https://offspring.lifehacker.com/how-to-teach-your-kids-to-spot-fake-news-1820985245

How to teach kids to spot fake news? First: Teach everyone to spot fake news. When I was a child, my parents had access to only a few news sources: our local paper, the big-city dailies (for us, the Washington Post and the New York Times) and the nightly news. Kids today have … the entire internet, with every crackpot theory and faked moon landing right at their fingertips. Even the distinction between “media” and “journalism” has blurred to the point that many adults don’t know if anyone can be trusted at all.

Which means that parental responsibilities now include giving your kids the tools to assess whether a given story is real—backed up by solid reporting—or biased, or totally and completely fake. Or Russian propaganda. To this end, educators are developing curricula to encourage “media literacy” in the face of an onslaught of, well, media bullshit and a president who’s actively trying to discredit responsible journalism. To get an idea of how parents can help their kids separate fact from fiction, I spoke to two people who are deep in the media-literacy trenches.

When you’re watching or reading the news with your kids, “do a play-by-play of your searching and fact-checking,” says Faith Rogow, an educational consultant who specializes in media literacy for children. Explain how you choose what to click on, and if you read something that sets off your BS radar, show your kids how you would verify that what you’re reading is real. “Explain ‘this sounds wrong to me, and this is what I’m doing to figure it out,’” she says. You want to make asking questions your kid’s default setting, what the National Association for Media Literacy Education calls a “habit of inquiry.” To do this, get your kids accustomed to asking a few regular questions:

First, use common sense. If you’re reading about something like PizzaGate, or that Sandy Hook was a hoax, Rogow says to “follow that train of thought to its natural conclusion.” That means asking: What else would have to be true for this to be true? How many people would have to be in on the conspiracy that Sandy Hook was a hoax or the moon landing was faked in order for this story to be true?

“The second question,” says Rogow, is “who benefits if this is true?” Who benefits if there really were a pedophile ring in a pizza parlor in Washington? If you ask questions that take wild stories to their logical conclusion, kids will start to see the holes. John Silva, the the director of education at the News Literacy Project, calls this kind of real-time parent-child fact-checking “lateral reading.” “While you’re sitting with your child, open up another browser tab and start checking other sites,” Silva says.

But, you say, isn’t the real news these days totally incredible? What about Roy Moore being banned from an Alabama mall for preying on young girls, for example—doesn’t that also seem rather unbelievable? That’s when you start educating your kids on reporting 101.

“I wish every school had every student work on the newspaper,” says Rogow. “If kids were challenged to report on something local and detailed, they would understand what goes into thoroughly reporting a story.” If your kid doesn’t have a school newspaper or simply isn’t interested, “have them check multiple and diverse sources,” says Rogow. “Here’s a quickie strategy: Use a site like the Newseum’s front page collection to look at how an incident is reported in other countries. Ask your kids, ‘what’s the different perspective?’ There are a lot of ways to gently challenge people to think more broadly and deeply.”

If another outlet is reporting the same story—say the New York Times picks up something the Washington Post reports, Rogow says “look for the words ‘independently verified.’ That means reporters have verified sources for themselves and aren’t just repeating what someone else wrote. This is where you can see who is doing their own reporting” and who is just linking back to the original story—which is how the echo chamber forms. Oh, and teach your kids the words “echo chamber.” Silva emphasizes that “the standards that journalists aspire to are fairness and balance, fact-checking and verification.”

An instructive story for this lesson? The Washington Post’s story on the women who came forward with their stories of Roy Moore’s alleged harassment and assault when they were teenagers. Point out to your kids how the reporters verified that Leigh Corfman told two friends at the time and her mother ten years later; note that they emphasize that she told her story consistently over six interviews, and that other women reported similar interactions with Moore when they were teenagers.

If you want to show your kids an excellent example of dishonest so-called journalism, take a look at James O’Keefe’s undercover “sting” operation against the Washington Post, and how the Post reporter did her due diligence in researching the “source” (a plant) and trying to verify her account. “The journalists were following their standards, and that’s when [the source’s] story began to fall apart. This could be an amazing conversation with high-school students: that Project Veritas went into this interview with the intention of proving a certain point—they went into it with an agenda and a bias against the Post for the [earlier] Roy Moore story. That’s a cardinal rule: Minimize bias. Journalists ask, ‘what are the facts? what can I verify?’ They don’t go into it with the facts already written,” says Silva.

Journalism 101 would also include a primer on the difference between the news and editorial sides of an organization. “On Fox News, Sean Hannity is the opinion guy and Shepherd Smith is the journalist. Kids should ask ‘Am I looking at the news or at someone’s opinion?’ The news side is sticking to the facts; opinion is more contentious. One tip: If there’s one person on the screen, it’s likely news. If there are four or five, it’s likely opinion, but you still need to listen carefully to what they are saying,” says Silva.

“Use fact-checking sites,” says Rogow. “Kids can learn to cut and paste a headline into Snopes. You can also do a link search [using a tool like OpenLinkProfiler] to see who’s linking to a story—Infowars will look like it’s very popular, but you can scroll down and see who these people are. Parents can reflect their own values here—if it’s linked by a Nazi site, you’ll point out that maybe it’s not credible.”

Parents can also use Checkology, an online course for increasing media literacy for kids, and show kids how to do a reverse image search or how to use TinEye on dubious photos, like the one supposedly showing an Antifa member attacking a police officer.