Fighting Fake News with Math

Digital literacy is more important than ever as everything can be found on the internet. People use the internet for everything: News, education, connection, entertainment. It is important that we are able to identify what is real and what isn’t because there’s an unlimited supply of both out there on the internet. As teachers, it is our job to help the next generation grow and flourish to become great leaders and members of society. A huge part of society now exists online so why is there not more effort into teaching kids to be appropriate members of online society too?

As a secondary math teacher, I think it’s especially important to teach digital literacy since there is a whole lot of information being thrown everywhere involving numbers, statistics, percentages, etc. If students were more digitally literate they would not get fooled or impressed by these inflated graphs, percentages, and charts that we see so often. By being math literate we can fact-check the information ourselves and trust in our ability to detect fake information. A really good video that illustrates this is this video by Mark Liddell and TED-Ed

This shows exactly why being math literate and digitally literate go hand in hand. Statistics are used to determine so many different things that have huge impacts in our lives. If we are always shown manipulated statistics that change how we perceive things then we must be able to understand the numbers ourselves and not by what they show us. The statistics are skewed and altered to change how it looks as that would push a certain agenda that whoever posted it is trying to achieve. In math we can understand what is involved in creating a statistic. We can understand what is a factor and what isn’t. Understanding those gives us a huge advantage in detecting fake news and altered statistics.

Another beneficial resource is this Interactive Media Bias Chart that shows a bunch of different sources that many people get there information from and how they fit within the bias chart. More benefits of being math literate is that gives us the power to be able to decipher what each spot on this chart means. If you were given the chart without any idea of how that chart works it means nothing! By understanding how charts work we can identify from this graph that the Alec Jones Show has extreme right views and uses unreliable sources and information. With that in mind we can take information in from these different sources with an understanding that their bias will most likely be here and here. Another great video that illustrates this idea of misleading mathematics is this TED-Ed video about misleading graphs with Lea Gaslowitz.

Now we can see how graphs can be altered to be misleading too! This is also super important because graphs are thought of us an easy way to display information so that we, as viewers, can see patterns and distinctions within the information. Being math Literate and understanding how graphs work, how they are created, how units can be sectioned, and why they are used gives us more tools to detect fake news. As explained in the video the information on two very different looking graphs can be the exact same so we must be aware of the idea of misleading graphs. Someone who is math literate would be able to regraph the information in different forms of graphs with different representations. As a consumer of news, this is a super power, since you can see the information as it really is and see right through the fake news.

A good way to go about teaching digital literacy and the math aspect of it would be to teach students how to skew, manipulate, and alter charts. By showing them how graphs and statistics can be skewed, how its done, and how different graphs can have the same information, they learn how to detect this manipulation in other media. A fun project could be that students pretend to be a big media platform and make a graph accompanied by statistics that are as misleading as they can make it. Then they explain how they did it and what they were trying to push by creating that misleading information followed by a non-misleading graph and statistic of the same information.