Students Reject 'Fake News' To Write Footnoted, Neutral Wikipedia Entries : NPR Ed Fake news has been, well, in the news a lot lately. But for the world's largest crowdsourced encyclopedia, it's nothing new. "Wikipedia has been dealing with fake news since it started 16 years ago," notes LiAnna Davis, deputy director of the Wiki Education Foundation. To combat misinformation, Wikipedia has developed a robust corps of volunteer editors. Today, educators are among those more concerned than ever with standards of truth and evidence and with the lightning-fast spread of misinformation online. The foundation gives professors the technical assistance they need to assign students, instead of writing a research paper, to write a brand-new Wikipedia entry, or expand an existing entry, on any topic in virtually any discipline. This spring, 7,500 students are expected to participate. Since the program began six years ago, Davis says, students have collectively added more than 25 million words of content to Wikipedia. There's another learning opportunity too.
for Schools | AllSides Preparing students to participate thoughtfully in democracy - and in life. Students need to learn how to sort through mass media and social networks, think critically about the issues, and engage with each other in a healthy and positive way, even when there are differences in opinions and backgrounds. AllSides for Schools helps educators teach these valuable lessons and skills. With its unique focus on maintaining healthy relationships and revealing multiple points of view across the political spectrum, it also avoids the potential problems around bias or disrespecting individual beliefs. Let's teach the next generation how to see diverse perspectives, value differences and benefit from everyone’s best ideas. Contact Us to Sign-Up See Overview of School Program Elections and Relationships The climate for elections and political issues is so divisive, how can classrooms discuss hot-button issues effectively and with mutual understanding? Relationships First Dictionary Term Lesson Plan
Blue Feed, Red Feed What is this? Recent posts from sources where the majority of shared articles aligned “very liberal” (blue, on the left) and “very conservative” (red, on the right) in a large Facebook study. In 2015, the journal Science published a research paper by Facebook scientists (Bakshy, Eytan; Messing, Solomon; Adamic, Lada, 2015, “Replication Data for: Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook”, Harvard Dataverse, V2) which looked at how a subset of the social network’s users reacted to the news appearing in their feeds. For six months, Facebook tracked and analyzed the content shared by 10.1 million of its users (who were anonymized). These users had identified their political views in their own profiles on Facebook. For a site appearing in the Journal’s red feed, a majority of the articles shared from it were classified in the study as “very conservatively aligned.” Are you saying these sources are conservative and liberal? No. No.
Fake Facebook News Sites to Avoid As Facebook and now Google face scrutiny for promoting fake news stories, Melissa Zimdars, a communication and media professor from Merrimack College in Massachusetts, has compiled a handy list of websites you should think twice about trusting. “Below is a list of fake, false, regularly misleading, and otherwise questionable ‘news’ organizations that are commonly shared on Facebook and other social media sites,” Zimdars explains. “Many of these websites rely on ‘outrage’ by using distorted headlines and decontextualized or dubious information in order to generate likes, shares, and profits.” Be warned: Zimdars’s list is expansive in scope, and stretches beyond the bootleg sites (many of them headquartered in Macedonia) that write fake news for the sole reason of selling advertisements. She also includes some helpful tips for spotting fake news: • Watch out if known/reputable news sites are not also reporting on the story.
A Fragile Trust | Jayson Blair Plagiarism Scandal | Independent Lens Film Credits A Film by Samantha Grant Co-Produced by Brittney Shepherd Edited by Richard Levien Music by Justin Melland Director/Producer/Editor Samantha Grant Associate Producer Jessica Jones Cinematography by Singeli Agnew Jason Blalock Charlotte Buchen Julie Caine Joshua Fisher Joelle Jaffe Stephanie Johnes Mark Rublee Austin De Besche Additional Camera Todd Dayton Brian Pollack Winnie Wong Alexandra Cummings Title Design and Motion Graphics Mike Nicholson Hand Drawn Animations by Stuart Langfield Assistant Editor Jason Sussberg Additional Graphics Ryan Padgett Jake Mendez Color Finishing by Gary Coates Sound Edit and Mix Philip Perkins Online Editor Heather Weaver Production Assistants Savanna Salter Creative Advisors Jon Else Deborah Hoffman Story Consultants Karen Everett New Doc Editing Ezra Edelman Suze Allen Jean-Philippe Boucicaut Adam Keker Jamie Meltzer Actor Sinclair Swan Transcribers Sophia Emigh Jayesh Parmar Legal Justine Jacob Richard J. Bookkeeping Juliet Mason Carol Wallace
Fake News, Misinformation, and Propaganda Skip to main content Fake News, Misinformation, and Propaganda This page provides background information, links, and tools from outside organizations to help guide users in navigating potential fake news A Visual Take Library Resources Using library databases is a near-foolproof way to find credible information. News databases: U.S. government information and background: Background Reports from Harvard and other universities: Fake news and the spread of misinformation From the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, links to peer-reviewed articles. NiemanReports: Election '16: Lessons for Journalism From the Nieman Foundation at Harvard; several articles on fake news and news literacy Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning Stanford University study on high school and college students (lack of) news literacy Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content: How News Websites Spread (and Debunk) Online Rumors, Unverified Claims and Misinformation Selected News Articles: Poynter
Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world We were guaranteed a free press, We were not guaranteed a neutral or a true press. We can celebrate the journalistic freedom to publish without interference from the state. We can also celebrate our freedom to share multiple stories through multiple lenses. But it has always been up to the reader or viewer to make the reliability and credibility decisions. News literacy is complicated. Professional journalists themselves face new practical and ethical challenges relating to anonymity, privacy and safety, as well as reliability in their attempts to verify sources of breaking news from social media and user-generated content in all media formats. Even news that is vetted by editors and publishers sometimes emerges from that process a bit processed, perhaps leaning in a particular direction. And word choice itself is connected to truth. On news literacy In its glossary, Stony Brook University’s Center for News Literacy defines news literacy as: Our kids need new types of filters. Fake news
10 Ways to Spot a Fake News Article - EasyBib Blog For many of us, 2016 is going down as a year to forget. Election upsets, Zika, the Syrian crisis, and unfortunately tons of fake news about all of the above and everything in between. Denzel Washington was recently quoted as saying, “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. 1. Links and citations allow us to easily access, read, and explore more about the information found in the article. Many big name news sites, such as CNN, do not include links or citations, but other sites do. 2. An article without an author’s name is another red flag. 3. Do a Google search on the author’s name to find their occupation and locate other articles that the author has composed. 4. On the top or bottom of most websites, you should see a section titled “About Us.” 5. Authors tend to read and re-read their articles numerous times prior to posting. 6. Copy and paste a quote from the article into Google’s search bar. 7. Do a simple keyword search on Google for a similar article. 8. 9. 10.
