Poll
A significant problem: 16 votes (64%)
A minor problem: 7 votes (28%)
Not a problem: 0 votes (0%)
Don't know / No opinion: 2 votes (8%)
Total Votes: 25
Videos & Webinars
- Fake News Workshop from the iSchool at Illinois"Presentations from Dr. Nicole A. Cooke, Dr. Stephanie Craft, Dr. Barbara M. Jones, and Dr. Rachel M. Magee focused on defining fake news and discussing how it relates to literacy and information behavior."
Can You Spot the Fakes?
- Detect Fakes"Detect Fakes is an MIT research project based on Kaggle's Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC)." Visitors are challenged to detect which videos have been manipulated. After you complete 10, you can see how you have done compared to others.
- A.I. Is Getting Better Fast. Can You Tell What’s Real Now?This quiz from The New York Times tests whether you can tell A.I. generated images from actual photos. Good luck!
Related Guides
- MTC Reads 2023-24: Artificial IntelligenceThis LibGuide has tons of great information about AI. As AI continues to create and spread fake news, this guide may have some useful information for you.
- News Sources: Left and Right Wing Bias in Journals/MediaThis guide provides some general information about popular news sources and guidance as to their political leanings. Check it out if you are looking for some distributers of real news.
Intro to Fake News
Featured eResources
- Factitious
"Facititious was developed by the American University JoLT team to playfully show how to detect fake news. We culled all stories from the internet, but they have been condensed and edited for game, education, and commentary purposes." - "Fake News on Social Media" from Opposing ViewpointsThe database Opposing Viewpoints features a brief overview of the topic and contains relevant journal, magazine, and news articles. They also have recommended video, audio, website, and statistical resources about fake news.
- "Fake News: Overview" from Points of View Reference CenterThis link takes you to the overview article on Fake News in the database Points of View Reference Center. The "Related Information" box on the left side of the page contains links to more resources (journal, magazine, news articles, etc.) on the subject.
- The Media Manipulation Casebook"The Media Manipulation Casebook is a digital research platform linking together theory, methods, and practice for mapping media manipulation and disinformation campaigns. This resource is intended for researchers . . . who want to learn about detecting, documenting, describing, and debunking misinformation."
For Teachers/Instructors/Professors
- "Teaching in the Age of Disinformation"This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses some of the difficulties of teaching about misinformation.
- Teaching: Tackling Disinformation With Media LiteracyThis Chronicle of Higher Education article shares what some instructors and librarians are doing to help teach students media and civic literacy.
Ask Us!
Real-World Examples & Consequences
Books & eBooks
Beyond Fake News (eBook) by
"The world is swimming in misinformation. Conflicting messages bombard us every day with news on everything from politics and world events to investments and alternative health. The daily paper, nightly news, websites, and social media each compete for our attention and each often insist on a different version of the facts. Inevitably, we have questions: Who is telling the truth? How would we know? How did we get here? What can we do? Beyond Fake News answers these and other queries. It offers a technological and market-based explanation for how our informational environment became so polluted. It shows how purveyors of news often have incentives to mislead us, and how consumers of information often have incentives to be misled. And it chronicles how, as technology improves and the regulatory burdens drop, our information-scape becomes ever more littered with misinformation. Beyond Fake News argues that even when we really want the truth, our minds are built in such a way so as to be incapable of grasping many facts and blind spots mar our view of the world. But we can do better, both as individuals and as a society. As individuals, we can improve the accuracy of our understanding of the world by knowing who to trust and recognizing our limitations. And as a society, we can take important steps to reduce the quantity and effects of misinformation"--
Bad News: Why We Fall for Fake News by
From the bestselling author of Suspicious Minds There was a time when the news came once a day, in the morning newspaper. A time when the only way to see what was happening around the world was to catch the latest newsreel at the movies. Times have changed. Now we're inundated. The news is no longer confined to a radio in the living room, or to a nightly half-hour timeslot on the television. Pundits pontificate on news networks 24 hours a day. We carry the news with us, getting instant alerts about events around the globe. Yet despite this unprecedented abundance of information, it seems increasingly difficult to know what's true and what's not. In Bad News, Rob Brotherton delves into the psychology of news, reviewing how the latest research can help navigate this supposedly post-truth world. Which buzzwords describe psychological reality, and which are empty sound bites? How much of this news is unprecedented, and how much is business as usual? Are we doomed to fall for fake news, or is fake news ... fake news? There has been considerable psychological research into the fundamental questions underlying this phenomenon. How do we form our beliefs, and why do we end up believing things that are wrong? How much information can we possibly process, and what is the internet doing to our attention spans? Ultimately this book answers one of the greatest questions of the age- how can we all be smarter consumers of news?
Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies: How to Find Trustworthy Information in the Digital Age by
Are you overwhelmed at the amount, contradictions, and craziness of all the information coming at you in this age of social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles? Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies will show you how to identify deceptive information as well as how to seek out the most trustworthy information in order to inform decision making in your personal, academic, professional, and civic lives. - Learn how to identify the alarm bells that signal untrustworthy information. - Understand how to tell when statistics can be trusted and when they are being used to deceive. - Inoculate yourself against the logical fallacies that can mislead even the brightest among us. Donald A. Barclay, a career librarian who has spent decades teaching university students to become information literate scholars and citizens, takes an objective, non-partisan approach to the complex and nuanced topic of sorting deceptive information from trustworthy information.
Misinformation and Fake News in Education (eBook) by
Today, like no other time in our history, the threat of misinformation and disinformation is at an all-time high. This is also true in the field of Education. Misinformation refers to false information shared by a source who intends to inform, but is unaware that the information is false, such as when an educator who recommends the use of a learning strategy that is not actually beneficial. Disinformation is false information shared by a source who has the intent to deceive and is aware that the information is false, such as when a politician claim that high-stakes testing will fix K-12 education when in fact there is no evidence to support this practice. This book provides recent examples of how misinformation and disinformation manifest in the field of education and remedies. Section One, Susceptibility to Misinformation, focuses on factors that influence the endorsement and persistence of misinformation. This section will include chapters on: the appeal and persistence of "zombie concepts" in education; learner and message factors that underlie the adoption of misinformation in the context of the newly proposed Likelihood of Adoption Model; cognitive and motivational factors that contribute to misinformation revision failure; cognitive biases and bias transfer in criminal justice training; the influence of conspiratorial and political ideation on the use of misinformation; and, how educational culture and policy has historically given rise to quackery in education. Section Two, Practices in the Service of Reducing Misinformation in Education, focuses on practices aimed at reducing the impact of misinformation, and includes chapters on: misinformation in the education of children with ASD and its influence on educational and intervention practices; the promise of using dynamical systems and computational linguistics to model the spread of misinformation; systematic attempts to reduce misinformation in psychology and education both in and out of the classroom; and the potential perils of constructivism in the classroom, as well as the teaching of critical thinking. Each section has a discussion chapter that explicates emerging themes and lessons learned and fruitful avenues for future research.
Fake News and Alternative Facts: Information Literacy in a Post-Truth Era (eBook) by
Listen to a podcast with the author now! Talk of so-called fake news, what it is and what it isn't, is front and center across the media landscape, with new calls for the public to acquire appropriate research and evaluation skills and become more information savvy. But none of this is new for librarians and information professionals, particularly for those who teach information literacy. Cooke, a Library Journal Mover & Shaker, believes that the current situation represents a golden opportunity for librarians to impart these important skills to patrons, regardless of their age or experience. In this Special Report, she demonstrates how. Readers will learn more about the rise of fake news, particularly those information behaviors that have perpetuated its spread; discover techniques to identify fake news, especially online; and explore methods to help library patrons of all ages think critically about information, teaching them ways to separate fact from fiction. Information literacy is a key skill for all news consumers, and this Special Report shows how librarians can make a difference by helping patrons identify misinformation.
Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers by
This is a freely available (open) textbook.
