How to Teach Your Kids to Spot Fake News

By Leigh Anderson Published December 5, 2017

Before we get into the meat of this article, which I will place in RED if this is fake or true (with a comment / link if need be) or leave no comment as there was no need to, you must understand that in order for propaganda to work, you have to mix in some truth. With that being said, I wasn’t looking to place this article anywhere today. I was just looking for a Fake New image I can use regularly, which just happened to be linked to this article. The article is full of holes so I thought why not? 13 comments in 5 years means it must be true. What is true is that no one believes the media anymore, and they have only themselves to blame for that.

David Ashton webmaster

How to teach kids to spot fake news? First: Teach everyone to spot fake news. When I was a child, my parents had access to only a few news sources: our local paper, the big-city dailies (for us, the Washington Post and the New York Times) and the nightly news. Kids today have … the entire internet, with every crackpot theory and faked moon landing right at their fingertips. Even the distinction between “media” and “journalism” has blurred to the point that many adults don’t know if anyone can be trusted at all TRUE.

Which means that parental responsibilities now include giving your kids the tools to assess whether a given story is real—backed up by solid reporting—or biased, or totally and completely fake. Or Russian propaganda. To this end, educators are developing curricula to encourage “media literacy” in the face of an onslaught of, well, media bullshit and a president who’s actively trying to discredit responsible journalismFALSE. To get an idea of how parents can help their kids separate fact from fiction, I spoke to two people who are deep in the media-literacy trenches.

Model Your Own “Habits of Inquiry”

When you’re watching or reading the news with your kids, “do a play-by-play of your searching and fact-checking,” says Faith Rogow, an educational consultant who specializes in media literacy for children. Explain how you choose what to click on, and if you read something that sets off your BS radar, show your kids how you would verify that what you’re reading is real. “Explain ‘this sounds wrong to me, and this is what I’m doing to figure it out,’” she says. You want to make asking questions your kid’s default setting, what the National Association for Media Literacy Education calls a “habit of inquiry.” To do this, get your kids accustomed to asking a few regular questions:

First, use common sense. If you’re reading about something like PizzaGate,FAKE pizzagate is true or that Sandy Hook was a hoax, Rogow says to “follow that train of thought to its natural conclusion.” That means asking: What else would have to be true for this to be true? How many people would have to be in on the conspiracy that Sandy Hook was a hoax or the moon landing was faked in order for this story to be true? TRUE

“The second question,” says Rogow, is “who benefits if this is true?” Who benefits if there really were a pedophile ring in a pizza parlor in Washington? FAKE they are covering up for pedophiles here If you ask questions that take wild stories to their logical conclusion, kids will start to see the holes. John Silva, the the director of education at the News Literacy Project, calls this kind of real-time parent-child fact-checking “lateral reading.” “While you’re sitting with your child, open up another browser tab and start checking other sites,” Silva says. Do NOT use Google, Bing nor Duck Duck Go for your searching. They are corrupted to the core and hide truth.

But, you say, isn’t the real news these days totally incredible? What about Roy Moore being banned from an Alabama mall for preying on young girls, for example—doesn’t that also seem rather unbelievable? That’s when you start educating your kids on reporting 101.

Check Sources

“I wish every school had every student work on the newspaper,” says Rogow. “If kids were challenged to report on something local and detailed, they would understand what goes into thoroughly reporting a story.” If your kid doesn’t have a school newspaper or simply isn’t interested, “have them check multiple and diverse sources,” says Rogow. “Here’s a quickie strategy: Use a site like the Newseum’s front page collection to look at how an incident is reported in other countries. Ask your kids, ‘what’s the different perspective?’ There are a lot of ways to gently challenge people to think more broadly and deeply.”

If another outlet is reporting the same story—say the New York Times picks up something the Washington Post reports, Rogow says “look for the words ‘independently verified.’ That means reporters have verified sources for themselves and aren’t just repeating what someone else wrote Anonymous sources is a common theme by todays fake jounos which means the story is bullshit. This is where you can see who is doing their own reporting” and who is just linking back to the original story—which is how the echo chamber forms. Oh, and teach your kids the words “echo chamber.” Silva emphasizes that “the standards that journalists aspire to are fairness and balance, fact-checking and verification.”

An instructive story for this lesson? The Washington Post’s story on the women who came forward with their stories of Roy Moore’s alleged harassment and assault when they were teenagers. Point out to your kids how the reporters verified that Leigh Corfman told two friends at the time and her mother ten years later; note that they emphasize that she told her story consistently over six interviews, and that other women reported similar interactions with Moore when they were teenagers. This story was FAKE.

If you want to show your kids an excellent example of dishonest so-called journalism, take a look at James O’Keefe’s undercover “sting” operation against the Washington Post, and how the Post reporter did her due diligence in researching the “source” (a plant) and trying to verify her account FAKE NEWS O’Keefe is a patriot and truth teller. “The journalists were following their standards, and that’s when [the source’s] story began to fall apart. This could be an amazing conversation with high-school students: that Project Veritas went into this interview with the intention of proving a certain point—they went into it with an agenda and a bias against the Post for the [earlier] Roy Moore story. That’s a cardinal rule: Minimize bias. Journalists ask, ‘what are the facts? what can I verify?’ They don’t go into it with the facts already written,” says Silva.

