Kyle Smith has taught at Superior High School on Lake Superior, Wisconsin, for 27 years. Last year, he asked his students to examine two websites.
Partnership for a Healthier America runs campaigns like Veggies Early & Often that promote nutrition and healthy eating to school-aged children. The International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) also offers nutritional information, but has downplayed the harmful effects of tobacco and questioned guidelines that encourage people to consume less sugar. Health advocates characterizes ILSI as “little more than a front group promoting the interests of the 400 member companies that provide its $17 million budget,” according to the New York Times.
Nearly two-thirds of Smith’s students considered ILSI the more credible of the two sites, he told me later by email. These students have been on the Internet almost since they were born. So why were they deceived?
They are not alone. In 2019, my research team at Stanford tested 3,446 high school students by providing them with an Internet connection and having them solve six tasks. As part of one task, they watched a social media video that allegedly showed ballot stuffing during the 2016 Democratic primaries. A few keywords in their browsers allegedly led to articles from Snopes and the BBC showing that the video is from the 2016 Russian elections. Only three students – less than a tenth of 1 percent – traced the origin of the clip to Russia.
States have begun to realize the threat posed by digital illiteracy. New Jersey is the latest to pass legislation requiring online literacy in the school curriculum. Such mandates could not have come sooner.
A few years ago, one could spot sketchy content by its telltale misspellings, propism errors, and tortured sentences – clumsy attempts by foreign governments to spread disinformation. No more.
Today, generative AI tools enable bad actors to mass-produce fraudulent content in crystal-clear prose. NewsGuarda company that tracks misinformation and assigns credibility ratings to media outlets, located 510 news sites created by AI tools as of October 10. Bet on this number which will multiply in the pre-election days to come.
How should we prepare Kyle Smith’s students – in fact, how should we all prepare – to face this onslaught? One answer, sung like a Greek refrain, is “teach critical thinking.” Smith’s students, however, didn’t need to think any further. They had to do less.
Smith’s students, however, didn’t need to think any further. They had to do less.
Landing on ILSI, the students were impressed because, as they put it, the organization “shows all the science and numbers when it comes to food equity.” They recognized its dot-org domain and its tax-exempt status, which they said added to the site’s legitimacy. They were influenced by the reports under the science and research tab and commented favorably on the international reach of the organization, with “13 entities around the world” that “use research from around the world”, making it “more capable to synthesize information regarding nutrition. .”
Every moment students spent perusing this polished site – clicking links, reading the About page, scrolling through its advisory board of doctoral students and representatives from top universities – gave PR impresarios the organization more time to work their magic.
However, imagine a fundamentally different approach. Before rushing headlong onto a construction site, the students could have taken a deep breath and asked themselves a preliminary question: do I Really you know what I’m looking at? Is this really the website of a credible scientific organization?
Thinking that you can tell what something is by looking at it plays into the hands of a con artist. Unless you bring in-depth knowledge about a topic, it’s easy to fall victim to clever manipulation of information. When he is awarded academics judging sites outside their expertise, they too get caught. Even if you carefully peruse ILSI’s website, you’ll never learn that Mars, maker of M&M’s and Skittles, severed ties with the group because they didn’t. “want to participate in advocacy-led studies” or that in 2021, Coca-Cola also abandoned ship.
You only discover these crucial pieces of context when you leave the site and go online, which is precisely how it is. fact checkers veterinarian sources unknown. To quickly get context, these professionals open new tabs and use the Internet to check Internet, a process called side reading.
This is not something students do spontaneously. But they can be taught. In a treatment-control study Conducted by my research team in Lincoln, Neb., public schools, students whose regular teachers taught them to read laterally nearly doubled their ability to make wise choices compared to their peers in regular classrooms. In a Canadian study, students showed a six-fold increase in the use of fact-checking techniques such as lateral reading and a five-fold increase in citations of appropriate contexts after just seven hours of instruction. Similar results were obtained by researchers working in Sweden, Germany and Italy.
No one is safe from the devious tricks of today’s digital scammers. It’s hubris to think we’re smart enough to outsmart the Web, relying on the knowledge of 9th biology level to evaluate scientific reports on virology or an introductory statistics course to evaluate multi-parameter data from the North Greenland Ice Core Project. Instead of thinking that we have the tools to investigate a hidden site by dissecting its prose or locating flaws in its research reports, leaving a site to leverage the power of the Internet wrests control away from us. its designers and puts it back where it is. belongs.
In our hands.