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? Large portions of the students - at times as much as 80 or 90 percent - had trouble judging the credibility of the news they read. 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? MCEVERS: So what do you think can be done about this? WINEBURG: We simply have not caught up to the way these sources of information are influencing the kinds of conceptions that we develop on a day-to-day basis. But what happens when they leave school and they take out their phone and they look at their Twitter feed? WINEBURG: Exactly.
Mark Zuckerberg Addresses Fake News On Facebook Some have criticized Facebook for being a platform that allowed fake news to spread. Following the criticism, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg released plans to combat fake news on the site. Here's a headline for you - "Pope Francis Shocks The World, Endorses Donald Trump." DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Hey, Linda. WERTHEIMER: So how big was the problem of fake news in this election season, do you think? FOLKENFLIK: We don't exactly know. WERTHEIMER: Well, Mark Zuckerberg seems to want it both ways. FOLKENFLIK: Well, until recently, I think he took an extremely disingenuous stance, which was that he said that Facebook was a platform but not a publisher. At the moment, he's saying hey, you know, we're going to change our algorithms, we're going to figure out ways to flag things more readily, we're going to go with outside outfits that fact-check stories, perhaps like Snopes or PolitiFact or others, and also to strip out the economic incentive for companies that have popped up to do so.
Barack Obama: Fake News On Facebook Hurts Democracy | The Huffington Post School Libraries Fight Fake News Fake news has been all over the real news lately. From Mark Zuckerburg to Pizzagate, fake news is a huge problem, and it’s not going away on its own. According to a recent study from Stanford University, approximately 80 percent of students struggled to evaluate the credibility of an online resource. Based on the recent surge of fake news and the results of the Stanford study, we decided to overhaul our website evaluation lessons by doing the following: Changing website evaluation to resource evaluation. Fake news has always been around, but now it feels more threatening. Completed worksheet from the Stanford study Author: Mica Johnson I’m a school librarian at Farragut Middle. Like this: Like Loading... Categories: Blog Topics, Community/Teacher Collaboration, Technology
“Factitious” Is An Online Game To Teach About Fake News Factitious is an engaging online game to teach about fake news. It could be a fun activity to do to finish-up a more extensive lesson on the topic. You can learn more about it at NPR’s article, To Test Your Fake News Judgment, Play This Game. You can also find lots of resources on teaching about fake news at The Best Tools & Lessons For Teaching Information Literacy, including the lesson plan I did for The NY Times. Related Three New Resources On "Fake News" & Information Literacy Here are three new additions to The Best Tools & Lessons For Teaching Information Literacy – Help Me Find More: Fake news – a lesson plan is from The Teacher James, and is for ELLs. 9 lessons to boost media literacy is by Frank Baker. June 2, 2017 In "teacher resources" Useful Resources On "Fake News," Including An NPR Story Highlighting My Lesson
If you've fallen prey to fake news, you're not alone | The News Literacy Project We can help With so many different types of content masquerading as news, it’s often hard to tell what's fact and what's fiction. There's been a lot of talk about fake news — fabricated stories, designed to resemble legitimate news reports, that are created to go viral and generate digital advertising revenue. Thanks to social media, these falsehoods can spread faster — and farther — than ever. Train your brain to spot fake news Double-check the source Is it a news organization you recognize and trust? Remember: Many fake news purveyors create sites that resemble those of actual news outlets. Be aware of your reaction Does the content provoke a strong emotional response, such as outrage, fear or curiosity? Remember: Fake news and other forms of viral misinformation are often designed to capitalize on our natural tendency to be less skeptical of information that, for whatever reason, we want to be true. Watch for red flags Does the headline use excessive punctuation??!?!!? Want to learn more?