In this article, Sullivan unpacks and analyzes the existence of and the problems surrounding fake news and the internet in the modern day United States. While most information professionals agree that fake news is a problem, some see it as a pattern that comes in waves while others may see it as an issue that many citizens do not acknowledge the true size of or even as a consequence of a lack of education. Either way, fake news is more than an issue of good news vs. bad news; it is a complex issue that, in the worst case scenario, is a threat to democracy. In terms of what information professionals can do about the issue, the first step is to be realistic and realize that there is only so much that can be done from the library staff’s position. Some people naturally have better instincts when parsing through news sources, while others will need help building those skills from the ground up. Long term, the best course of action is to increase research about fake news and its consequences. Short term, research guides, single session classes, and checklists for recognizing misinformation (all provided by the library) are common and accessible places to start.

This resource is a great place to start supporting the media literacy journey of your teenage child or a teenager around you. The Center for Parent and Teen Communication uses this article to lay down the basics: the difference between disinformation and misinformation, how disinformation is spread, and how to protect yourself and your teen against disinformation and misinformation. They lay out a series of questions you should ask yourself when encountering new information online from does the website URL look legitimate to what kind of reaction does the information elicit in you. They also give steps and resources for fact checking.

This resource is a great introductory resource into explaining how to critically think about the information we get online to kids and teens. An important part of the process is learning first yourself how to handle online news and having purposeful reactions to said news since kids and teens will learn first from the actions of the adults around them. The article further breaks down how to handle media literacy at different ages, including thinking about the maturity level of the child or teen and deciding how much responsibility they can handle online. With teens, the main ideas are to check in with the teens and allow them to express themselves to gauge their media literacy level and to encourage critical thinking.

In this article, Schulten offers a checklist of sorts for teaching and supporting media literacy in high schools and libraries. Starting big, the first point to focus on is the importance of media literacy. Once students get the bigger picture, teachers and librarians should encourage students to share their own thoughts on the topic and learn from their peers in the process while supplementing their learning journey with additional resources that are also supplied at the end of this article. Schulten also supplies questions for educators to use that encourage critical thinking with respect to media literacy.

Lisa Manganello, a high school librarian in New Jersey, shares how she promoted media literacy in classrooms around her school. Most teenagers get their news from social media, namely TikTok. While social media itself isn't inherently negative, the fact that these teenagers are not taught to identify misinformation is. Beyond frequently switching out informational posters and focusing on developing collections of books on media literacy, she also leads her classes in classes where they focus on identifying misleading and biased information across the internet and discussing what could improve the information delivery they study. She even guides them to critically think about images attached to articles and how the image can change the tone of the article. After identifying downfalls of news articles, she teachers her students how and where to find reliable and less biased information. Manganello also works with her school's teachers to support their media literacy in their everyday studies and lessons.

This article discusses how science-specific information literacy can support more general infromation literacy by teaching students suring their public education how to parse out information into fact versus fiction. Specifically, this article states that science educators have the power to support this literacy through regular instruction. Adults are expected to read, evaluate, and think critically about scientific information that they are unfamiliar with (i.e. COVID-19, vaccines, climate change, polution, etc.). Therefore, it is in the educators' best interest to teach children not to understand every field of science but to instead teach them to think critically about topics that may be unfamiliar to them. Media Literacy Now provides the areader with the supporting goals and methods to use to teach media literacy from a science point of view.

This article discusses one successful method for teaching information literacy to teens. The author of this article discusses teaching information and media literacy to a group of 10th and 11th grade students during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The method she used and found extremely effective was to lead the students in an assignment involving lateral reading. When describing the assignment, she refrained from calling the technique "lateral reading" and using words like "bias", only using these terms during the discussions following the assignment. The students where led to pick a news topic and find multiple articles covering said topic. They were then asked to identify any political or religious affiliations or any inconsistancies in facts reported. The class also had discussions about their findings, talking about their different observations and what made one resource more believable than others. To wrap up the assignment, the author notes one student talking about the benefit of the algorithm: when you learn what to trust, the algorithm learns too.

This article analyzes the results of a survey of older teens (16-18 years old) about their own perceived skill for using the internet to stay educated, how often they use different internet based outlets, and who they think is responsible for hindering the spread of misinformation. The results found that, in general, the students tended to inflate their own ability to identify reliable versus unreliable sources. Most popular methods for teaching media literacy are effective, but the authors of this article suggest additional steps educators and information specialists can take to further support and supplement media literacy among teens and young adults. These supplemental steps are to help students acknowledge and build their attention capacity, make students aware that they may overestimate their ability to identify misinformation, and to support media literacy not just in terms of news or social media but also in other academic fields.

This article outlines a program used to highlight the importance of identifying misinformation and disinformation. The program features a fake crime scene set up with a case file of information related to the case. The crime scene and case file both contain unintertionally and intentionally false and misleading information. Patrons were given information related to the crime scene that would typically be public infromation during a real crimi scene, then split into groups and allowed to investigate the crime scene, and lastly, led away from the scene where they were given "confidential" infromation on the crime. As groups converse, staff members record their final theories on a white board. Right before the end of the program, staff reveal the truth behind the crime, identifying the misinformation and disinformation and talking about how it affected the investigations.

This article compiles the resources and methods that Diana Laughlin, a librarian in Colorado, used to teach a media literacy lesson at a high school outreach program. She uses a mix of general media resources like TED talks and BuzzFeed and local resources like news articles from local news stations to teach the importance of looking critically at online information. Laughlin ackowledges that this topic has been politicized, but that covering media literacy regardless of the opinions of the participants is a crucial lesson to learn.

In this article, Calvert and Jonsson give tips on how to handle a patron relaying misinformation casually in the library. While programming can be utalized to combat dis/misinformation, the patrons whose media literacy needs intervention may not sign up for or attend the program that focuses on the media literacy element. Even in casual conversation, there are phrase library professionals can use that will help patrons reframe how they process information they see or hear in everyday life. This source also provides further resources on indetifying and combating misinformation.

In this updated version of Teaching Media Literacy, De Abreu discusses the rise in importance of media literacy education that came with the rise in popularity of the internet and, in particular, social media. This book is broken into three parts. Part 1 focuses on the basics of media literacy: critical thinking, social media's role in infromation delivery, biases and misrepresentation in media, media literacy from a global perspective, and media literacy's role in civil change. Part 2 focuses on teaching media literacy. The author provides lesson plans that offer a broad look at media literacy, discussing large platforms and emerging outlets that students are likely to run into and how to analyze these platforms. Part 3 provides further resources to help the students expand their knowledge of media literacy past the basics. Overall, this book offers a modern view of media literacy education that takes into account modern situations and builds off of them.