REAL OR FAKE? THINKING BEYOND THE FIRST IMPRESSION

Staff members Lorenzo Gomez, Barb Mason, and Kellie Piekutowski attended NewsLitCamp at the Daily Herald on April 18. Here are some of their takeaways.

Information. It’s the “very building blocks of civics – the basis for the decisions we make. And these decisions are the basis of our actions.” 

Spoken by Peter Adams of the News Literacy Project during NewsLitCamp, this notion might be overwhelming to educators, the adults who are responsible for helping students sift through all of that information, both the real and the fake. It’s certainly overwhelming to me. How could it not be? 

As Adams pointed out, we live in a world in which citizens can dabble in tweet generators to pose as @realDonaldTrump, @KimKardashian, or anyone for that matter. A world in which reputable organizations, such as PolitiFact, confuse visitors by permitting native advertising, ads bearing the appearance of news content, on their sites. A world of engagement bait social media accounts, which exist only for the purpose of earning ad revenue. A world where citizens may download free prank news apps to their devices to change the headlines of actual pieces of journalism to share via social media, “polluting the national news,” Adams said. 
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Slide by slide, Adams showed NewsLitCamp attendees real examples of tweets relaying misinformation. View his resources here. The problem with all of this is, he said, “People vote.” As educators, we need to help students fight the fake. Here are several ideas and/or resources educators can use right now to prepare students for what they face:

• Empower students to fact check and then engage by calling people out on their inaccurate tweets.
• Digital forensics. Challenge students to use digital forensics / reverse image searches to determine if tweeted images are authentic or not.
• Subscribe to The Sift, a weekly e-newsletter managed by thenewsliteracyproject.org with ideas for how to use what happened last week to teach news literacy in the classroom.
• Teach students the standards of journalism.
• Follow @hoaxeye, an account that calls out fake tweets.
• Visit Punditfact, a website that lists fake news websites (but watch out for native advertising!)
• Visit www.checkology.org, which offers lessons on fact vs. fiction in an online format. Some of the content is free, but you have to subscribe for the bells and whistles.
• Bookmark Third Eye archive: TV News Archive chyrons. You can direct students here as a resource for determining if TV news chyrons (the teaser text on a news program) they come across on social media are real or have been doctored.
• Assignment idea: Ask students to write the Play Store and iTunes to petition that they remove “prank news” apps.
• Encourage students to document misinformation. They can use archive.li/, for example, to take a snapshot of a webpage to add to the archive, even if the original page disappears.
• Visit First Draft News for curriculum resources, such as the Observation Challenge, a digital forensics challenge.

Please let Barb, Lorenzo, or me know if you would like more information about our experience and/or any of these resources.