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

There’s a story going around right now about a “reporter” who was following people shorting Tesla stock and allegedly approaching them for information. I won’t go into the whole Elon vs. the Short Sellers history, you don’t need it. Let’s just say that posing as a reporter can be used for ill in a variety… Continue reading

Short update on the Check, Please project. We’re about halfway into the coding hours on this which is a bit scary. We still have some expert hours from TS Waterman at the end to solve the hard problems but right now we’re solving the easy ones. A couple weeks ago we put out a prototype.… Continue reading

We’re still teaching history using only print texts even as kids are being historicized online by Holocaust deniers and Lost-Causers. We’re teaching science in an era when online anti-vaxxers gain traction by using scientific language to deceive and intimidate.  Sam Wineburg, The internet is sowing mass confusion. We must rethink how we teach kids every subject. Couple… Continue reading

OK, maybe you’re just here for the video. I would be. Watch the demo of Check Please, and then continue downpage for the theory of change behind it. Watched it? OK, here’s the backstory. Last November we won an award from RTI International and the Rita Allen Foundation to work on a “fact-checking tutorial generator”… Continue reading

There’s a lot of things that set our approach at the Digital Polarization Initiative apart from most previous initiatives. But the biggest thing is this: we start from the environment in which students are most likely to practice online literacy skills, and in that environment attention is the scarcity. The idea that scarce attention forms the… Continue reading

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware that there are two documentaries out on the doomed Fyre Festival. You should watch both: the event — both its dynamics and the personalities associated with it — will give you disturbing insights into our current moment. And if you teach students about disinformation I’d… Continue reading

So today a group known for pranks circulated an imposter site that posed as the Washington Post, announcing President Trump’s resignation on a post-dated paper. It’s not that hard for hoaxers to do this – any one can come up with a confusingly similar url to a popular site, grab some HTML and make a… Continue reading

As I was reading An Xiao Mina’s recent (and excellent) piece for Nieman Lab, and it reminded me that I had not yet written here about why I’ve increasingly been talking about reputation as a core part of online digital literacy. Trust, yes, consensus, yes. But I keep coming back to this idea of reputation.… Continue reading