Journalism 101 would also include a primer on the difference between the news and editorial sides of an organization. “On Fox News, Sean Hannity is the opinion guy and Shepherd Smith is the journalist. Kids should ask ‘Am I looking at the news or at someone’s opinion?’ The news side is sticking to the facts; opinion is more contentious. One tip: If there’s one person on the screen, it’s likely news. If there are four or five, it’s likely opinion, but you still need to listen carefully to what they are saying,” says Silva.

Use Tools

“Use fact-checking sites,” HAH what a joke Fact Checking sites are all paid for Soros funded propaganda bullshit sites says Rogow. “Kids can learn to cut and paste a headline into Snopes. You can also do a link search [using a tool like OpenLinkProfiler] to see who’s linking to a story—Infowars will look like it’s very popular, but you can scroll down and see who these people are. Parents can reflect their own values here—if it’s linked by a Nazi site, you’ll point out that maybe it’s not credible.”

Parents can also use Checkology, an online course for increasing media literacy for kids, and show kids how to do a reverse image search or how to use TinEye on dubious photos, like the one supposedly showing an Antifa member attacking a police officer.

It’s also helpful to teach kids some of the structural fundamentals of media—e.g., how Facebook’s algorithms keep some stories from you and emphasize others. “Get your news from news organizations,” says Silva. “The extra layer of social media algorithms contributes to the strength of the ‘filter bubble.’ You want to see how the original story was published,” not how it’s been selectively edited to elicit a reaction. (Like the video of Trump dumping a whole box of fish food into the koi pond.) “If you had watched the full video you would have gotten the full story,” says Silva. “Teach kids to look for context. Who’s sharing it with you and why? Political organizations, news sites, and entertainment sites all share in different ways.”

And a lot of people don’t know, for example, that the top results for a Google search are ads and the rest of the results are affected by your personal search history. “Kids think that what comes up in the feed on their phone is somehow neutral when, in fact, structurally, it is based on their own search history and what they click on, so the default is to create an echo chamber. Parents could help open up that echo chamber by sending kids to sources that their feeds don’t typically include,” says Rogow.

There are a lot of additional online sources for learning to weed out the bull; a good first stop for a teen might be this news literacy toolkit, or NewseumED, or Common Sense Media.

Check Your Reaction

“When you start reading a piece of information, a strong [emotional] reaction is a warning sign. If you’re very happy or angry or incredulous, the chances are that it has been written in a way to manipulate. News is not meant to sway your emotions, it’s meant to sway your intellect,” says Silva. Media thrives on drama; that’s how outlets get clicks and shares. If you keep a cool head, you’ll be better able to weed through the emotional manipulation to check the facts. He cites a friend’s child, a seventh-grader who read that a planet was going to crash into the earth on September 23rd and wipe out all life as we know it. The child was terrified, and his mother couldn’t reason him out of his fear. Teach kids that that kind of extreme emotional reaction is a red flag (and then teach them to check multiple and diverse sources). “One source is a big warning sign,” says Silva.

Know the Difference Between Bias, Propaganda, and Ordinary Mistakes

“Think through [with your kids] the difference between a conspiracy, or someone intentionally trying to mislead you, versus a mistake [by an otherwise solid news organization]—they happen. Talk about poor reporting,” or reporting with bias (again, the O’Keefe video is instructive FAKE). “Talk about why good journalists should wouldn’t accept this level of reporting,” says Rogow. A good primer on propaganda for kids is here. For adults, check out this essay on propaganda, written in 1944, that specifically focuses on Hitler’s rise to power. And help them do some research of their own on how responsible journalists sometimes do make mistakes and how news organizations should correct them.

Share Your Concerns and Values

Simply telling a 16-year-old “You should not believe that,” won’t necessarily work—parents need to focus on encouraging their kids to ask questions. “How many kids understand the anti-Semitism that’s behind attacks on George Soros?” George Soros is a Tyrant trying to destroy America. Here is all the proof you need so what does that then tell you about this site “Lifehacker” and the reporter called “Rogow”?? Rogow asks. “What if you showed them these kinds of statements about Jews going back 40 or 70 years and asked ‘Isn’t it interesting that they’re targeting this one guy who’s Jewish?’ Instill that little seed of doubt. Keep the questioning going.”

Get Them to Do a Deep Dive of Their Own

At the end of the day, the best tool kids have is their own education and intellect. Lauren Alix Brown, writing for Quartz, quotes CNN CNN is a totally fake news organisation don’t believe anything they say reporter Fareed Zakaria’s advice that young people tune out the cacophony of the media to become an expert in whatever subject matters to them:

“I say this to my kids all of the time, ‘you can graze all these headlines and tweets and blog posts you like—at the end of the day the way you develop real knowledge about a subject still remains that you have to go deep; still remains that you have to actually read books; still remains that you have to talk to experts, travel to countries.”

At a certain point, parents will have less control over their kids and won’t be able to weigh in on every conspiracy theory and outrageous headline. But by then, we hope they’ll be experts in their own right, whether they’re interested in medicine or foreign policy or the federal tax code. And because we’ve taught them rigorous habits of inquiry, they won’t fall prey to every hoax on the Internet. In fact, maybe they’ll gently school us some day. As Silva points out, “Really, parents should have a self-reflective moment about their own news habits.”