluate online information given the emphasis that is already placed on the careful reading and analysis of historical documents. Even the most basic guidelines can steer students away from misinformation. Consider the following questions next time you are researching online:

Is the site associated with a reputable institution like a museum, historical society or university?

Can you identify the individual or organization responsible for the site, and are the proper credentials displayed?

Then, finally, you have to examine the material itself. Is the information provided on the Web site, including text and images, properly cited? What can you discern from both the incoming and outgoing links to the site? Only then can you approach it with the same level of trust that you would a scholarly journal or piece of archival material.

History classrooms that emphasize the critical evaluation of bias and perspective in primary sources, along with the questions above, will also provide students of all ages with the necessary skills to evaluate the links that regularly appear in their Twitter and Facebook feeds. Healthy and well-deserved skepticism can go a long way.

The ease with which we can access and contribute to the web makes it possible for everyone to be his or her own historian, which is both a blessing and a curse. The internet is both a goldmine of information as well as a minefield of misinformation and distortion. Teaching our students how to discern the difference will not only help them steer clear of fake history and fake news, but reinforce the importance of a responsible and informed citizenry. In doing so, we strengthen the very pillars of democracy.

Kevin M. Levin is a historian and educator based in Boston. He is the author of Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder (2012) and is currently at work on Searching For Black Confederate Soldiers: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth for the University of North Carolina Press. You can find him online at Civil War Memory and Twitter @kevinlevin.

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The Remedy for the Spread of Fake News? History Teachers

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Few people would approach a complete stranger on the street for information about the pressing issues of the day, and yet that is just how many behave on the internet. In the wake of the 2016 election, reporting from Buzzfeed and other outlets has made it increasingly clear that the American voter is woefully lacking in the skills needed to judge the veracity of a news website.

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Center for Media Literacy | Empowerment through Education | CML MediaLit Kit ™ | | Empowerment through Education

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© 2014-2019 Stony Brook Center for News Literacy

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The News Literacy Project works with educators and journalists to give students the skills they need to discern fact from fiction and to know what to trust.

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National Association for Media Literacy Education

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National Association for Media Literacy Education

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The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) unites a community of educators committed to advancing media literacy education.

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Browse 1,000s of Lesson Plans, Classes, Digital Artifacts, Historical Events, and other NewseumED learning tools.

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In the age of digital information overload and the current divisive climate in the United States, discerning whether information you read is fact-based or fake can be tricky. As you scroll through social media, it's important to keep a keen, skeptical eye and an awareness of our own and others' bias. It's also critical to carefully consider wild claims and suspect sources. A well-known nonprofit, for example, may provide seemingly credible sourcing for a particular story, but lean toward their own agenda. A trusted news organization may have sponsored content-a.k.a native ads-peppered into its homepage, which can be tricky to spot. A website may look credible but be devoid of truth. The key is to identify objective news sources you trust and scrutinize content you come across. Think you can spot "fake news?" Take the quiz!

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In the age of digital information overload and the current divisive climate in the United States, discerning whether information you read is fact-based or fake can be tricky. As you scroll through social media, it's important to keep a keen, skeptical eye and an awareness of our own and others' bias.

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Learn the signs of online disinformation and internet trolls. The Spot the Troll quiz asks you to examine real social media profiles and posts and decide whether they are legitimate.

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Free digital citizenship curriculum and edtech ratings.

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Common Sense Education provides educators and students with the resources they need to harness the power of technology for learning and life. Find a free K-12 Digital Citizenship curriculum, reviews of popular EdTech apps, and resources for protecting student privacy.

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The COR curriculum provides free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.

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Free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.

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From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg in 14 Lessons

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From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg in 14 Lessons

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The full News Literacy course, developed at Stony Brook University, organizes the material into 8 concepts that are spread amongst our 14 week course that take 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.

Below, find a summary of each of those lessons, and a link to the most updated version of the teaching materials for each from our professors at Stony Brook University. Each of the following Course Packs include PowerPoint presentations, associated media, lecture notes, and recitation materials.

Our course structure changed in the Fall 2015 semester. The changes are outlined in our updated syllabus from that semester.

Lesson 1: Why News Literacy Matters

News Literacy Lesson 1 Course Pack - Updated SPRING 2016

In the wake of the latest information revolution, it is up to the consumer to determine whether information is reliable and whether to publish it.

Lesson 2: The Power of Information

Lesson 3: ...But is it True? Part 1

Journalists and scientists have a similar understanding of truth - a statement of probability that's proportional to the amount of available evidence and subject to an informal system of peer review.

