GSAN: Titanic sub misinfo | AI hands | Try lateral reading

Note: The News Literacy Project staff is off next Tuesday for the July 4 holiday. Get Smart About News will return on Tuesday, July 11.

Top reads

A roundup of the latest topics in news literacy and misinformation.

• “News organizations are struggling to cover media figures and politicians peddling delusions” (Oliver Darcy, CNN).
  • Related: “YouTube removes video of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Jordan Peterson for vaccine misinformation” (David Ingram and Ben Goggin, NBC News).
• “Health experts worry as Meta rolls back some COVID misinformation policies” (Mary Kekatos, ABC News).
• “How Local Officials Seek Revenge on Their Hometown Newspapers” (Emily Flitter, The New York Times).
• “Misinformation targets LGBT community during Pride Month” (Catalina Marchant de Abreu, France 24).
• “Misinformation spreads, but fact-checking has leveled off” (Mark Stencel, Erica Ryan and Joel Luther, Duke Reporters’ Lab).
• “To debunk science misinformation, consider these factors” (Martin Repetto-Penn, Futurity).
• “Canadians will no longer have access to news content on Facebook and Instagram, Meta says” (Jessica Mundie, CBC News).
• "A.I.’s Use in Elections Sets Off a Scramble for Guardrails" (Tiffany Hsu and Steven Lee Myers, The New York Times).

Featured video

How can you tell if an image is AI generated? It’s common to look at the hands and fingers, but it’s also important to look at the source. Learn more from this NLP TikTok video:

Try lateral reading
Unsure if a news source is credible? Try “lateral reading,” or leaving a website to better determine its credibility by investigating what other online sources say about it.

Share this NewsLit tip:

A doctored image of President Joe Biden in a diaper wasn’t real. An AI-generated image of former President Donald Trump dancing with a 13-year-old girl at the private island of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein was also inauthentic. An alleged screenshot of a news story about the OceanGate submersible being found intact but empty was impostor content. Check out more of the latest debunked rumors on NLP’s RumorGuard!

Thanks for reading!

Your weekly issue of Get Smart About News is created by Susan Minichiello (@susanmini), Dan Evon (@danieljevon), Peter Adams (@PeterD_Adams), Hannah Covington (@HannahCov) and Pamela Brunskill (@PamelaBrunskill). It is edited by Mary Kane (@marykkane) and Lourdes Venard (@lourdesvenard).

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