Reboot in the News

Nobody likes to think they’re an easy mark for fake news. People don’t want to believe that they can be duped. But it turns out that Americans are far too confident about their Internet skills. 

New research from our team suggests only 1 percent of Americans know how to truly identify a fake news website, and many don’t often take the extra steps to ensure the information they are reading and sharing is credible.

As schools around the world have transitioned to online education during the COVID-19 crisis, many are reporting frustration. One Israeli mother captured the anger of many in a video when she said, “If we don’t die of corona, we’ll die of distance learning.”

It’s not news that social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook can be hotbeds of rumor and misinformation. Spend anytime online, and there’s a friend of a friend retweeting some implausible bit of Kardashian news.

But the COVID-19 pandemic is showing that information on social media is particularly unreliable, a crapshoot of so-called advice that can have disastrous effects on public health. 

Schools have historically been the beneficiaries of public and private sector investments in digital infrastructure, programs, and other resources. Funding has been primarily directed at in-school internet connectivity, after school programs and a wide range of related activities, including teacher professional development, e-books, and on-site computer labs.

My son, his best friend, Dave, and I were chatting over a pizza last weekend when Dave dropped some (absolutely incorrect) information: The elderly are forgoing nursing homes for cruise ships, because the room and board cost about the same, plus you get entertainment and travel.

Our public square isn’t what it used to be. But, if schools lead the way, media literacy education can help us rebuild civic society.

If the damage to public discourse wasn’t clear already, the recent controversy over political advertising on social media platforms surely drove the point home. While Twitter’s Jack Dorsey announced a ban on such advertising, Mark Zuckerberg defended Facebook’s decision to keep hosting political ads without subjecting it to rigorous fact-checking.