The concept of provisional truth: Because journalism is a snapshot in time, journalistic truth evolves as new evidence emerges. The lesson for news consumers: Follow a story over time.

Context and transparency: Key concepts in the journey from fact to truth. Valuable news stories put information in context and are transparent about how reporters know what they know and don't know and why.

Truth is more likely to emerge when you look at a story from different perspectives. Journalists do that by trying to include the voices of all involved.

Lesson 4: But is it true? Part 2: Verification

Journalists pursue the truth by following a ranking of direct evidence that places the greatest value on photographs and videos, documents and records, personal observations and witnesses.

Seeing isn't always believing. News outlets and consumers must also verify the authenticity of visual journalism. How news organizations and consumers evaluate still images and videos.

Assessing the value of polls, surveys and studies. Understanding the science of polling and evaluating reports of scientific breakthroughs.

The battle between journalism's pursuit of the truth and digital-age business models: How the fight for page views, ratings and circulation can put journalistic values in peril.

Lesson 5: What Makes News Different?

Lesson 6: Fairness and Balance

Lesson 7: Who's Biased Now?

- Updated News Literacy Lesson 7 Course Pack Fall 2015

Lesson 8: Who Decides What's Newsworthy?

- Updated N ews Literacy Lesson 8 Course Pack Fall 2015

Lesson 9: The Medium is the Message

- Updated News Literacy Lesson 9 Course Pack Fall 2015

Newspapers and magazines still offer the most comprehensive coverage, but market forces, technological advances and demographic changes have dramatically reduced their resources and reach.

Radio has survived by maintaining an intimacy and immediacy and developing its own style of storytelling.

TV news is still the most powerful tool for following breaking news stories with compelling visuals, but it exists in an entertainment medium.

Lesson 10: The Medium is the Message - Part 2, Digital Media

N ews Literacy Lesson 10 Course Pack - Updated Spring 2015

News websites and search engines have broadened the reach of news consumers while presenting them with new challenges - information overload, questions of authenticity and confirmation bias - in their pursuit of reliable information. A key lesson: Ranking on search engines does not necessarily indicate the reliability of a website or piece of information found online.

The explosion of social media and the evolution of the news consumer from observer to news producer have brought not only a powerful level of engagement but also the proliferation of misinformation. Plus: How social media has been used in modern election campaigns.

Lesson 11: Says Who?

News Literacy Lesson 11 Course Pack - Updated Spring 2015

The decontruction process uses News Literacy concepts to analyze and dispassionately judge a report's reliability.

1. Summarize the main points: Do the headline and lead support them?

2. How close does the reporter come to opening the freezer? Is the evidence direct or indirect?

3. Evaluate the reliability of the sources using IMVAIN.

4. Is the reporter's work transparent? Does the reader learn what the reporter knows and does not know?

5. Does the reporter place the story in context, providing facts that surround an event or elements of a news story and provide meaning or significance?

6. Are the key questions answered? Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?

7. Is the story fair?

Lesson 12: Deconstructing The News

News Literacy Lesson 12 Course Pack - Updated Spring 2015

This 7-step deconstruction process uses News Literacy concepts to analyze and dispassionately judge a report's reliability.

1. Summarize the main points and then check if the headline and the lead support the main point(s) of the story?
2. How close does the reporter come to opening the freezer? Is the evidence direct or "arm's-length?"
3. Evaluate the reliability of the sources using IMVAIN.
4. Does the reporter make his or her work transparent?
5. Does the reporter place the story in context?
6. Are the key questions answered?
7. Is the story fair?

Students apply the principles of deconstruction to all forms of traditional media including video and audio news stories.

For video news, we analyze a series of "winners" and "sinners" and how you can tell the difference.

Lesson 13: Deconstructing Social Media

Students learn to recognize the power and gauge the reliability of social media posts and websites

A key lesson: Ranking on search engines does not necessarily indicate the reliability of a website or piece of information found online.

The advent of crowdsourcing and "citizen journalists" has created new opportunities and challenges for both news outlets and news consumers.

Lesson 14: News Literate You -- The Future of News

In the Digital Age, we are all publishers as well as news consumers. And with great power, comes great responsibility.

The advent of crowdsourcing and "citizen journalists" has created new opportunities and challenges for both news outlets and news consumers.

The Internet's disruption of traditional journalism business models has raised a key question: Who will pay for watchdog journalism in the Digital Age?

