As of yesterday, we’ve released the Check, Please! Starter Course, a three hour online module on source and fact-checking that can be dropped into any course or taken as a self-study experience. The techniques we teach in the course are the same moves in the popular open textbook Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, but we Continue reading

I’ve been going through my NextDoor community because — well, I have to keep on top of new problems in social media and information. On good days that means I scroll through TikTok, on bad ones, NextDoor. One thing people occasionally do on NextDoor is share Ring videos. Some are of legit crimes; the ones Continue reading

A question we get asked a lot about our four moves curriculum is whether it sticks. Can a two or three week intervention really change people’s approach online to information permanently? Remember, we don’t do traditional news literacy. We don’t do traditional media literacy. We don’t teach people about newspapers, communications theory, or any of Continue reading

How can students get better at sorting truth from fiction from everything in between? At applying their attention to the things that matter? At amplifying better treatments of issues, and avoiding clickbait? Since 2017, we’ve been teaching students with something called the Four Moves. Our solution is to give students and others a short list Continue reading

Found some disinfo on TikTok today which had apparently started on Facebook. It’s a video that promotes a variety of bogus and increasingly bizarre claims — there are plastic shards in rice that show up when put in a hot pan, harmful magnetic gunk in your baby formula you can extract with a magnet, poisonous Continue reading

There’s a video going around that purportedly shows Nancy Pelosi drunk or unwell, answering a question about Trump in a slow and slurred way. It turns out that it is slowed down, and that the original video shows her quite engaged and articulate. Two things about this. The first is that our four moves (SIFT) Continue reading

I have so much writing backlogged I need to get a few quick hits out to clear the logjam. Here’s a good example of a statistical false frame that’s visual enough for a slide. It says “Washington Post” on the bottom there, but of course the Washington Post version lacks the “presidential term” markers. When Continue reading

The Four Moves have undergone some tweaking since I first introduced them in early 2017. The language has shifted, been refined. We’ve come to see that lateral reading is more of a principle underlying at least two of the moves (maybe three). We’ve removed a reference to “go upstream” which was a bit geeky. All Continue reading

Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. For kids today, that means Googling stuff. One might think these searches would turn up a variety of perspectives, including at least a few compelling counterarguments. One would be wrong. The Google searches flooded his developing brain with endless bias-confirming “proof” to Continue reading

If you want to see how data voids are utilized by extremists, here’s a good example. Last night a prominent conservative organization tweeted this image: You see the beach ball, right? It asks you to Google the “Kalergi Plan”. What’s that? It’s an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that has its roots in “the ‘white genocide’ and Continue reading