News literacy

Sven

In one startling example, the Stanford researchers showed students in suburban Chicago a Facebook video that claimed to show people ballot-stuffing during the 2016 presidential primaries.

“Out of those more than 3,000 students, only three figured out that actually, the video came from Russia,” says Joel Breakstone, who heads the Stanford group.

Please scroll down to "To Combat Misinformation, A News Literacy Class Will Be Required In Illinois High Schools"
https://npr.org/live-updates/morning-edition-2021-08-13#the-supreme-court-wont-stop-indiana-universitys-vaccine-requirement

On the bottom of the article, there is a transcript of the podcast which provides additional details on this article.
https://npr.org/2021/08/12/1026993142/illinois-is-the-first-state-to-have-high-schools-teach-news-literacy

Without fact checking, the quality of the content is questionable, especially those from social media.

Crash

How did the three figure it out? Signs in Russian or something?

Sven

Quote from the second link,

Under the new curriculum, Illinois students will analyze news content across platforms. Breakstone's groups spent the last year working with ninth-graders at a suburban Chicago high school, integrating news literacy into subjects like geography and biology. It found that what helped students distinguish misinformation the most is something called lateral reading. That can be as simple as opening a new tab and leaving the post to find more about the source of information. It appears to be effective. Students reportedly got a lot better at spotting questionable sources. But this effort takes time and practice. Students say they often didn't see why, for example, a company writing about climate change receiving funding from the fossil fuel industry could skew the story. Many assume that if a social media influencer has tons of followers, it means they're trustworthy.

Students like this Naperville, Ill., freshman practiced by finding popular social media posts about nutrition and recording themselves fact-checking, like this.

The methods Breakstone used in the study was not discussed. Students these today are very good in finding the original source of the video footage posted in social media. I suspect the video was posted in several countries outside of US, and likely it was created to the illusion of how easily voting is altered. Quality journalism requires vigorous fact checking from multiple sources.

Additional information on ProfessorJoe Breakstone.
https://ed.stanford.edu/spotlight/breakstone-advances-use-formative-assessment-teach-history

For music, there are apps that can locate the original artists based on a short verse of a song. Similarly, YouTube has a search engine based for many topics. You can imagine searching for “microchip in vaccine” would yield. Are these information for real?

Crash

Thanks.