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From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg in 14 Lessons

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The full News Literacy course, developed at Stony Brook University, organizes the material into 8 concepts that are spread amongst our 14 week course that take students from the first information revolution of Johannes Gutenberg's printing press to the Digital Age of Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook.

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School Journalism's Curriculum and Lessons

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School Journalism's Curriculum and Lessons

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Media Literacy Resources: Navigating a Digital Society Media Literacy in 2018: Top Five Combating Apathy in an Era of "Fake News" and Standardized Testing Ancient Texts, Modern Media Literacy Beyoncé and Black History: Get in Formation Literature: A Portal to Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning
Understanding Media: How Messages Work
A free, self-directed course from Poynter. The course is for anyone who wants to become a critical media consumer.
Commentary vs. Journalism: Are journalists biased? Character Ed should link in lessons on Media Literacy and Digital Citizenship New Year's Resolution: Consume a Healthier News Diet Encouraging Lightbulb Moments: 'Single Stories' and the Lack of Diversity in the Media Making News Literacy a Trending Topic
Lesson Links
Diagnosing Propaganda Techniques in Campaign Ads: Civic Discourse and Media Literacy Lesson: is it News or Opinion?
American Press Institute's Introductory News Literacy Units
These are lightweight, general usage lesson plans for introducing students to how to read and understand news media and current events. While the Institute offers more specific and in-depth materials and ideas for promoting news literacy, these units provide a resource for the time-pressed teacher. Split into three units of one-to-two weeks each, the curriculum briefly overviews critical elements in news understanding and healthy processes for determining source information and bias. Individual lessons can be adapted and used to fit specific classroom needs.

CHECK
An infographic and accompanying lesson plan from The News Literacy Project give educators a way to apply news literacy to examples of information they or their students select.

Digital Collection of Short News Literacy Lessons
The News Literacy Project offers lesson plans to educators and others interested in news literacy on its Learn Channel.

Journalism Education Association - Understanding News Literacy
Developed by Megan Fromm for the Journalism Education Association and made possible through a grant from the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

Lesson: A Consumer's Guide to Sourcing in News Reports
An e-learning lesson teaching teens how to evaluate sourcing in a news story with Paul Saltzman of the Chicago Sun-Times.

Searchlights and Sunglasses
A free digital book and learning tool from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's Eric Newton. For specific ideas on how to teach news literacy in your classroom, check out the "learning layer" activity called " How do you know what to believe? "

Weekly Lesson Feed and Other Classroom Materials
Prepared by the Center for News Literacy at Stonybrook University.

Check It Out on the Web
Students need to know how to find accurate information on the Internet. By giving them the goal of learning about online newspapers, they can research a topic (putting their school newspaper online) as well as use Internet research techniques.
Curriculum Set 1
Day 1
News Literacy Lesson - Day One
News Literacy PowerPoint - Day One Key Word Note-taking Template

Day 2
News Literacy Lesson - Day Two
News Literacy PowerPoint - Day Two
Scavenger Hunt Bingo
Curriculum Set 2
The American Society of News Editors and the Journalism Education Association in partnership with the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute offer free news literacy lessons for English/language arts, science, math and social studies teachers to use in secondary-school classrooms. Funding for the project was provided by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.

ASNE and JEA worked with educators affiliated with the American Bar Association Division of Public Education, the National Council for the Social Studies, the National Council of Teachers of English, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the National Science Teachers Association to develop the lesson plans.

A Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 License allows teachers to adapt the lessons for educational purposes. Teachers can use the lessons as a springboard to incorporate news literacy skills into every academic discipline and help students learn critical-thinking skills for analyzing and judging the reliability of news and information in everyday problem-solving and real-life experiences.
English/Language Arts Model News Literacy Curriculum Math Model News Literacy Curriculum
PowerPoints Grades 7/8
Buffalo Blizzard
All the Ants Counting the Hungry
PowerPoints Grades 9/10
Verifying Probability in the News
Statistics in the News Discussion-Warmup Understanding the Distribution of a Set of Data Using Variation to Evaluate Statistics Scatter Plot Review Using the Regression Line to Make Predictions Science Model News Literacy Curriculum PowerPoints
Grades 9-10 Water In The United States Grades 11-12 Know Your News Social Studies Model News Literacy Curriculum

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Article Links Media Literacy Resources: Navigating a Digital Society Media Literacy in 2018: Top Five Combating Apathy in an Era of "Fake News" and Standardized Testing Ancient Texts, Modern Media Literacy Beyoncé and Black History: Get in Formation Literature: A Portal to Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning Understanding Media: How Messages Work A free, self-directed course from...

