How to Protect Students From Fake News | Edudemic

English: Graph of social media activities
English: Graph of social media activities (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
English: A protester holding a placard in Tahr...
English: A protester holding a placard in Tahrir Square referring to Facebook and Twitter, acknowledging the role played by social media during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

For those raised in the information age, life without the internet is no life at all. It is often a primary focus of a teen’s day (75% of teens are online several times per day) and an important means by which they communicate with the world and take in new information. While information can be found in various sources across the internet, an overwhelming majority of teens and pre-teens tend to gather their information from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

A 2015 report by the Media Insights Project found that the majority of surveyed Millennials (aged 18-34) cited Facebook as their sole or primary source of key news and other information.

Unfortunately, Facebook is not known as a credible source for news. The recent outbreak of “fake news” has hit social media sites particularly hard, as these types of platforms are set up to propagate information at record speed regardless of source or content. In addition, teens are particularly bad at discriminating between real and fake news. According to a recent study out of Stanford, 82% of surveyed middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between ads and real news on a website, highlighting the need to teach students media literacy and proper research skills.

Source: How to Protect Students From Fake News | Edudemic