After a downed U.S. pilot was rescued in Iran, a photo began circling on social media that purported to show the Air Force officer surrounded by other troops, a U.S. flag in his lap.
While the rescue was real, the photograph wasn’t, according to fact-checking initiatives. It was, to use one of President Donald Trump’s favorite terms, “fake news.”
But it took a combination of effort and skepticism to figure this out.
The U.S. military hasn’t identified the officers who were shot down. The fact-checking website Snopes ran the image through artificial-intelligence detecting software that concluded it was likely made with AI. Reuters traced the image to a MAGA-supporting X account and deemed that there was no evidence for its authenticity.
Eventually, the posts began to be deleted, or marked “created with AI.” But not before millions of people had seen it.
This is the environment in which consumers of news are operating today. More than half of Americans get at least some of their news from social media platforms, according to Pew Research, and the youngest adults consume the most news on social media and trust it the most.
Amid concern that young Americans lack “news literacy” — the ability to identify credible sources of news and think critically about the content — initiatives are emerging to teach them these skills.
Young people are faced with “the most complicated information landscape that has ever existed in the history of humanity,” said Elliott Goodman, director of district fellowships for the nonprofit News Literacy Project, which recently awarded a $60,000 grant to nine districts and five charter schools through Northeastern Utah Educational Services. The fellowship comes on the heels of legislation that requires news literacy be part of digital skills taught in Utah schools.
“We want students to be fully prepared for the reality of the 21st century, and that means being able to determine the credibility of the information they’re consuming so they can make decisions about their health, their wealth and their civic engagement,” Goodman said.
The News Literacy Project is not alone in this work. Other initiatives include News Detective, a fact-checking project that enlists college students to determine the veracity of social media claims.
It’s not just young people who lack news literacy, however. Research has shown that many adults struggle to distinguish between news and opinion, which can contribute to distrust and polarization.
The good news is, these are skills that can be learned, by zoomers and boomers alike.
Misinformation vs. disinformation
About 10 years ago, a couple of entrepreneurs in Eastern Europe pranked the world with an advertising campaign for a device that was supposed to help people breathe better when they strapped it to their face. The tagline was “Breathe Your Own Forest.”
They didn’t really expect people to fall for it — they were just trying to draw attention to their larger cause, getting more trees planted across the world. But “Treepex” fooled not just the internet, but reputable news organizations, and it became the subject of news articles that had to be retracted.
The incident was somewhere in the middle of misinformation (false information spread by mistake) and disinformation (false information spread with intent). Journalist Ilana Strauss, who wrote about it in 2019, then called it “one of the most elegant satires I’ve ever seen ― and one of the scariest.”
Strauss now leads an online fact-checking initiative called News Detective, which works with a handful of colleges (including the University of Oregon, the University of Illinois and Howard University) to teach fact-checking skills to college students. Using skills they learned in the classroom and on videos on the News Detective website, students work to verify or debunk claims that originate on Bluesky, processing about 50 a week.
Strauss, who previously worked as a fact-checker for PolitiFact and Reader’s Digest, said in an interview that News Detective is different from fact-checking work done by news organizations like Reuters or USA Today in that it is crowdsourced — while most of the work is done by college students, anyone can contribute.
“In an age where billions of pieces of content come out everyday, we believe that a firehose-style solution like News Detective is necessary. It’s also great for media literacy, as people learn by doing,” the News Detective website says.
The claims being investigated this month are diverse: from whether Charlie Kirk lived out his faith, to whether female octopuses throw rocks at male suitors, to whether former President Joe Biden was responsible for the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war.
The students are taught to consider these and other questions in their analysis: what are the primary and secondary sources of the information, what potential biases the sources may have, what evidence supports the claim and what evidence undermines the claim.
Confusing commentary with news
Students looking into a claim that Charlie Kirk “didn’t follow his faith” were quick to point out on News Detective that the claim was an opinion, and one person noted “there could be a bias towards some sort of political view.”
That’s what researchers at the University of Illinois found when they conducted a study assessing how good people are at distinguishing opinion from fact.
Jeffery J. Mondak, a political science professor and the James M. Benson Chair in Public Issues and Civic Leadership, said respondents were asked to consider 12 statements about current events and then to categorize them as statements of opinion or fact. It was discouraging, he said, to realize 47% of the respondents “could not outperform chance.”
“On average, if you were just guessing randomly, you would get six out of 12 right. And 47% got zero to six right, so they did no better than chance. So that’s bad news.”
Mondak and his co-author, Matthew Mettler, defined a statement of fact as something that can be proven true or false with objective evidence, whereas statement of opinion cannot be proven true or false because it depends on the individual’s values or preferences.
Unless people are able to make that distinction, fact-checking initiatives can only go so far. “If I tell you the sun rises in the West, and you say, ‘No, that’s wrong, it rises in the East,’ and I say, ‘Well, we’re both entitled to our opinion,’ then I can’t be corrected. That presents a fundamental barrier to people being fully and correctly informed,” Mondak said.
