LSBU Library: Fake News: Evaluating Information

Fake News Quiz

Can you spot the fake news stories?
Can you disentangle fact from fiction?

Digital literacies and evaluation tools

Yes, Digital Literacy. But Which One?
Mike Caulfield emphasises the importance of integrating digital and information literacy skills with subject knowledge in order to evaluate information sources.

What is News Literacy

What is News Literacy
News Literacy is a curriculum developed at Stony Brook University in New York over the past decade. It is aimed at journalism students, but the skills it teaches can help everyone develop critical thinking skills in order to judge the reliability and credibility of information, whether it comes via print, television or the Internet.

"Psychological vaccine"

'Psychological vaccine’ could help immunise public against ‘fake news’ on climate change
New research finds that misinformation on climate change can psychologically cancel out the influence of accurate statements. However, if legitimate facts are delivered with an “inoculation” – a warning dose of misinformation – some of the positive influence is preserved.

Checklists

Six easy ways to tell if that viral story is a hoax
Six useful tools to track back online resources to see their origin and if they are authentic.
Fake News: 4 quick checks
The UK Safer Internet Centre suggests four ways to assess online resources.

Newspapers

How left or right-wing are the UK’s newspapers?
The results of a YouGov poll uncovering Britons’ view on where mainstream national newspapers sit on the left-right political spectrum.

Bias, Bullshit and Lies
Nic Newman and Richard Fletcher's report is published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, with the support of Google and the Digital News Initiative.
This report explores the underlying reasons for low trust in the news media and social media
across nine countries (United States (US), UK, Ireland, Spain, Germany, Denmark, Australia, France,
and Greece).

With the advent of the Internet and social media, news is distributed at an incredible rate by an unprecedented number of different media outlets. How do we choose which news to consume? Damon Brown gives the inside scoop on how the opinions and facts (and sometimes non-facts) make their way into the news and how the smart reader can tell them apart. (US-centric)

Reports

Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning
Over the last year and a half, the Stanford History Education Group has prototyped, field
tested, and validated a bank of assessments that tap civic online reasoning—the ability to
judge the credibility of information that floods young people’s smartphones, tablets, and
computers.

In what follows, we provide an overview of what we learned and sketch paths our
future work might take. We end by providing samples of our assessments of civic online
reasoning.

PolitiFact's guide to fake news websites and what they peddle
A useful expose of some fake news websites.
Fake news and critical literacy: final report
The Commission on Fake News and the Teaching of Critical Literacy Skills, run by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Literacy and the National Literacy Trust, as well as partners Facebook, First News and The Day, has gathered a wealth of evidence over the past year on the impact of fake news on children and young people, as well as the skills children need to be able to spot it.