factitious How to outsmart fake news in your Facebook feed It doesn't have to be this way. Fake news is actually really easy to spot -- if you know how. Consider this your New Media Literacy Guide. 1. Does the story come from a strange URL? Zimdars says sites with strange suffixes like ".co" or ".su," or that are hosted by third party platforms like WordPress should raise a red flag. 2. Mantzarlis says one of the biggest reasons bogus news spreads on Facebook is because people get sucked in by a headline and don't bother to click through. Just this week, several dubious organizations circulated a story about Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi. However, the articles themselves didn't contain that quote nor evidence that Pepsi's stock saw a significant drop (it didn't). 3. Sometimes legitimate news stories can be twisted and resurrected years after the fact to create a false conflation of events. A blog called Viral Liberty recently reported that Ford had moved production of some of their trucks from Mexico to Ohio because of Donald Trump's election win. 4. 5.
Fake News Is Here: Help Students Detect It We highly recommend that teachers explore a New York Times Learning Network article (1/19/17) sharing many lesson ideas and resources (including this post): Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post-Truth’ World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News. Also see this MindShift story (2/16/17) highlighting some ways that teachers across the USA are helping students close-read news/information for accuracy. By Frank W. Baker “Dewey Defeats Truman” read the large-type headline on the front page of The Chicago Daily Tribune for the issue published the night of the 1948 presidential election. The paper went to press before the final votes were counted. That famous incident was not fake news. GOP nominee Donald Trump was fond of repeating his plan to deport illegal immigrants, and the Boston Globe newspaper (a decidedly anti-Trump paper) decided to show readers what a future Trump presidency might mean. A tweet from the Globe called it “the front page we hope we never have to print.” 1. More help:
Skills and Strategies | Fake News vs. Real News: Determining the Reliability of Sources - The New York Times Video and a related lesson plan from TEDEd. Update: Please also see our new, 2017 lesson, Evaluating Sources in a ‘Post-Truth’ World: Ideas for Teaching and Learning About Fake News _________ How do you know if something you read is true? Why should you care? We pose these questions this week in honor of News Engagement Day on Oct. 6, and try to answer them with resources from The Times as well as from Edutopia, the Center for News Literacy, TEDEd and the NewseumEd. Although we doubt we need to convince teachers that this skill is important, we like the way Peter Adams from the News Literacy Project frames it in a post for Edutopia. As he points out, every teacher is familiar with “digital natives” and the way they seem to have been born with the ability to use technology. Below, a roundup of tools, questions, activities and case studies we hope can help reduce this digital naïveté. Getting Started: What is News Literacy and Why Do You Need It? Video and a related lesson plan from TEDEd. 2.
Veles, Macedonia one center producing fake news for $ ( 2 clicks) In the weeks following the 2016 presidential election, pundits, politicians and tech titans all sought to figure out whether fake news had affected the outcome. Hillary Clinton publicly castigated the "guys over in Macedonia who are running these fake news sites," and suggested they may have been working with Russia. The New Yorker reported that President Obama spent a day after Trump's victory talking "almost obsessively" with advisers about the stories coming out of Veles.
We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned : All Tech Considered "The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right." Fanatic Studio/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Fanatic Studio/Getty Images "The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right." A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the election. We wondered who was behind that story and why it was written. We tried to look up who owned it and hit a wall. By day, John Jansen is head of engineering at Master-McNeil Inc., a tech company in Berkeley, Calif. Jansen started by looking at the site's history. Jansen is kind of like an archaeologist. The "Denver Guardian" was built and designed using a pretty common platform — WordPress. "That was sort of the thread that started to unravel everything," Jansen says. The sites include NationalReport.net, USAToday.com.co, WashingtonPost.com.co. Interview Highlights Yes. Can I ask who?
