education

Teach Students to Evaluate Information Teach students about author credentials and how to evaluate them. Credential is a term librarians often use, but many students do not know exactly what the term means. What is a credential? What credentials are legitimate indicators of expertise? Acceptable credentials will vary from subject to subject, so the definition […]

How Can We Help Our Students? Teach Information or Media Literacy Students today have never lived in a world without computers and cellphones. They have always been immersed in technology and bombarded with infor- mation. This is normal for them. They use technol- ogy easily and accept new technology readily. They are willing to experiment

Use Verification and Educational Tools A wide variety of reliable news agencies provide infor- mation and tips to both their reporters and their read- ers for avoiding fake news. There are several projects underway to increase levels of trust in the legitimate media. The Trust Project at Santa Clara University in California is working to

Seek Information beyond Your Filter Bubble We can avoid fake news by leaving our filter bubbles and seeking out opinions that do not agree with our own. Comparing sources is always a good idea. Com- paring sources that illustrate different points of view can often give some context to the interpretation of the information being

Experience and education do not always result in unbiased reporting. The reputation of the organiza- tion that supports (employs) a reporter also serves as a means of evaluating a source. Publishers that have been in the news business for a while get a reputation based on the accuracy, reliability, and slant of the sto- ries

Learn about Search Engine Ranking A first strategy to foiling the purveyors of fake news is to educate ourselves about how fake news is created and how it spreads. For example, when people search for information, they often use a search engine. The amount of information that is retrieved is always overwhelming. The vast majority

Google and Facebook Anti–Fake News Efforts The social media platforms and search engines them- selves have made some efforts to help detect and flag fake news. Facebook created an “immune system” to Combating Fake News in the Digital Age Joanna M. Burkhardt help protect itself from infection by bots.40 Google announced that it will increase

Experiments in Bot and Botnet Detection A variety of experiments have been conducted using multiple processes to create a score for information credibility.29 Research groups are prepared to supply researchers with data harvested from social media sites. Indiana University has launched a project called Truthy.30 As part of that project, researchers have developed an “Observatory

Linguistic Approaches to the Identification of Fake News The following four linguistic approaches are being tested by researchers: In the Bag of Words approach, each word in a sen- tence or paragraph or article is considered as a sepa- rate unit with equal importance when compared to every other word. Frequencies of individual words and

Experiments in Fake News Detection Researchers have studied how well humans can detect lies. Bond and DePaulo analyzed the results of more than 200 lie detection experiments and found that humans can detect lies in text only slightly better than by random chance.17 This means that if a bot supplies a social media user with