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Recognizing fake news now a required subject in California schools (www.pleasantonweekly.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Recognizing fake news now a required subject in California schools::undefined

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[–] 39 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

I’d really like to see the curriculum. And examples.

I feel like this is not an easy task. I suspect if someone thinks it’s not that difficult, then they are not willing to actually use political examples.

But maybe I’m wrong. I just don’t know. When I was in school NOTHING touched actual politics. Maybe that’s why I can’t conceive of how this will work when focused on that topic.

What am I missing?

Edit: When I say politics was never covered, I can give a weird anecdote:

Shortly after high school I was with some friends and asked them about the conservative/liberal thing. And they asked me a few questions and then said I was liberal, I think.

The kicker: one of the two friends went on to be a false elector who signed the documents in my home state on Jan 6th. I saw their name during the hearings.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I haven’t seen the current curriculum but this kind of thing was an area of research for me (the spread of information on social networks).

    There was a study done - I want to say that it was about 40 years ago - that used a single lesson to teach young kids the basics of literary criticism and deconstruction so that they could dissect what the Saturday morning cartoon ads were trying to say. They were able to identify that the ads were implying that eating a sugary breakfast cereal would get you more fun friends to play with, and so on. A lot of it had to do with social pressures.

    In any case, there was a measurable increase in the kids’ ability to resist being influenced by the ads, once they knew what to look for. I suspect they’ll take a similar approach here.

    Nothing is ever going to be 100% successful, but if you pull back the curtain and show them that the Grand Wizard is just a little man pulling their levers, it’ll have a helpful effect on hopefully enough people to matter.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    It's definitely not that difficult.

    We had these lessons in Lithuania in the late 90s though not on fake news per se just how to evaluate text sources. It's the same stuff you get taught for paper writing but in reverse. Check sources and use basic logic.

    I don't think politics are needed to be taught explicitly though, just basic logic concepts. For example, I do wish kids were taught about Baysian perspective outside of math settings. Just understanding that would eliminate a lot of misinformation dangers.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Simply teaching kids that they can’t trust everything they read online is 50% of it. Explaining how and why information gets posted and why anyone might want to share disinformation, how outrage porn manipulates us… now we’re at 75%. The rest is a common sense approach to considering the source of information, understanding a news organization vs. a blog, finding more than one source for information, understanding what Wikipedia is and is not.

    This is totally common sense and politically neutral.

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