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Study: Most Students Can't Spot Fake News (engadget.com)
Even those who think that the U.S. Presidential election wasn't affected by the swath of fake news articles swirling on Facebook and other social media networks, they tend to agree that there is a lot of misinformation on the web. At Slashdot, it's hard to say that anyone here will not be able to tell fake news from a real one. But what about kids? How is our future generation doing? Not so well, apparently. An anonymous reader shares an Engadget report:A Stanford study of 7,804 middle school, high school and college students has found that most of them couldn't identify fake news on their own. Their susceptibility varied with age, but even a large number of the older students fell prey to bogus reports. Over two-thirds of middle school kids didn't see why they shouldn't trust a bank executive's post claiming that young adults need financial help, while nearly 40 percent of high schoolers didn't question the link between an unsourced photo and the claims attached to it. Why did many of the students misjudge the authenticity of a story? They were fixated on the appearance of legitimacy, rather than the quality of information. A large photo or a lot of detail was enough to make a Twitter post seem credible, even if the actual content was incomplete or wrong. There are plenty of adults who respond this way, we'd add, but students are more vulnerable than most.
Teach logic to preschoolers, I say.
But that might lead to critical thinking.
"His name was James Damore."
"At Slashdot, it's hard to say that anyone here will not be able to tell fake news from a real one."
Judging by some of the discussions over the last few days on similar articles I doubt this.
This clearly illustrates the one area where schools lack: critical thinking
Our school system is really only designed to enable rote memorization:
Memorize your multiplication tables.
Memorize the dates of the Egyptian empire
Memorize the themes in To Kill a Mockingbird
Memorize that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell
They are given a book, told "this book is truth, memorize this book," and so yeah, seeing an article with ulterior motives would throw them for a loop.
If you want better politicians, you need a better populace. If you want a better populace, you're going to need a better public school system that teaches students more than just numbers and facts. We need to teach them how to think critically, how to examine the world around them, and how to leverage the internet as a nearly unlimited resource, while being wary of the ability for any random jack-hole to post some spurious shit on their blog.
This signature is false.
I'm fucking sick of this narrativr being pushed on Slashdot. Your first clue that it's politically motivated should have been President Obama using his presidential podium to bitch about it. Your latest should have been how quickly China latched onto the bandwagon. Those with longer memories might recall that China has enforced internet censorship using this exact rationale before; "anti-social misinformation." But "fake news" is much more succinct - it implies that "real news" can only come from "real news sources." Coincidentally this endless propaganda blitz only started after it was revealed how much election info people got from their friends on Facebook. It's yet another media attempt to solidify - nay reclaim - their oligarchal status as outlets that people trusted implicitly. One need look no further than their current behavior - where they are issuing hysterical semons about Trump being "the least transparent President in history" because he didn't inform the media before stepping out for a fucking steak dinner - to see the depths of their panic. After a campaign season where they dropped the last pretenses of objectivity and did their level best to destroy Trump - only to see him win the Presidency - they know their former sainted and respected status as Messengers From Olympus is no more. They can shriek and rage and stomp their feet all they want but nothing will change this. Trump uses Twitter to speak to the masses directly, which underscores the point: they are not just no longer trusted, but no longer needed.
No number of propaganda articles will change that.
This is a dunning-kruger problem. The only way you can tell if something is fake or not, is if you already have at least some knowledge about the subject matter. If there's an article from a trusted news source about how Intel put out a 6GHz CPU, the first thing I would do is check if the date is April 1st because I know about the problems involved.
If an article says someone has discovered a liquid form of a higgs-boson condensate, how would I know different? I mean, it's a condensate , obviously it must condense somehow.
And to make matters worse, in the US there are truth in advertising laws but there doesn't seem to be an equivalent for news. At least, I assume that must be the case, because I can't fathom how Fox News could be viable otherwise.
Fake news is nothing new, and certainly not specific to this past election. The only thing different is that people are finally starting to wake up to how serious of a problem it is.
All the major new outlets are guilty of publishing opinion pieces as if they're real news. Maybe not totally made-up fake, but just as bad.
You are confusing propaganda with news. Trump saying something on twitter isn't news. Somebody posting an article on facebook isn't news. You have to have a vetting process, and a check/verification process, be it at the editor, but more rpeferably at the reading end too. And no matter what side of the political process you, both Democrate and republican are faulty of using hoax stories, let us call them by what they really are. You take trump as example, but even he fell down the trap with that so called "jihadist" video which was an hoax.
