Josh Marshall, who is generally one of the better political commentators out there, recently wrote a piece called Why You’re Fooling Yourself About Fake News. The point of the piece is that liberals who believe that fake news sways elections are wrong. Fake news, says Marshall, is a demand-driven phenomena: the people reading and believing Continue reading

So yesterday I spent the day — and really, almost the entire day — fact-checking so-called “statements of fact” here, on this rather boring Rick Perry article. So, for example, the article says that Rick Perry did the Cha-Cha on Dancing with the Stars. We check that Perry actually got a “D” in a class Continue reading

Another quick lesson in sourcing viral user-created content. Here’s a picture that showed up in my stream today. OK, so what’s the story here? To get more information, I pull the textual information off the image and throw it in a Google search: Which brings me to a YouTube video that tells me this was Continue reading

I’ve been addicted to fact-checking for a while. Ten or fifteen years, maybe? Longer? When I see something in any of my feeds that doesn’t smell quite right, I have to hold myself back from checking it. It’s just somehow one of those enjoyable “flow” activities for me. That said, I never really watch what I Continue reading

One of the problems I’ve had for a while with traditional digital literacy programs is that they tend to see digital literacy as a separable skill from domain knowledge. In the metaphor of most educators, there’s a set of digital or information literacy skills, which is sort of like the factory process. And there’s data, Continue reading

I’d like to imagine you are a teacher who has asked the most brilliant students in the world to build an AI that scours the internet — every known public document — to produce answers to simple questions. You sit down on finals day and type in the question “Did the Holocaust happen?” The machine Continue reading

First, pick a claim. It will be associated with at least one news article, but note that you are analyzing the claim, not the article. You can get a claim by going to the Open Claims page. The fact the link is red means the page hasn’t been created yet. When you click it you will Continue reading

A couple people asked me to expand on comments made in my recent Familiarity = Truth post. In it I say this about the Buzzfeed finding that over 50% of Clinton supporters who remember fake anti-Clinton headlines believed them: [A] number like “98% of Republicans who remember the headline believed it” does not mean that 98% of Continue reading

So I have news, lots of news. If you’re the sort of person who just wants to jump into what I’ve launched and started building with the help of others, you can go here now, see what we’re launching, and come back to read this later. For the rest of you, long theoretical navel-gazing it Continue reading

Almost a month ago, I wrote a post that would become one of my most popular on this site, a post on the They Had Their Minds Made Up Anyway Excuse. The post used some basic things we know from the design of learning environments to debunk the claim that fake headlines don’t change people’s Continue reading