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Free Book: Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers

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Free Book: Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers

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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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Stony Brook Center for News Literacy Lesson Plans

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Stony Brook Center for News Literacy Lesson Plans

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Let's Get Started | Stony Brook Center for News Literacy

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News Literacy is a newly emerging academic discipline designed to teach students how to take skillful possession of their power as citizens by becoming perceptive news consumers. At a time when the digital revolution is spawning an unprecedented daily flood of information and disinformation, the course seeks to help students recognize the differences between fact and rumor.

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Fighting Fake News Lesson Plan from KQED Boston

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Fighting Fake News Lesson Plan from KQED Boston

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Educational Videos:

Navigating Digital Information series on YouTube teaches the audience fact-checking skills that journalists use to do their jobs - anyone can learn how to fact-check misinformation on the internet. Hosted by best-selling author and MediaWise Ambassador, John Green, this series was produced in partnership with Complexly, Green's production company and published on the @CrashCourse channel on YouTube.
MediaWise Voter Guide
The MediaWise Voter Project partnered with Complexly, best-selling author John Green's production company on a 2020 election guide for first-time voters called the MediaWise Voter Guide. It's an 8-part YouTube video series hosted by influencer Evelyn from the Internets. By watching this series, first-time voters learn how to navigate the confusing online information ecosystem of political news so they can feel confident they are informed with the facts when voting for the first time in November.
How to Vote In Every State
This is a 54-part, short-format video series on YouTube which teaches first-time voters (and really anyone!) how to register to vote and how to actually cast their ballot in their state. If you live in Texas, you watch the Texas video. If you live in Missouri, you watch the Missouri video, etc. This series was created in partnership with Complexly as well. It was recently updated to include more up-to-date information about the impact of coronavirus and voting as well.
Campus Correspondents TikTok Videos
The MediaWise Voter Project Campus Correspondents have produced 50 short-form (about 1:00 minute) fact-checking and media literacy videos teaching first-time voters how to find reliable information about the election to help combat voter suppression misinformation that is running rampant across platforms. Here is an example of a fact-checking video. Here is an example of a general media literacy tip video. You can find additional samples on our TikTok account here.

You'll also find their fact-checking videos from our friends at PolitiFact that are part of their 'Truth-o-Meter Minute' fact-checking series which are also super cool and performing well.
Animated Video Series:
MediaWise is producing a 4-part, 1-minute animated (cartoon-style) video series teaching digital media literacy tips to first-time voters. Through this popular social media video format, first-time voters will learn fact-checking skills including lateral reading, 3 key questions you can ask yourself to fact-check info on your feeds, and other helpful quick hit tips. There will be vertical and horizontal formats posted and promoted across platforms. This series launches the week of September 8. This series is supported by Becker Trust.
MediaWise PSA featuring many of our ambassadors: Stop the Spread of Coronavirus Misinformation
MediaWise for Seniors social media campaign links

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Our mission at MediaWise is to empower people of all ages to be more critical consumers of content online. We teach people key digital literacy skills to spot misinformation and disinformation so they can make decisions based on facts, not fiction. We believe that when facts prevail, democracy wins.

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How to Teach Your Students About Fake News

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How to Teach Your Students About Fake News

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How to Teach Your Students About Fake News - Lesson Plan | PBS LearningMedia

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Fake news is making news, and it’s a problem. This lesson gives students media literacy skills they need to navigate the media, including how to spot fake news.

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Evaluating Sources in a 'Post-Truth' World

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Evaluating Sources in a 'Post-Truth' World

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Fake news and the spread of misinformation: A research roundup

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Fake news and the spread of misinformation: A research roundup

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Fake news and the spread of misinformation: A research roundup

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This collection of research looks at the impact of fake news and other forms of misinformation, including fake Twitter images.

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Fake news and the spread of misinformation: A research roundup

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Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning

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Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning

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Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning

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

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Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

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Differentiate news sources to make the best decisions

Ad Fontes Media helps businesses, consumers, educators, and platforms navigate today's complex and dynamic news landscape. We provide data, tools, and educational resources for all stakeholders in quality news media.

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Home of the Media Bias Chart® - Ad Fontes Media rates the news for bias and reliability via a proven methodology and politically balanced...