"The coronavirus pandemic is rife with misinformation. Use your library’s digital reach to help people sniff out fake news.
Misinformation runs rampant during times of unrest, and the COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. Your library may be closed to the public, but you can still help thwart misinformation by sharing media literacy resources via your website or social media channels.
But a word of warning: Try not to overload your social media followers—or yourself—with too much news."
https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/covid-19-fighting-fake-news-pandemic/; accessed May 15, 2020.
"Military conflicts — like the one that is sparking between the United States and Iran — are usually surrounded by false images and outdated videos that go viral on social media. It happened in Turkey the other day.
To avoid that misinformation scenario, the International Fact-Checking Network developed a step-by-step guide to teach citizens how to verify images, from asking simple and rhetorical questions to using reverse image search on cell phones."
https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2020/how-to-use-your-phone-to-spot-fake-images-surrounding-the-u-s-iran-conflict/ ; accessed Jan 9, 2020.
"If hackers continue to get better at the technology of deep fakes, detection, and other methods will follow close behind. But unless digital literacy prioritized, we will always be behind the hackers. It’s an arms race, the new Cold War. Technology fixes won’t be enough so librarians will have to step in, preparing patrons for the information wars that are coming."
https://www.oif.ala.org/oif/?p=18390; accessed August 13, 2019.
"Being nonpartisan means that we don’t have a stake in a party or politician and whether they are right or wrong. We take the side of the truth. So, we are always looking for what is and what is not backed up by facts and evidence. As far as our nonpartisanship and our attempts to minimize bias, the most scrutiny we get is from readers and the public. Our response to this scrutiny is that we fact-check things that would make the average person wonder if it’s true or not. We also fact check incorrect items. So, if someone makes frequent inaccurate statements, then we are going to fact-check them more."
https://www.oif.ala.org/oif/?p=18384; accessed August 10, 2019.
"The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter’s existence—some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years—and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/03/largest-study-ever-fake-news-mit-twitter/555104/;accessed March 9, 2018.
"It’s a term that has been constantly redefined and repurposed; what used to specifically refer to deliberately misleading information built to draw large social media audiences to ad-laden websites is now frequently co-opted as a quick slight against legitimate news organizations with perceived bias."
From https://www.poynter.org/news/should-we-stop-saying-fake-news; accessed December 19, 2017.
"Judging from the President’s tweets, his definition of “fake news” is credible reporting that he doesn’t like. But he complicates the matter by issuing demonstrably false statements of his own, which, inevitably, make news. Trump has brought to the White House bully pulpit a disorienting habit of telling lies, big and small, without evident shame. Since 2015, Politifact has counted three hundred and twenty-nine public statements by Trump that it judges to be mostly or entirely false. (In comparison, its count of such misstatements by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is thirteen.)"
From Donald Trump’s “Fake News” Tactics; accessed December 4, 2017.
“Parody is an interesting form of humor, very hit-and-miss, and it depends largely on how familiar someone is with the subject, and what their own views on it are,” Sample said. “For parody to work, you need an agreed-upon norm and then you have to exaggerate that. But today it’s hard to find an agreed-upon norm about anything, or something that doesn’t already seem like exaggeration.”
From http://www.pressherald.com/2017/12/10/maine-parody-site-is-far-from-fake-news-and-enough-readers-get-the-joke/; accessed December 18, 2017.
But readers are now being confronted with an even tougher challenge: decoding the work of writers whose track records of faulty reporting are occasionally interrupted by stories that are actually true.
The trait has appeared among pro- and anti-Trump writers alike, as bloggers on each side of a chaotic political crisis mix information from knowledgeable insiders with wild allegations about their opponents."
From https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/may/16/fake-news-sites-reports-facts-louise-mensch; accessed December 2, 2017.
"The epidemic of fake news is relatively new but has already largely impacted the way people consume and disseminate information online. Facebook recently began displaying ways to avoid fake news on its news feeds, but this puts the responsibility on the consumer to avoid fake news, rather than on Facebook to eliminate it from news feeds. Today we'll discuss what fake news is, where it comes from and how it can be avoided."
From http://radio.wosu.org/post/fake-news#stream/0; accessed December 2, 2017.
"There are critics who say news literacy is trying to run before it can walk. They say, “Come back when you have all the evidence and then we’ll talk about adding it to the curriculum.” But there’s a strong case that news literacy deserves a place in our public schools right now, even before all the evidence is in. Based on the embrace of the Common Core, dozens of states believe the kind of analytical thinking that news literacy is predicated on is worth teaching, whether it creates news literacy or not, because it prepares kids for college—and for life."
https://archives.cjr.org/feature/can_news_literacy_grow_up.php ; accessed May 23, 2019.