Now that you've been assigned a team to work with and a claim to investigate, build your web literacy skillset with the methodology presented in Mike Caufield's Web Literacy textbook. In a series of short chapters, Caufield lays out how to do the "Four Moves" of critical literacy and develop those into a habit of healthy skepticism. Today, work through the first part of the book, and complete two of the "Going Upstream" activities.
As we start honing our skills in distinguishing true, factual content from everything else, one distinction that should be relatively clear is the difference between genuine journalistic content and content that has been sponsored by a company that wishes to draw your business. These can never be the same thing.
If you have an adblocker installed in your browser, you may have forgotten how ridiculously pervasive ads are online. If so, try going to a site you frequently visit with adblocker turned off or in a different browser. See the difference? Try a news site like Fredericksburg.com. It's ridiculous how many ads there are, right? Like it or not, ads and the fact that we look at and occasionally click on them drive the economy of the web. We know how to spot ads and are rightfully skeptical of them. You're probably sophisticated enough in your ad-detecting skills that you can spot things like the giant fake "Download Now" buttons that are actually ads, or the fake "x" in the top right corner that doesn't actually close the ad.
But ads getting sneakier. Sometimes a paragraph or sentence snuck into an article is actually an ad link, and sometimes an entire article is actually a sponsored article.
In the context of truth-seeking, sponsored content is always suspicious in the same sense that we are trained to understand that the claims made in an informercial are always going to be exaggerated in order to make the product look better than it probably really is.
To learn how to spot this online, first understand the economics and nuances of sponsored content by reading the first few sections of Web Literacy (seriously, they're short sections). Start at the beginning of the book and read up to and complete the activity in Chapter 9: ACTIVITY: SPOT SPONSORED CONTENT.
As it says, first consider these websites and off the top of your head (i.e. without viewing the site) rank them most sponsored content to least sponsored content:
Make your best guess, and share your initial ranking in Slack in the #discuss-sponsored channel.
Then, actually look at the links in the Web Literacy chapter and tally up the amount of sponsored content that appears on that page. You're looking for content here, not just ads, so that will include headlines for other articles in that publication.
With those tallies, sort that list again compare it to your initial ranking. In Slack, reply to your initial ranking post (in a thread so that others won't accidentally see your final ranking). Share your final tally and compare those with your initial ranking. Are they close? Different? Why?
Next, continue in that section to learn about advanced Google search techniques and its reverse image search capabilities. It's common knowledge that Photoshop can be a powerful tool in manipulating the appearance of reality, which leads us to be at least somewhat skeptical of any images that appear just a little too perfect, but images and video can still go viral on the pretext of their authenticity.
Context is always important. Consider what happened last year when a viral image of children sleeping in a cage went viral, accompanied with the claim that these children were separated from their parents by Trump's immigration policy. As it turned out, these images were actually from 2014, leading Trump and his supporters to accuse the "fake news media" of lying in order to make him look bad. The fact that children really were still being held in cages in 2018 now has a hard time breaking through to someone's mindset who has already decided what they believe.
Debunking through direct analysis can be difficult if the artist or designer is skilled enough, but tracking an image to its source may reveal a great deal about the intent behind it and therefore its authenticity.
Use your deduction and googling skills to try and debunk two or three of the images in Chapter 15: Trace Viral Photos Upstream. I'll create threads in #general-chat for each of these, so post your findings in those threads -- and don't peek at other students' answers! Try and figure it out for yourself first so that you can get some practice.