I’m sitting here starting an argument with you and you are starting an argument with me. I am against expressive social media, I say. I think it is making us very dumb and we should use other forms of social media to teach kids. “But, Mike,” you may be thinking, “why are you so binary,… Continue reading

I’ve generally kept my advocacy for the Lead-Crime Hypothesis off this blog. This is a blog about web-enabled education, after all. But today I can probably get away with it because there’s a web literacy connection. Seriously, I promise. For those who don’t know the lead-crime hypothesis, it goes like this: the massive crime wave… Continue reading

I can’t make it to MisInfoCon, unfortunately, or the #fakenewssci conference going on right now on the East Coast (can we get a few West Coast misinformation conferences please?) But I thought I’d offer my take on a frame for the problem of misinformation on the web. When you listen to the psychologists talk about misinformation,… Continue reading

Back before the election I was working on a book on the problems of living in “the stream” — this endless flow of stuff we read, retweet, and react to. My argument in that still unfinished work was that while the stream is useful and exciting it also warps our sense of reality in unhelpful ways. Forced… Continue reading

Jesse Walker on how our need for narrative creates a market for both conspiracy theory and fake and slanted news: For a lot of people, the real assumption that they bring to the news, even beyond their partisan affiliations, is an expectation of a smooth narrative. They expect news stories to look like the movies… Continue reading

Today’s photo investigation. The big “story” now is that the Women’s March left a big mess and that’s awful, and they should have cleaned it up. Here’s the image — it’s shocking! Well, this is almost too easy. There’s two ways to do this. If you search Snopes for the term “Women’s March signs snopes”… Continue reading

I like showing people how to debunk viral photos for a couple reasons. First, it requires small enough action that it can easily become a habit. You don’t need to do a lot of research or have a lot of knowledge. Second, it shows how technological affordance (in this case Google Chrome’s right-click “Search by… Continue reading

This comes up in my feed today: I go to retweet it, but stop. How do I know this is true? It’s a little alarm bell that goes off now when something seems just a little too perfect. I right click on the image, search by image.   I look at the URLs, and I see… Continue reading

There is an excellent article in the Guardian by Evgeny Morozov, who gets at the heart of what we have come to call “the fake news problem”. According to Morozov, there are two “denials” that drive not only fake news (and a host of other corrosive clickbait), but our entire information environment: The big threat… Continue reading

My ideal news environment would be an international mix of both small and large papers and individual reporters doing paid work in ways that rewarded those with a dedication to facts and deep analysis over spin, clickbait, and press release stenography. We’d probably get part of the way there if we could figure out a… Continue reading