Combating Fake News

I am honestly shocked at how much fake news/information that is online. I also didn’t know before that AI can generate pictures and make it look so realistic. It is also very surprising to me how many people create fake news. I found it interesting in TRU Libraries article that gave a lot of information about fake news and detecting it. They suggest that fake news has 3 characteristics which are factually inaccurate, optimized for sharing, and meant to obscure or distort emotions. I think a lot of people making fake news do it for the views because it is usually the things that seem extremely unreal that go viral and get a lot of attention.

I think it is extremely important to teach about fake news in the classroom. A great resource to do this is with a quiz. This quiz gives you 3 headlines and you are supposed to guess which one is fake. I did this and I found it to be fun to do and I think it would be great to show to students and do it together as a class.

It is also important to teach students more about how to identify fake news. This article had many great suggestions. One of them being teaching students to identify bias. This is very useful for students to know and be able to do. As well as helping students create investigative techniques when it comes to identifying fake or real news. For this, it would be useful to teach students about professional fact checking strategies. Overall, it is important to teach students how to identify fake news because it won’t be going away.