TEDEd: Spreading False News
Pew Research Weighs In
Social Media Plug-Ins
Consider installing these browser plug-ins specifically tailored to your social media sites:
- Escape Your Bubble (Facebook) - a plug-in that fills your Facebook newsfeed with opposing political views and repackages partisan content with an aggressively positive affect.
- FlipFeed (Twitter) - a Twitter plug-in created by M.I.T. researchers. To see how the other half lives, your regular Twitter feed is replaced by that of a random, anonymous user of a different political persuasion.
- This is Fake (Chrome, for Facebook) - plug-in to flag fake news in your Facebook newsfeed in real time.
- PolitEcho (Chrome, for Facebook) - Find out how polarizing the content on your newsfeed is when compared to your friends as a whole.
"Truthiness"
Back in 2005, Stephen Colbert introduced the Word truthiness, now defined by Wikipedia as: a quality characterizing a “truth” that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively “from the gut” or because it “feels right” without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.
While we need to reject the idea of relying solely on from-the-gut verification systems, it is important to recognize that we are not always looking at a binary situation.
Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit and Tumblr played huge roles in circulating political information during the past election season and it is impossible to disregard the complication that our political news consumption habits have caused.
Adapted from School Library Journal
Hoaxy Visualizes how Fake News Spreads Across Social Media
We're at the point where the reproduction of "fake news" online often has offline consequences (see, Fake News Brought Real Guns). While Google and Facebook have both taken measures to combat it, Indiana University is going about things in a different way. Hoaxy, a project from IU's Center for Complex Networks and System Research, is a search engine that tracks the spread of fake news stories on social media, visually.
In the News
- This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News On FacebookA BuzzFeed News analysis found that top fake election news stories generated more total engagement on Facebook than top election stories from 19 major news outlets combined.
- Fake News, Social Media and the Downfall of the U.S.Dr. Dustin Swanger, President of Fulton-Montgomery Community College in Johnstown, New York, weighs in on how fake news and social media are related.
- Social media sites can’t allow fake news to take overThe Editorial Board of the Washington Post expresses their concern of Fake News via Social Media
- 'Who Shared It?': How Americans Decide What News to Trust on Social MediaThe Media Insight Project, a collaboration between the American Press Institute and The AP-NORC Center, uses a survey-based experiment to investigate what determines Americans’ trust in news on social media.