Fake news is false information usually spread via social media. It often works by only telling one side of a story presenting facts in favor of a particular opinion or world view while ignoring any aspect of the topic which are not in line with this ideology. Sometimes, the information presented are even completely made up. While journalism has never been perfectly objective, social media has intensified the problem of fake news by enabling everyone to broadcast any kind of claim. Social media shows you content you will most likely enjoy. So, people only get to see – often false – information that go with their world view and endorse them in their opinions.
This development divides our society and supports extremism. Debates are based on emotions and false information rather than facts. People not only get endorsed in their opinions, but also have less sympathy for other positions. Hate speech is getting propagated over social media encouraging discrimination and violence. If you have not seen it by now, you should watch ‘The Social Dilemma’ on Netflix about this and other issues with social media.
Probably inspired by ‘The Social Dilemma’, people have discussed social media quite a lot on this blog in the last couple of weeks focusing mostly on data security and the data oligopoly of the big tech companies. I made a post myself about data ownership. Fake news has also been debated, mostly under the aspect of the platforms responsibility of identifying and deleting or correcting false information. While I think this approach is right and highly important, I would like to look on fake news from an educational angle in this blog post.
Social media is still relatively new – Instagram has just turned 10 years old – and our educational systems have not adjusted yet. Media literacy is a crucial skill and should be a subject in every school as important as mathematics and languages. Since some children already get their first smartphone or tablet in primary school, media literacy should be taught from first class on. Teachers could present diverse real-live examples of information and discuss with the class approaches on valuating the information. In primary school, I could see the focus being on questioning who is making this for whom with which intention. In middle school, classes might analyze the rhetorical means of social media posts. While analyzing rhetorical means is already a standard skill imparted in most schools, it is often not used on social media posts. Pupils should also learn how to check and assess sources. Which national and international news agencies are reliable? What makes a website or article suspicious?
Furthermore, teachers could confront students witch articles which seem absolutely believable to them and then do a ‘fact check’ together exploring common pitfalls and raising critical thinking. For example, interesting cases could be ‘even if a lot of bad news about Donald Trump are true, this particular one might still be made up’ or ‘even if this source usually informs really well, in this case it left out a lot of important aspects’. Students could also use this class to present social media posts they found themselves and were curious about.
In the context of ‘fact checks’, it would also make sense to teach statistics to explain for example, the difference of correlation and causation. The class could for instance look at cosmetic brands that make claims like ‘this crème reduces wrinkles by 56% in two weeks’ and discuss why this claim alone is not a valuable information and which information about the underlying study are missing to make it convincing (e.g. variance, confidence-interval, number of participants).
Of course, (social) media literacy class would only benefit society in the long run, because people, who have left the educational system already, are not affected. A lot of teachers might also not be suited to teach this class being unexperienced with social media and fake news themselves. Furthermore, the responsibility shall not be taken away from the social media platforms. Media literacy class cannot be the sole solution to fake news, but it could be one of many approaches.
And if your media literacy is any good, you have probably noticed by now, that this blog post was solely about my own opinion and I might be totally wrong about this. What do you think?
