GO TenQuestionsForFakeNewsFINAL. Stanford Study Finds Most Students Vulnerable To Fake News. NPR's Kelly McEvers talks to Professor Sam Wineburg about his study that tested over 7,800 teenagers about their ability to differentiate fake from real news and sponsored ads from news articles. How do kids and teenagers perceive what they read online?
Can they tell real news apart from fake news or ads? A new study from Stanford University asked more than 7,800 students to evaluate online articles and news sources. And the results, says lead author Sam Wineburg, are bleak. Large portions of the students - at times as much as 80 or 90 percent - had trouble judging the credibility of the news they read. Wineburg is a professor of education and history at Stanford, and I asked him earlier today to describe one of the tests they used. SAM WINEBURG: We showed them a picture of daisies that looked like they were deformed. And we asked students, is - does this photograph provide proof that the kind of nuclear disaster caused these aberrations in nature? WINEBURG: Exactly. WINEBURG: Thank you.
Many Americans Believe Fake News Is Sowing Confusion. In the wake of the 2016 election, everyone from President Obama to Pope Francis has raised concerns about fake news and the potential impact on both political life and innocent individuals. Some fake news has been widely shared, and so-called “pizzagate” stories led a North Carolina man to bring a gun into a popular Washington, D.C. pizza restaurant under the impression that it was hiding a child prostitution ring.
According to a new survey by Pew Research Center, most Americans suspect that made-up news is having an impact. About two-in-three U.S. adults (64%) say fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events. This sense is shared widely across incomes, education levels, partisan affiliations and most other demographic characteristics.
These results come from a survey of 1,002 U.S. adults conducted from Dec. 1 to 4, 2016. And some Americans say they themselves have shared fake news. Start with a Question: What should educators do about fake news? The fake news phenomenon has been developing alongside the growth of social media for years, but it is getting more attention presently because of the important role accurate and inaccurate information can play in a presidential election. Since 50% of young adults get their news primarily online, and teachers observe their younger students doing the same, many educators have growing concerns about their students' abilities to identify the real from the fake news on the internet. The most alarming statistics came recently from the Stanford Graduate School of Education. As reported by the Wall Street Journal, 82% of middle schoolers were unable to distinguish between "sponsored content" and a real news story on a website. When these young learners do academic research and find out about the broader world through the internet, are they be able to tell the difference between real and fake?
Here are a few resources that educators can use to get started: 1. 2. Can You Spot the Liar? 9: Other Stories From This Source Are Incredulous - 10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Story | HowStuffWorks. Our list of fake websites was by no means exhaustive, and new ones open up every week. So how can you tell if a site is reliable if it's not on any list of fake websites? One way is to do a quick scan of some of the headlines and first few paragraphs of other stories on the site. Let's say you're interested in a story with the headline, "President Obama Suffers Heart Attack.
" That certainly sounds plausible. But if some of the other headlines on the site read "Grandmother Mates with Croc," "9-Year-Old Accidentally Discovers Cure for Cancer" and "Sky Over Oklahoma City Actually Rains Cats and Dogs," you should be wary. Of course, the other headlines may not be quite that fantastical. Still, if you take a good look at the other stories, you'll get a sense of the seriousness of the publication, which is a good indication of its integrity. Can You Tell Fake News From Real? Study Finds Students Have 'Dismaying' Inability.
Stanford researchers assessed students from middle school to college and found they struggled to distinguish ads from articles, neutral sources from biased ones and fake accounts from real ones. Gary Waters/Ikon Images/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Gary Waters/Ikon Images/Getty Images Stanford researchers assessed students from middle school to college and found they struggled to distinguish ads from articles, neutral sources from biased ones and fake accounts from real ones.
If the children are the future, the future might be very ill-informed. That's one implication of a new study from Stanford researchers that evaluated students' ability to assess information sources and described the results as "dismaying," "bleak" and "[a] threat to democracy. " As content creators and social media platforms grapple with the fake news crisis, the study highlights the other side of the equation: What it looks like when readers are duped.
"The photograph had no attribution. How To Spot A Fake News Story. The rise and proliferation of fake news stories has been much discussed lately. Some claim the wild and reckless distribution of baseless stories about Hillary Clinton swung the election to her opponent. There may be some truth in that. But fake news stories had been around long before election 2016.
Indeed, the idea of making stuff up and passing it off as journalist quality news goes all the way back to the advent of the tabloids. What has most alarmed people about fake news stories is their presence on social media. More and more people are getting information about politics, society, and the world in general on sites such as Facebook, Buzzfeed, and Twitter. Facebook has gotten the lion’s share of grief over this phenomenon. I have personally seen FB postings that contain links to the stupidest and most outrageous stories imaginable. Fake news stories do not lure the non-educated exclusively. It takes some cleverness to give absurdity the veneer of intellectual respectability. What Are You Doing to Teach Students to Spot Fake News Stories? | CTQ #CTQCollab. Posted by Bill Ferriter on Sunday, 11/20/2016 One of the most interesting conversations currently taking place around Donald Trump's surprise victory in our Presidential election has been the role that fake news peddled and promoted in Facebook news streams may have played in swaying voters.
Mark Zuckerberg -- Facebook's charismatic founder -- has called the notion that fake news is a problem on his site "a pretty crazy idea" and argued that a clear process is in place that allows users to flag suspicious or hateful content for further review. But that position was openly challenged over and over again all week long. Buzzfeed, a popular online source covering digital media and technology, opened the criticism by publishing the frightening results of an analysis of the election stories generating the most engagement -- think likes, shares and comments -- on Facebook in the final three months of the election. Turns out, the process isn't consistent, thorough or reliable. It's not pretty: Aisha Sultan: Teaching children how to spot real news from fake news | Aisha Sultan.
There’s a mild-mannered warrior in the front lines of the propaganda wars. Kylie Peters, a librarian in the Chicago area, has been concerned about the rise of so-called “fake news”: deliberately false stories made to appear factual, designed to sway public opinion. “Librarians are the original search engine,” said Peters, who works at Geneva Public Library in suburban Chicago. A recent analysis showed that fake or hoax stories got more reader engagement on Facebook than real news stories during the last three months of the election. “People think they don’t need libraries because of Google. In fact, they need us more than ever to help them combat information overload, and sort and evaluate the current glut of information,” Peters wrote in a recent Facebook post. She shared strategies for identifying false information and biases, noting that biases are not always bad — as long as you know what they are. “Your first stop when you visit an unfamiliar website should be the ‘about’ page.