How can we teach our children to detect ‘fake news’?
Fake news is a form of the brown press that consists of the deliberate distribution of disinformation or rumors via printed newspaper, television, radio, or even online, as in social media. This type of news is written and published with the intention of deceiving, in order to obtain financial or political gains, often with sensationalist headlines, exaggerated or evidently false to attract attention. Intentionally misleading and false content is different from satire or parody. These news stories often employ compelling or entirely fabricated headlines to increase readership, share, and click rates on the Internet. (wikipedia.com)
Detecting fake news is a critical, albeit challenging, a problem in Natural Language Processing. The rapid growth of social media platforms has not only produced a huge increase in the accessibility of information but has also accelerated the spread of fake news. Given the huge amount of web content, automatic detection of fake news is a practical problem required by all online content providers.
A report released by the University of Western Sydney found that many children do not adequately analyze the media they consume or seek the source to verify its veracity. The researchers interviewed 1,000 Australians between the ages of 8 and 16 and found that while young people value news, 43% of children and 23% of teenagers cannot distinguish between false and real news. In addition, 54% of young people rarely check whether the news they find online is true.
Clearly, media literacy skills are vital for children growing up in the digital age, and parents and teachers play an important role in teaching those skills.
Can children identify fake news?
A growing number of organizations believe the answer is a resounding YES. Especially if they are instructed to do so. The most recent addition to the field is a free online game called NewsFeed Defenders, which helps train students to identify misinformation online. ICivics, a nonprofit educational institution founded by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, developed the program with the Annenberg Public Policy Center.
The News Literacy Project, an education program aimed at helping young people to distinguish real news from fake news in the social media era, tackles the false news problem at the consumer level. The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit says that since 2016, it has been catering to an increase in demand for teachers worldwide. He recently received a $ 1 million grant from Facebook to help expand his services, helping children perfect their own lie detectors.
Fake News in Brazil
With a population of almost 208 million people, Brazil has a huge presence on social media: 120 million WhatsApp users, more than 100 million people on Facebook, and another 50 million sign up for Instagram. At least 14 “false news” bills are being examined in Parliament. Ten of Brazil’s 35 political parties have signed an agreement with the electoral authority to combat “the spread of false information”. “The objective is to teach students to identify false news, and now it is part of the national curriculum because the country has decided that it is necessary,” said Leandro Beguoci, editorial director of Nova Escola.
Nowadays, it has become a challenge to distinguish fact from fiction — especially for children. However, by helping them to know what is real and what is false, you are also teaching them to think for themselves and also to understand the world better.
The aim of the Fake News Challenge is to explore how artificial intelligence technologies, particularly online learning and natural language processing, can be harnessed to tackle the problem of fake news. They believe that A.I. technology promises to significantly automate parts of the procedure that human fact-checkers currently use to determine whether a story is real or a scam.
Source
Book: “Literacy and Young Children: Research-Based Practices” by Diane M. Barone (Editor), Lesley Mandel Morrow (Editor)
