Category: Fake News

“You may think you are prepared for a post-truth world, in which political appeals to emotion count for more than statements of verifiable fact,” Margaret Sullivan, media columnist for The Washington Post, wrote recently. “But now it’s time to cross another bridge—into a world without facts. Or, more precisely, where facts do not matter a whit.”

Because I teach American history, government and journalism in high school, Sullivan’s words hit close to home. I spoke with my students about Mary Beth Hertz’s Edutopia post, “Battling Fake News in the Classroom,” and I sensed that many of my students, while skilled at what Hertz fittingly calls “crap detection,” were still deeply troubled by what they characterized as a growing public aversion to the truth.

When politicians and thought leaders can’t or won’t agree on a basic set of facts, how can we motivate students for the noble pursuit of truth and help them see why it still matters?

Read more at PBS.

Image courtesy of PBS.

A University of Washington seminar, “Calling BS in the Age of Big Data,” promises to help students develop a BS detector — and it’s become a global phenomenon, with universities as far away as Australia planning to teach a version of it this fall.

Did you hear about the researchers in China who said they’d developed an algorithm that could predict whether somebody was a criminal by scanning a photo of their face?

The researchers used “fancy machine learning” to eliminate human biases and come up with a scientific way to determine criminality by examining facial features, University of Washington professor Carl Bergstrom told his class in Mary Gates Hall one day last month.

“What do you guys think?” Bergstrom asked.

In unison, more than 100 students responded out loud: “Bullshit!”

Exactly.

Read more at The Seattle Times.

Image courtesy of The Seattle Times.

Even the popular fashion youth magazine Teen Vogue has felt the need to educate its readers about how to improve their media literacy skills.

In between articles about fashion, entertainment and beauty, the magazine’s news and technology section recently featured a piece intended to help teens distinguish between what is real news and what can be considered “fake” news. The article begins:

Sure, most of us know that just because you read something on the Internet doesn’t mean it’s true. And lately everyone is talking about fake news — hoaxes, propaganda, and flat-out lies that are intentionally meant to look like real news. Confusingly, President Donald Trump has been attempting to redefine the term to mean anything that is reported by the mainstream media with which he disagrees. Even satire, a worthwhile and thought-provoking writing genre, is often incorrectly lumped together with fake news or taken at face value and mistaken for news.

Read more at Teen Vogue.

Image courtesy of Teen Vogue.

Post-truth, alternative facts and fake news. Media has changed a lot since we began tweeting, but the last year has left media and its consumers in a crisis. A Pew Research study revealed that 62 percent of adults get their news from social media. We now live in a hyper-partisan world where sensational fake news often spreads faster than real news, according to a post-election BuzzFeed analysis. In this age of citizen journalism, media literacy is a confusing proposition.

Adults may assume that digital natives, who can text, post and Google at the same time, are able to sort through the information onslaught better than they can. In fact, Stanford University released a study in November that indicates students have a lot of trouble discerning the credibility of online information. For example, 82 percent of middle schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website. Even worse, this study was completed well before the reports of fake news surrounding the u.s. presidential election surfaced.

There is hope. A study by the Civic Engagement Research Group found that media literacy training does make people significantly less likely to believe a factually inaccurate claim, even if it aligned with their political point of view.

Read more at the Center for Media Literacy.

A University of Washington class titled “Calling Bull**** in the Age of Big Data” has drawn worldwide attention and even a book deal for the professors. And the school doesn’t censor the second half of that particular word.

Assistant Professor Jevin West and Biology Professor Carl Bergstrom stood in front of a packed auditorium Wednesday. An overflow of students had to sit on the stairs. The lecture was broadcast to the world. The professors continue to balance local and national media requests.

The professors adhere to this definition of the word: BS is language, statistical figures, data graphics, and other forms of presentation intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener, with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence, according to the class’ website.

“I think people are sick of seeing pollution, and I think they just want to clean it up,” said West, knowing they’ve hit a nerve.

Read more at King 5 News.

Image courtesy of King 5 News.