During the hayday of journalism , say 1940 to 1970-80ish , this vetting and verification process was understood, and serious journalism rose above the yellow press. But starting 1980ies and strongly 1990ies, it declined because people are pretty damn cheap. So vetting and serious investigation dropped, dropped and dropped until the cost are so much cut that every damn idiot copy/paste one source be it a AFP , Reuter or a 3rd party rag, check it, they even don't bother changing the wording. Heck now people are considering the shit out of facebook news. It isn't. They are just stories, as likelies to be hoax, taken out of context, or even news, without vetting or fact checking you can't tell. Since there is no vetting process on either side (writing/reading), no double check , those hoax get spread. heck scam too. Steorn. Rossi eCat. And so forth. How often I tried to get people to spot the warning sign ? And get ignored because I am a "liberal" or a "rightwingnut" (depending on the slant of the story I try to point out has problem) or even a "close minded scientist" ?
And frankly, I have been saying for years it is a problem, albeit in skeptical forums, not here. The problem is that critical thinking is a skill one need to learn because it is pretty damn easy to fall into one's bias as long as they go the way one politically think. Nobody Is teaching critical thinking. So for years we have been seeing hoaxes rise as stories and being handled seriously. Heck among skeptic group, what do you think we try to fight for ? Critical thinking is THE skill everybody should be getting. And yet again I predict that this will fall by the byside , being seen as propaganda from butthurt people.
The only point where you are right, is that a lot of media are butthurt now and see that as a problem. But that does not mean the problem is not real. It is real, and I have seen the rise of hoax and scam being treated very seriously , far more than previously in spite of fact checking being so easy nowadays.
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What is all this sudden bullcrap about "fake news" in a country where it is LEGAL to fictional ALL news (thanks to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation's multiple lawsuits in federal court) and where the Koch brothers are responsible for most of the "content" on NPR, and everything on PBS and Frontline?
I mean, WTF is all this Prof. Elizabeth Sindars/Merrimack College (WTF that is????) bullcrap about???? This is the Land of Fake News, and has been during my lifetime.
And now . . . for some Non-Fake News . . . .
I had an amazing teacher in middle school. He'd teach us exactly that--how to spot propaganda, false advertising claims, etc. It was probably the best set of lessons I ever learned because now I'm impervious to all the crap.
Of course, if he was teaching today they'd try to brand him as a communist or a "leftist" (whatever that means) ...
Actually he would alternately be branded a communist/leftist and a racist/misogynist/[something]-phobe depending on whose propaganda was being scrutinized.
:-)
There, I reject your implication that it is only the right offering false claims.
But that might lead to critical thinking.
Unlikely. Most teachers benefit a lot from the educational status quo, which is defended by the Democratic Party. College professors are the most politically biased group in America. According to some polls, only 3% of them voted for Trump. Our educational system is the problem, not the solution, with a strong vested interest in indoctrination rather than thinking.
Or maybe, just perhaps, those college professors know something you don't. Just a thought.
Yes, they know the world of scholarly journals and ivory towers. Not necessarily the real world. The more we move from hard science to soft science the more their teachings are opinions and beliefs, often politicized ones. If you think professors are beyond such things you have not spent much time around them.
I never knew about Breitbart news until this election, and after following them for the last 3 months I think they're probably the best example of actual news reporting on the net. The site is right-wing slanted, but the actual reporting appears to be high quality and accurate.
You should avoid the obvious trollery; you almost had me for a second there.
repeating the same right wing talking points that have been used since Regan to cut funding to education and public services.
Let's see, where do I begin:
1. Real wages are down. Way down. You can't spend money on sh*t you need if you don't have it in the first place. You can't budget what isn't there. And you can't pay your way through college on $17k/yr (full time min wage) when tuition alone is $11k of that, scholarships are dried up or hyper competitive and even borrowing doesn't pay enough to get you through.
2. Kids have learned plenty about cause and effect. See above. They've got the math skills to see they can't afford higher education. Why don't you?
3. Did it ever cross your mind that that 2nd year college kid might just be exhausted from working and studying full time?
4. The "precious little snowflake" movement was an educational movement started by real teachers who had actually studied real students. As opposed to knee jerk armchair commenters like yourself. What they found were millions and millions of unwanted children who existed because their parents had sex. Kids who got little or no positive reinforcement at home and who'd been conditioned to failure. It's a solution for combating that. If you knew anything about teaching or education you would know this. This is what happens when you take something that looks easy (teaching) but is actually really, really fucking hard and don't leave it in the hands of experts. This is gonna get me modded down but fuck it, I got karma to burn: Elites are elite for a reason. Donald Trump is not elite. My friend's mom who just finished her Doctorate in education? Yeah, she's mother fucking bad ass elite.
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