News Literacy

This article from First Draft News presents findings of a network study of a recent conspiracy theory about the "Great Reset" from late 2020. Robust networks of amateurs share misinformation so quickly that traditional fact-checking can't keep up.

If fact-checking doesn't work, what's the answer? Pre-Bunking.

Falsehoods on Twitter are 70% more likely to be re-tweeted than accurate news, because false headlines are often more unusual and more emotionally arousing than true headlines.

People share misinformation in order to protect their sense of identity, a decision-making process this researcher calls "identity protective cognition," a potent form of motivated reasoning.

Brooke Donald at the Stanford Graduate School of Education News Center reports on studies at Stanford that found that students at all levels (K-12 through college) had difficulty identifying credible sources.

In this online game, swipe right for real story, swipe left for fake. Are you a good judge of "fake news"?

Aggregates articles from different parts of the political spectrum side-by-side, so you can compare in real time how different biases operate. Created by John Gable, who was a Republican operative with the RNC, Trent Lott, and Mitch McConnell.

Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web Is Changing What We Read and How We Think, explains how Google and social media area actually isolating us from people who are different in this TEDTalks video (8:58).

Compare sample public news shares in blue-leaning and red-leaning social media feeds.

We have biases for good evolutionary reasons: to act more quickly, to reduce the amount of information, to assign meaning in spite of ambiguity, and to decide what to remember. Unfortunately, a lot these biases lead us astray when making decisions about what information to share. Take a look at this radial chart of biases to get a sense of why it's such a struggle to reduce bias.

What are your biases, and how do they affect how you perceive and assimilate news?

This blog post by Mike Caulfield explains how to "read laterally" to examine whether the evidence someone provides is verified elsewhere on the web.

Journalist & fact-checker Markham Nolan (managing editor at Storyful.com) explains how journalists confirm stories they find online. (13 min TEDTalk video, Fall 2012)

Emily Thorson, political scientist recently at BC, now at Syracuse, explains productive and nonproductive ways to engage with your friends about misinformation.

Cynicism (nothing is true) is just as bad as gullibility (everything is true). Media literacy is about intelligently discriminating between sources, not just debunking everything.

Lisa Fazio, psychology professor at Vanderbilt University, explains why facts are often elusive.

MediaWise put together a YouTube playlist for International Fact-Checking Day (April 2) in 2019

In 5 30 minute online units, learn the basics of online fact-checking, using techniques employed by professionals

Once known as "botornot," the Botometer® is "a joint project of the Indiana University Network Science Institute (IUNI) and the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research (CNetS)." To use it to find probabilities of bot-ness on Twitter, you must be logged into your own twitter account & approve access. Check your own followers & follows!

Analyze a twitter account for frequency, types of posts, post content, and post timing. Is it a human or a bot? Humans tend to sleep.

Created by First Draft, a journalism education site, this course is intended as an introduction to verification techniques for the general public.

Upload an image or provide a link: see where else an image has been used online. Useful for revealing re-used images claimed to be current. (Alternative: Google image reverse image search)

First Draft toolbox with embedded widgets for reverse image search, date/time weather verification, user name & twitter handle, and links to useful tools for location and other details.

Yandex is the Russian Google equivalent; the image search uses robust algorithms to find similar images.

This Global Investigative Journalism Network article walks you through how to verify claims about what was (or was not) on a web-page in the past.