Teaching Fake News

[Dill]

(02-01-2020, 10:44 AM)BmorePat87 Wrote: I recently made a new lesson to teach fake news. We started with this image and I asked students whether or not it provides strong evidence of the conditions near the Fukushima site.

The facebook ads really resonated with them.

Do your part. Do an initial smell test: Does it even seem real? Source it. Where's it from, who wrote it, what did they cite. Find something to collaborate it. Who else is reporting it and are they legitimate too?

If it holds up: post it.

Good job. I think that there should be a required course nowadays for propaganda and fake news--an updated course, because the stuff I learned in HS is outdated now.

I have over the last few years read a number of articles and results-of-studies showing how difficult it is to change people's minds, even that people become more entrenched in their views when they encounter counter-evidence.  What I don't like about these studies so far (without denying the usefulness and accuracy of their data), is that they present rejection of impartial reasoning as psychological/biological constant. In fact we see considerable historical variation in peoples willingness or unwillingness to deal with counter evidence, and this points to variation in background: upbringing, training, role models, standards and values.

I think susceptibility to fake news today is in part because hoaxers can craft such convincing online presentation, yet there are people who consistently don't fall for them and people who consistently do. And this difference is not spread equally among demographic groups.  There may be some percentage of every population with inherently unstable judgment, but I think that percentage falls far below 39-41%. 

It is a problem in contemporary US politics because there are large numbers of people who 1) are not good at vetting sources in general, not just online, and 2) they have actually been educated or "trained" to vet poorly, in part by their choice of news media and in part by other authority figures/role models in their lives. E.g., many have been conditioned to immediately construe all political arguments/evidence as "partisan"; so their first goal is to figure out whether a source is Republican or Democratic, not whether it is logical valid or true. If they can't do that they feel unsure of themselves. Introduce an element of (learned) magical thinking, and the "smell test" doesn't help them any more as Trump lies leave no scent, while everything Hillary says stinks of untruth.  

Vetting--or critical thinking--itself is not a simple process easily taught in a few rules, since it relies both on understanding logic and a sense of how context can be manipulated, which in turn requires a level of background knowledge. (Just thinking of Ken Starr's Trump defense, delivered today, along with Philbin and Seculow's, which turn the obstructed effort to leverage evidence and witnesses from the White House into "absence of proof" and from there into a shameful, disrespectful attempted coup on the presidency--on "freedom" itself--accompanied by seeming endless defense of the principle of executive privilege, which itself was never in question.)

Anyway, glad to see that you are teaching this in your class. Is there any way this could be made into a semester long course, or at least a 5-6 week segment of an existing course?  What do other teachers or the administration think?