Ultimate Guide to Fake News: 27 of the Worst Fake News Sources If you spent any manner of time on the Internet in 2016, you probably noticed the term “fake news” being thrown around. It seems that the events of 2016 helped fuel an epidemic of the writing, posting, and sharing of articles posing as factual news releases. In reality, they were nothing more than clickbait attempts at generating revenue through the spreading of nearly unbelievable stories that captivated the emotions of many. It’s never fun when you read something awe-inspiring online and then find out later that you were tricked into believing something entirely untrue. So how do you combat this? Let’s start with the basics: what is Fake News? Fake news is a deliberately untrue published article that uses ideas and misconceptions that people want to hear or will share. The main thing to remember is that fake news is meant to trick the person reading it. Fake news is not the same as an honest mistake in the research and writing process, nor is it meant as social commentary. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Ken Paxton makes unfounded claim that Barack Obama used DACA to 'unilaterally confer' citizenship | PolitiFact Texas The lead lawyer for Texas state government hailed President Donald Trump’s rescission of predecessor Barack Obama’s move affording young unauthorized immigrants, sometimes called "Dreamers," renewable shields from deportation. Moreover, Attorney General Ken Paxton charged in a Sept. 5, 2017, press release, Obama "used that lawful-presence dispensation to unilaterally confer U.S. citizenship." A reader asked us to check on that. In his release, Paxton said the program that Trump gave Congress six months to restore granted lawful presence and work permits to nearly a million "unlawfully present aliens." That's close to solid. Yet citizenship wasn’t a declared offering via DACA. Iowa senator touts figures So, what citizenship provision was Paxton talking about? A web search led us to a Sept. 1, 2017, press release from Sen. As of Aug. 21, 2017, Grassley’s release said, 45,447 DACA recipients had been approved for "advance parole" with 3,993 applicants getting applications denied. Our ruling
Digital content — finding, evaluating, using and creating it | Services to Schools Finding information is an important component of digital literacy. Finding digital content that is meaningful is about: employing various search strategies to help source quality information using multiple search engines to challenge personal filter bubbles using written, visual, and audio resources to navigate information in a variety of modes collecting a range of information that can then be evaluated to meet your requirements. Planning Before you begin searching for relevant digital content, consider: what is the inquiry question you are trying to answer or topic you are exploring the information you already have what information you need the type of information you need, for example, an overview, detailed analysis/research, or statistics how much information you need — what gaps are there in your knowledge. Effective searching for digital content You find better results using precise keywords and search strategies. This guidance provides useful information about effective searching:
How To Spot Fake News Critical thinking is a key skill in media and information literacy, and the mission of libraries is to educate and advocate its importance. Discussions about fake news has led to a new focus on media literacy more broadly, and the role of libraries and other education institutions in providing this. When Oxford Dictionaries announced post-truth was Word of the Year 2016, we as librarians realise action is needed to educate and advocate for critical thinking – a crucial skill when navigating the information society. IFLA has made this infographic with eight simple steps (based on FactCheck.org’s 2016 article How to Spot Fake News) to discover the verifiability of a given news-piece in front of you. Download the infographic Translations If you would like to translate the infographic into your language, please contact us.
Prolific fake news writer Paul Horner dead at 38 Professional hoaxster Paul Horner, who made a name for himself as a satirist and fake news impresario years before it became a focus of the 2016 presidential campaign, has died. The Arizona Republic reported on Sept. 26, 2017, that Horner, 38, died in Laveen, Ariz., on Sept. 18. The Maricopa County Office of the Medical Examiner confirmed to PolitiFact that the agency was investigating Horner’s death, but that final reports can take 3 to 6 months to complete. Horner ran a string of websites that often looked deceptively like mainstream news organizations. Formerly a writer at fake news site NationalReport.net, Horner is credited with authoring stories ranging from Bill Murray running for president to President Barack Obama opening a Muslim museum to Banksy getting arrested. We mentioned Horner specifically when we named Fake News our 2016 Lie of the Year. His stories also used the name Paul Horner as a source, or made some reference to an individual with that name.
Everyone Has Invisible Bias. This Lesson Shows Students How to Recognize It. Last year, an English teacher at my school came to me with an all-too-common concern about an essay a student named Kyle had just turned in. The teacher’s 10th grade class had just finished op-ed essays on a topic of their choice, and Kyle had chosen to examine the economic impact of illegal immigration on the U.S. economy. But in his submitted draft every source in his bibliography—and I do mean every—leaned toward one political bias, and sometimes quite heavily. “It happened again,” lamented my colleague. Despite directing the class to consult disparate points of view and guiding them to databases and websites constructed to provide point and counterpoint arguments, Kyle hadn’t shown any effort in entertaining other viewpoints. Students were failing the most central tenet of media literacy, and turning in another set of essays reinforcing bias confirmation. “How do we help them recognize when their bias is interfering with their understanding?” Confronting Invisible Bias