Lesson Plan: How to Spot Fake News | Channel One News The problem of fake news came to a dizzying head in 2016 when a man fired a shot in a family pizzeria as he “self-investigated” a false report of a child abuse ring led by top democrats. A BuzzFeed report confirmed that fake news stories, such as the one that claimed Hillary Clinton sold arms to ISIS, were actually viewed more times than articles from established and legitimate news sources. Did fake news have an impact on the election? How do we address the problem from here? This lesson plan features a Channel One News report on the problem. Opening Activity Warm up: Ask students: How do you get your news? Words in the News: Review this word prior to viewing the video. propaganda (noun): Information that is often exaggerated or false and spread for the purpose of benefiting or promoting a specific individual or cause. Heard on the Air: “If we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.” Watch Video: “Fake News on Facebook” Discuss Take a Survey Write
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. If you do read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.” So what should you do? You want to be informed, but a good deal of the information out there is incorrect or biased. 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. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. How can you prevent the spread of fake news?
Good Tools for Teaching Students How to Evaluate Web Content Credibility Source: Butler University Library, adapted from Meriam Library at CSU, Chico One of my favorite lessons to teach is about evaluating the credibility of web sites and other digital content. I often start by showing the classic “Can't Lie On The Internet” video from AllState, which gets a laugh and helps to get students in the right mind set. Next, we check out the classic “DHMO” site and talk about what we see there. Dihydrogen Monoxide sounds pretty scary, but is this site legitimate? That's when I bring up Kathy Schrock's 5 W's PDF and use it as a kick off point to discuss the idea of using criteria for evaluation, not just gut reactions. Another tool I came across recently that I like is this 60 Second Guide for evaluating web resources. There are countless resources on the web for evaluating content credibility, and it is easy to get a bit overwhelmed. The Challenges of Video and Social Media Credibility Another Great Resource: Snopes.com
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.
The Honest Truth about Fake News … and How Not to Fall for It (with Lesson Plan) | The Lowdown | KQED News Did you hear that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump for president? Or that Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS? Crazy, right? And … 100 percent false. But if you were one of the millions of people drawn to a bogus headline in your Facebook feed — or other social media platform of choice — and found yourself reading an article on what seemed like a legitimate news site (something like, say, The Political Insider, which “reported” the Clinton-ISIS story), then why wouldn’t you believe it? Welcome to the world of “fake news.” Digital deception It comes as little surprise that the web is chock full of commercial click-bait hoaxes: get-rich-quick schemes, free Caribbean cruises, erectile dysfunction treatments … you name it. But as it turns out, the internet is also teeming with bogus information sites that masquerade as real news. Even President Obama weighed in, assailing the rapid accumulation of fake news as a “dust cloud of nonsense.” Fake news, real profit, serious consequences
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. This is a little disheartening, since this is a huge part of what we teach as school librarians, and it appears we’ve not been very effective. There really isn’t a magic formula or checklist that replaces the critical thinking needed to determine if information is credible. 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...
How to Spot Fake News - FactCheck.org Fake news is nothing new. But bogus stories can reach more people more quickly via social media than what good old-fashioned viral emails could accomplish in years past. Concern about the phenomenon led Facebook and Google to announce that they’ll crack down on fake news sites, restricting their ability to garner ad revenue. Not all of the misinformation being passed along online is complete fiction, though some of it is. A lot of these viral claims aren’t “news” at all, but fiction, satire and efforts to fool readers into thinking they’re for real. We’ve long encouraged readers to be skeptical of viral claims, and make good use of the delete key when a chain email hits their inboxes. In 2008, we tried to get readers to rid their inboxes of this kind of garbage. Those all still hold true, but fake stories — as in, completely made-up “news” — has grown more sophisticated, often presented on a site designed to look (sort of) like a legitimate news organization. Consider the source.
How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail Have you ever noticed that when you present people with facts that are contrary to their deepest held beliefs they always change their minds? Me neither. In fact, people seem to double down on their beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming evidence against them. The reason is related to the worldview perceived to be under threat by the conflicting data. Creationists, for example, dispute the evidence for evolution in fossils and DNA because they are concerned about secular forces encroaching on religious faith. In these examples, proponents' deepest held worldviews were perceived to be threatened by skeptics, making facts the enemy to be slayed. Two social psychologists, Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson (a former student of Festinger), in their 2007 book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) document thousands of experiments demonstrating how people spin-doctor facts to fit preconceived beliefs to reduce dissonance.
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. 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. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.