Misinformation

The current media and technology landscape means kids are no longer confined to just learning in the classroom. Sure, kids have always been able to learn outside the classroom via books and other life experiences, but today’s technology allows children to learn in a multitude of new ways. Looking at that change, Project Tomorrow runs a survey called Speak Up, polling hundreds of thousands of sixth graders and adults about learning trends, and makes the local data available to individual districts. Here are a few takeaways:

• For students today, there is very little distinction between school learning versus what they do on their own at home or on their digital device(s). They feel the learning experience is happening all the time. It is also found they have a healthy balance of using print materials versus first-person materials, and having opportunities to engage with people as well as with digital tools. The media is often quick to say kids today just want to put their nose in their phone and don’t want to interact with people, but the survey found that is more of a symptom seen in Millennials rather than in this current generation. 
• Students want to co-learn with their teachers and parents. Because they are so used to looking up information online, they are not looking to the teacher or a parent to be an expert in everything. It is common practice to go home and look up information they received at school – partly for accuracy and partly to learn more about a topic. Parents should understand that and not be offended by kids looking for verification of what they say.
• Students today are also good at authenticating resources. Surveyors were told by students that kids never use a dot com, they don't trust dot coms; that dot orgs are okay; a dot edu is the best; and you shouldn't really even trust the dot govs.

Facebook has announced some tools for users to limit the amount of political ads served, yet they are not budging in refusing to fact check political ads on the platform. And, although this new tool allows you to reduce the number of political ads you see, it does not allow you to cut them off completely. If you are curious about what categories of ads you are being targeted with, the information is available in your settings, but Facebook’s stance remains that they should not be forced to act as referee in political debate and they are not in any position to say what is true and what is not in such claims.

The debate over Facebook’s freewheeling stance has led to more attention being paid to media organizations, who many opponents argue have essentially been incentivized to publish more divisive,  polarizing, and biased views in order to maximize engagement. Many critics say the divisions we are seeing in society today are the results of media being motivated by profit, and by allowing this to happen, Facebook has become the coliseum hosting the battles. 

TikTok, a popular app with teens, has revised its community guidelines and provides more specifics outlining 10 unacceptable content categories, including violence, hate speech, bullying, dangerous acts and threats to minor safety. As of yet, however, the platform did not detail how it will determine which content providers are breaking the rules.

Recently released PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) study results revealed that only 14 percent of U.S. students were able to reliably distinguish between fact and opinion. PISA is an international assessment that measures 15-year-old students' reading, mathematics, and science literacy every three years. These findings are particularly alarming in these times when many rely on social media to get their news – a place where everyone has an opinion. In a commentary reaction to these results, Chris Link of the Global STEM Alliance at the New York Academy of Sciences shares strategies to help teachers and parents improve students' ability to identify information that is false or biased. One of the exercises he suggests is providing students with links to legitimate looking sites containing false information to see if they are deceived. He says, “experiences like these, where students are challenged to consider the validity of information and sort what’s real from what’s fake, would better prepare them not only to be savvier consumers of news, but also to someday digest contradictory information to make complicated decisions about their own health care, finances or civic engagement”.

Recent research has shown that facial recognition technology is more likely to misidentify African Americans and Asian Americans, a finding that is continuing to raise questions about using the technology in K-12 schools. In a blog post, Sarah St. Vincent, director of Cornell Tech's Computer Security Clinic, shares 10 questions school leaders and parents should ask before adopting the technology, including how accurate the system is, particularly for women and people of color.

Less than a year before the 2020 election, and false political information is moving furiously online. Avaaz, a global human rights organization, has reported that the top 100 false political stories were shared by Facebook users over 2.3 million times in the United States in the first 10 months of 2019. Still, few politicians (or their staff) are prepared to quickly notice and combat incorrect stories about them, according to dozens of campaign staff members and researchers who study online misinformation. Several of the researchers said they were surprised by how little outreach they had received from politicians. Campaigns and political parties say their hands are tied, because social sites such as Facebook and YouTube have few restrictions on what users can say or share, as long as they do not lie about who they are.

As a voter and a parent, what can you do? Review the basics on how to detect misinformation and share with your children. Misinformation hurts everyone by normalizing prejudices, and even justifying and encouraging violence.

Facebook and Instagram already ban ads for guns and e-cigarettes, but now they have announced that they will also be banning "branded content" (influencer posting) that promotes weapons, tobacco and vaping. Enforcement for the new rules should take effect in the "coming weeks," Facebook says. They are also working on tools to help creators honor the new policy, such as setting minimum age requirements on their content. This is the first time Instagram is limiting what influencers can pitch in their feeds, and it's considered overdue by some. Facebook and Instagram have both come under fire for letting social media stars advertise harmful products, including those who stars who are sometimes underage themselves.

Facebook is trying a new approach to fact checking by using “community reviewers”, a diverse group of contractors hired through partners like YouGov, to check potentially false reports. Facebook will use its machine learning process to identify misinformation in posts, as it does already. When content is tagged as potentially false, Facebook's system will then send the post on to the new team of community reviewers. The community reviewers will be prompted to check the post by conducting their own additional research, and if they find the post to be incorrect, they'll be able to send their findings and resources to Facebook's fact-checkers for their official assessment.

By enabling more people to provide input into the fact-checking process, Facebook's aim is to improve both the relative accuracy of its findings, and to lessen accusations that it is favoring one side of politics over another. Critics, however, say this new ‘diverse’ review system is just cover for their policy on not fact-checking political ads and should be brought up when discussing misinformation with your children.

In a world inundated with fake news, it's easy to cast blame on others for spreading misinformation. Now a study from Ohio State University gives credence to a notion that we create our own "alternative facts" to align with our biases. In this instance, the researchers showed that people misremembered accurate statistics when the facts were contrary to what they believed to be true.

Researchers at Stanford University are working with journalism groups to develop a news and Internet literacy curriculum designed to teach students how to sort fact from fiction. The free online curriculum, called Civic Online Reasoning, teaches skills including lateral reading, which professional fact-checkers use to evaluate the credibility of information sources. Lateral reading is a strategy for investigating who is behind an unfamiliar online source by opening a new browser tab to see what trusted websites say about the unknown source.