The respondents were also presented with an incorrect statement of fact to see how they would respond. Most rated it as opinion.
“What we think happened was that people were thinking to themselves, that’s incorrect, so it can’t be a statement of fact, therefore it must be a statement of opinion,” Mondak said. “That worried us because, again, it means that misinformation can’t be corrected.”
Mondak and Mettler also found a high level of partisan bias, both in people who identified as Republicans or Democrats. “If the statement was something they liked, they tended to call it a statement of fact. If they didn’t like it, they tended to call it a statement of opinion.”
That reflex, he said, “creates a pretty fundamental barrier, not a random one, but a systematic one. ... Both sides are turning the world a quarter turn or so in their direction, and that just widens the impact of polarization.”
It’s one reason, Mondak said, that talk shows that present opposing views with one group of Republicans and one group of Democrats fail to persuade anyone. A better option to encourage serious thought, he said, would be to offer opposing sides of an issue with both Republicans and Democrats on either side of the issue.
How kids are becoming news literate
At the News Literacy Project, the mission is to teach students how to separate good information from bad information as early as grade school, although most of the emphasis is on middle school and high school.
Jamie Patterson, a social studies content specialist for Las Cruces Public Schools in New Mexico, has been working with the nonprofit to provide news literacy training for students in high school.
The news landscape has changed, she said, and “if we don’t actively do something to help them navigate this new landscape, it makes them more susceptible to false information,” she said.
Studies have found that people generally overestimate how good they are at ferreting out misinformation, but Patterson said that her students, for the large part, understand they need this training. “They realize this is a gap that they have in their own education,” she said.
Working with a platform called “Checkology” that the News Literacy Project developed, the Las Cruces students learn to evaluate the credibility of a news source and information they come across, and how to check the origin of social media posts. (Using geolocation tools, for example, a student could check to see if a social media post purportedly from a mom in, say, Nebraska, originated in another country.)
There’s also the opportunity for in-person or virtual visits from journalists across the country in a range of specialties, including print, broadcast and new media, and a “check center” where students can upload an image, article or post to determine its validity.
The platform also emphasizes the importance of journalism. A course called “News Matters,” for example, is designed for grades 3 through 6, and teaches lessons that include distinguishing fact from opinion, recognizing quality journalism and what makes something newsworthy.
There is evidence that the program is working. In evaluating student skills before and after taking the course, the News Literacy Project found that 88% of students recognized when a social media post “failed to provide credible evidence” — up 20 points — and 81% agreed that “a free press is very important to a healthy democracy,” up 17 percentage points after students took the course.
I asked Patterson if she could give me one thing she had learned from the program as she taught her students. “Just one?” she said and laughed.
“I think lateral reading is a big deal, and the credibility of sources. I have found myself being convinced by somebody saying something online, and then I go and look at their credentials. ... At the end of the day, it’s reminding yourself to slow down when you hear something, and then checking for the validity of the source.”
(Lateral reading, according to the Checkology instruction, is to evaluate the validity of a website by opening new tabs and seeing what other sources have said about the site.)
She said students also benefit from learning to intentionally “go outside of your algorithm.”
In one exercise, she asks students to pretend they are an algorithm, and to think about what they would feed a certain person next. The next part is figuring out how to actively break the algorithm.
How to create a news literate society
Mondak, at the University of Illinois, also said that it helps to think from other perspectives, which is one reason he believes that scholastic debating provides a template that could improve news literacy.
Competitive debaters have to be prepared to argue either side of an issue, which gives them an out-of-algorithm experience.
Too often, he said, people think they are seeking out information but are consciously or unconsciously looking for information that confirms what they already believe. He mentioned a Harvard psychology professor who famously asks, “What evidence would convince you that you’re wrong?”
“If regular people are looking at the state of the economy, or the benefits of this or that trade policy, and nothing would convince them that they’re wrong ... well, in the world that I live, if you can’t be wrong, then it’s not science. We want people to behave like scientists.”
Strauss, at News Detective, said when people encounter anything on social media, they should initially give it the same credibility as something they overhear on the street. “It’s no more automatically legitimate if it’s written down than if you heard someone shouting it on the street. There are real ways to figure this out. There are fact-checking tools you can learn in 20 minutes. There’s real, objective science to this. It’s not a matter of ‘Oh, I trust liberals’ or ‘I trust conservatives.’”
According to Goodman, at the News Literacy Project, Utah is one of 10 states that require news literacy be taught in public schools, but everyone can benefit from learning how to be smarter about media consumption.
“It’s so important that people have a healthy skepticism,” Goodman said. “We don’t want people to shut down; we don’t want people to trust everything. We want people to look at something and say, you know what, I have the skills to verify this, I have the skills to gather multiple perspectives on this topic, I can identify what the central claim is here.”