Hapgood

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

So nobody took me up on my trace a viral photo challenge. I’m disappointed in you all. It’s like you have jobs or something. In any case, I’ve walked through the solution to one of the images in a video. For what it’s worth I recorded the video without sound so that I could concentrate Continue reading

This tweet appeared in my stream yesterday. I used the first photo here (guy with feet on fire) as an example in my evolving course materials on how to trace things to a source on the internet. I also tracked down the other photos as well. It took barely any time at all. Maybe ten Continue reading

I’ve been working over the break to boil down how to check Internet claims into something short and active. Short, because longer prescriptions don’t work. Active, because we are trying to build habits. Here’s what I’ve got so far. See if someone has already done the work. Some people call this the “Check Snopes First” Continue reading

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