(Before you even read further-- is the Statista infographic (above) real or fake?)
I am so excited about a new tool that I discovered over the past week! Like many of you, I have been incredibly concerned about Fake News and its pervasiveness in our tech lives. That led to me thinking about and how to teach skills that will help combat the problem.
Upon my initial search, I found some good work being done by Melissa Zimdars, Associate Professor, at Merrimack College. Her article, 'False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and Satirical “News” Sources' (published with a Creative Commons license) is a great place to start. She breaks it all down into 4 categories:
- CATEGORY 1: Fake, false, or regularly misleading websites that are shared on Facebook and social media. Some of these websites may rely on “outrage” by using distorted headlines and de-contextualized or dubious information in order to generate likes, shares, and profits.
- CATEGORY 2: Websites that may circulate misleading and/or potentially unreliable information
- CATEGORY 3: Websites which sometimes use clickbait-y headlines and social media descriptions
- CATEGORY 4: Satire/comedy sites, which can offer important critical commentary on politics and society, but have the potential to be shared as actual/literal news
The big bonus of Professor Zimdars' work is her comprehensive list of Fake News websites. At today's viewing of the list, there were 921 sites listed! She categorized them according to the following labels:
Website Labels for OpenSources.co:
Fake News (tag fake): Sources that entirely fabricate information, disseminate deceptive content, or grossly distort actual news reports.
Satire (tag satire): Sources that use humor, irony, exaggeration, ridicule, and false information to comment on current events.
Extreme Bias (tag bias): Sources that come from a particular point of view and may rely on propaganda, decontextualized information, and opinions distorted as facts.
Conspiracy Theory (tag conspiracy): Sources that are well-known promoters of kooky conspiracy theories.
Rumor Mill (tag rumor): Sources that traffic in rumors, gossip, innuendo, and unverified claims.
State News (tag state): Sources in repressive states operating under government sanction.
Junk Science (tag junksci): Sources that promote pseudoscience, metaphysics, naturalistic fallacies, and other scientifically dubious claims.
Hate News (tag hate): Sources that actively promote racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination.
Clickbait (tag clickbait): Sources that provide generally credible content, but use exaggerated, misleading, or questionable headlines, social media descriptions, and/or images.
Proceed With Caution (tag unreliable): Sources that may be reliable but whose contents require further verification.
*Political (tag political): Sources that provide generally verifiable information in support of certain points of view or political orientations.
*Credible (tag reliable): Sources that circulate news and information in a manner consistent with traditional and ethical practices in journalism (Remember: even credible sources sometimes rely on clickbait-style headlines or occasionally make mistakes. No news organization is perfect, which is why a healthy news diet consists of multiple sources of information).
Unknown (tag unidentified): Sources that have not yet been analyzed (many of these were suggested by readers/users or are found on other lists and resources). Help us expand our resource by providing us information!
Note: Tags like political and credible are being used for two reasons: 1.) they were suggested by viewers of the document or OpenSources and circulate news 2.) the credibility of information and of organizations exists on a continuum, which this project aims to demonstrate. For now, mainstream news organizations are not included because they are well known to a vast majority of readers.
Great stuff, right?!
On Twitter, the good people on NPR shared a story that really intrigued me and led me further down this path and to my new favorite tool.
My excitement is off the charts! I'm starting up with the News Literacy Project's Checkology tool tomorrow with my library students.
The program is free for the rest of this school year. I will revisit this tool in the coming week once I've had a little time to play with it. But, I thought I would share today so that more of us can help get our kids on track with news literacy and fact-checking. If they don't learn to separate fact from fiction this world will be in real trouble.
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