Abstract
Fake news has been a highlight of social media and mainstream media conversations for years, with particular focus on health and politics. Three years into a pandemic, it is clear that the spread of misinformation about healthcare and diseases can happen at an alarming rate, with serious consequences. And in the political sphere, bias within reporting has been a highlight for years with current divisions between parties seeming to stretch fact checking sources to their limit, with political violence hanging in the balance.
This session will discuss the link that forms between individual bias and the spread of misinformation, and how addressing those biases is the first step in stopping that spread. Using a multipronged approach of instruction, social media posts, videos, emails, and more, students are engaged in the process of identifying misinformation while confronting their own conscious and unconscious biases. Learning through the ABCs of misinformation including algorithms, bias, and credibility, students follow the life and flow of “fake news” and its consequences. Beginning with algorithms, they learn to address how what you like on social media and the news sources you choose will continue to influence what news you consume. Following with bias, we highlight how comparing articles on the same topic from multiple news sources can result in very different coverage and reinforce what we already believe to be true. Finally, through credibility, students work to evaluate the bias of the authors and websites they frequent, addressing truth vs half-truths.
References
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Nyilasy, Greg. “Fake News in the Age of COVID-19.” Inside Business, University of Melbourne, 10 April 2020. https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/fake-news-in-the-age-of-covid-19
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Wang, Xiangyu, Min Zhang, Weiguo Fan, and Kang Zhao. “Understanding the Spread of COVID‐19 Misinformation on Social Media: The Effects of Topics and a Political Leader’s Nudge.” Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 73, no. 5, May 2022, pp. 726–37. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1002/asi.24576.
