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Hi there,
Welcome to the second issue of Scroll Smarter! (If you missed the debut issue — which included AI bunnies — you can view it here.) We hope you found our first issue to be helpful. If you are enjoying this newsletter, please be sure to forward this email to your friends and family. To explain what Scroll Smarter is all about, you can share this TikTok video we made about the newsletter. Good old-fashioned dial-up internet sounds included. 😏 Happy scrolling! — The Scroll Smarter team |
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Perplexed by parental controls |
Most parents don’t want kids to see harmful things online, but parental controls are harder to use than they should be. That’s what psychology professor and author Jean M. Twenge wrote in this column about her struggle to use parental controls to stop her kids from accessing social media apps and websites that feature gambling, violence and pornography. |
📴 Many websites and apps have parental controls, but they can be hard to find, difficult to set up, and easy for kids to (sneakily) turn off. 💸 Third-party apps offer solutions, but they come with a cost, and they aren’t always simple to use. 🫣 Many social media and web companies want parents to police kids’ online habits rather than implement age verification, even in the few states that have required it by law. |
📱A Global Witness investigation showed that TikTok suggested sexual content to 13-year-olds browsing in restricted mode. |
Chihuahua among wolves? A-wooo — no. |
This digitally altered image showing a chihuahua among wolves went viral alongside false claims that one of these petite pups ran with the big dogs. |
🐺 A viral post appears to show images from a trail cam of a chihuahua rubbing elbows — er, paws — with a pack of wolves. But the pictures were digitally altered.
📸 The original, unaltered images are from a research project in Michigan and can be found online — and show only the wolves. 🤖 AI tools are advanced and super quick and easy to use, so false posts like this are becoming more common.
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🔍Check the source. A reverse image search can help you track down the original context for an image. Here’s how.
👀Look for news coverage. A search engine can help you find additional context. In this case, you wouldn’t find any credible news coverage about a chihuahua joining a wolf pack, but you would find coverage that shows the actual trail-cam pics.
👨👩👧👧You can practice these steps with your kids. How can your family use these skills when you find something too wild … in the wild? |
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Different beliefs, same facts |
Question: When friends and family have beliefs that are opposite of each other, where is a good place to find facts? — Looking for facts
Answer: It may feel like people with different beliefs lack any common ground today, but you can look at these divides as an opportunity. It’s a chance to remind ourselves of the difference between a belief and a fact, and the relationship between them.
At first, this can be difficult to do. Our understanding of the world is significantly shaped by what we see online. Many of us turn to social media for news and information, but algorithms play a big role in what we see, and engagement and revenue are prioritized over accuracy and authenticity. Nothing keeps people scrolling like echoing their existing beliefs back at them.
Recognizing this is a first step in finding common ground. Start with those facts on which you can agree and then branch into where you disagree: your interpretation of those facts or their significance.
Credible news organizations that follow journalism ethics and standards to verify and fact-check information produce reporting that is full of facts. These reports typically won’t make us feel as good as our social media feeds, but they serve as a much more accurate and honest basis for forming our opinions. To determine whether a news source is high-quality, check out these five steps, which help you seek out important characteristics of credibility like accuracy, fairness, independence, transparency and accountability.
Remember, if you don’t like a particular news source, that doesn’t mean that the statements of fact included in its reporting aren’t true. You might trust one set of news sources, and your counterpart in a conversation might trust other sources, but you can independently agree on details that have been verified as true and go from there — with patience, respect and humility.
And if you have a disagreement about facts, try fact-checking together. You can use RumorGuard’s five factors to evaluate the credibility of a claim. |
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Do you have a news literacy question? Send us your questions in this form. ➡️ If your question is picked, you’ll win swag from the News Literacy Project like this critical thinker hat below! We may answer your parenting or family-related questions on topics like AI, misinformation, fact-checking, journalism and social media in this newsletter. Questions may be edited or rephrased for clarity and length. |
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🤖 AI playmates: Parents and experts wrestle with whether — and how much — to let kids interact with AI tools at playtime (The Guardian).
📰 Gen Z news publisher: A 26-year-old is now the publisher of his hometown newspaper after buying it for $16,000 with help from (you guessed it!) his parents (12 News KPNX).
🤳 What could possibly go wrong? OpenAI’s new iPhone app lets users fabricate AI video of themselves — and their friends — doing anything they can imagine (The Verge).
👧 Kidfluencer concerns: As more kids aspire to be social media influencers, a new study explores the potential drawbacks for these “kidfluencers” and the children who watch them (CBC).
🤫 It’s oh, so quiet: AOL ends dial-up service, which was the way many adults remember accessing the internet for the first time (NBC News). |
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No, there is not a man stuck inside Chicago’s “Cloud Gate” sculpture in Millennium Park (known as “The Bean”), although a viral rumor falsely claims this. Watch this News Literacy Project explainer on TikTok (or on Instagram or YouTube) and learn how to avoid falling for stories that go viral with no evidence to prove their sensational claims.
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