Making sense of data: Diving into charts and graphs is the first in a series, presented by our partner SAS, exploring the role of data in understanding our world. SAS is a pioneer in the data management and analytics field.  

Charts and graphs are useful tools for communicating complex information. They allow consumers to see — rather than read or calculate — differences and trends. Charts and graphs provide readers the ability to visually consume information, answer their own questions and draw novel conclusions. Yet, these types of data visualizations are often designed to communicate the purpose of the creator. Those creators make decisions while designing charts and graphs to potentially emphasize characteristics of the data that lead users to draw specific conclusions.   

Need an example? Let’s start with this chart showing life expectancy for males and females in different countries.  

Figure 1. Global Life Expectancy (truncated axis) World Bank

This chart was specifically designed to highlight the differences among groups. It’s very clear that in all the countries selected, women outlive men by several years. We see that the high-income countries selected in this chart have greater life expectancy compared to the rest of the world, but people in the U.S. have a lower life expectancy than those in other industrialized nations.   

If we examine the chart more carefully, we see that it violates the principle of proportional ink. This principle of data visualization recommends that the amount of ink used to represent values be proportional to the value it represents. This chart violates this principle with a truncated — or shortened — vertical axis that starts at age 65. When you look at the difference between male and female life expectancy across the world, twice as much ink is used for the female bar as for the male bar. If viewers don’t double–check the labels on the axis, this may inadvertently lead them to think that women are living twice as long as men. More likely, readers notice the labels but still perceive the difference as being very significant.   

Figure 2. Global Life Expectancy (full axis) World Bank

Alternatively, the above chart represents the same data but follows the principle of proportional ink. The height of each bar is proportional to the value it represents. Here, the significance of the trends is visible but much less stark. We can again see that women outlive men and that the U.S. is a bit behind the rest of the industrialized nations, but this chart highlights that the differences are a matter of a few years and not a much higher order of magnitude.  

If an author were trying to discuss the differences, you could imagine that this chart would be less compelling than the first. Neither is inaccurate; they just use visual cues to highlight different aspects of the data, which can lead readers to draw different conclusions.  

Looking at a line chart

Let’s explore a different approach using a line chart. The chart below shows changes in the U.S. birth rate (births per 1,000 people) over time. This line appears to be moving slowly and steadily downward, representing a decline in births over time.   

Figure 3. US Birth Rate (full axis)  World Bank

The information is correct, but what happens if we truncate the axis again?  

The declining birth rates begin to look much more significant in the following chart. This visualization also highlights that the steady decline seen above wasn’t actually so steady. From 1997 to 2008, the birth rate stayed more or less the same. So which graph is accurate? Again, technically both.  

Both highlight different aspects of the story using the same data. If an author wanted to highlight the pattern of steadiness from 1997 to 2008, they might use the second graph. If they wanted to highlight the slow and steady decline, they might choose the first. An author may even further manipulate the information by focusing on a specific time frame.   

Figure 4. US Birth Rate (truncated axis) World Bank

Now take a look at a graph depicting birth rates that starts in 1997, below. This data visualization makes it look like something happened in 2008 that caused a sudden, unprecedented downturn in birth rates. When we have access to the larger historical perspective, we can see that declining rates occur over the last 30 years, but the context is lost in this presentation. This could be a case of intentionally misleading the reader. The author may choose not to give the reader the full picture in order to reinforce a specific point.   

Figure 5. US Birth Rate (1997-2017) World Bank

Here’s another example that may be particularly hard to interpret. Sometimes authors wish to present data that occurs on very different scales. The chart below shows the leading causes of death in the U.S. over time. Heart disease, the number one cause of death, killed around 400 people per 100,000 in 1980. The fourth most common cause of death, unintentional injuries, killed approximately 40 people per 100,000. What’s harder to see are the rates of the lowest–ranked causes of death. They’re all clustered at the bottom because of the scale of the vertical axis, making them hard to read.   

Figure 6. Main Causes of Death in the US (linear axis) CDC

Understanding a logarithmic scale

One way to fix this is by using a logarithmic scale. This means that values from 1-10 are given the same vertical real estate as values 10-100, and 100-1,000. Using a logarithmic scale can help spread out data that have significant differences in values. You then can see individual trends in each line much better. By spreading out the data in the chart below, you can see the drop in deaths from HIV much more clearly than in the first graph.  

However, logarithmic scales are not necessarily something most people are familiar with, and they can be challenging to read properly. You might look at this chart and note that there has been a slight decrease in the number of deaths caused by heart disease from 1980 until now, but in reality the number has been reduced by more than half, from about 400 to 160 people per 100,000.   

Figure 7. Main Causes of Death in the US (logarithmic axis) CDC

Both graphs have their value. One allows you to see the lower values more clearly; the other is easier for most people to interpret. Which is the appropriate one to use? Unfortunately, the answer is “it depends.”  

As with all other forms of information, authors will choose the one that most accurately communicates their purpose. That purpose might be to persuade you or simply present a particular piece of information more prominently. What matters most is how you, the reader, respond to the data.  

You can be a better consumer of data visualizations by examining the charts and graphs you see more carefully. Take note of whether a vertical axis has been shortened or distorted in some way, for example. Consider what the data might look like if presented differently. Examine the data that’s been chosen, what’s been left out, and if the graph tells the whole story. Could you gather more information to give the graph better context?   

Asking and answering these types of questions will make you a smarter and more responsible consumer of data. You’ll be able to find the true answers behind the data and distinguish those from the information the author was specifically trying to draw attention to.   

Test yourself: Take our data quiz (here or below)!

Related articles:

• Six strategies for making sense of data in the media
• Exploring statistics in the media
• Understanding complications with data collection
• Evaluating claims made from data
• Special look at issues with infographics
• Spotlight on data in social media
• How to be savvy about data in the news
• Quiz: Can you make sense of data?

About SAS: Through innovative analytics software and services, SAS helps customers around the world transform data into intelligence.

The series described below, presented by our partner  SAS, explores the role of data in understanding our world. SAS is a pioneer in the data management and analytics field.  

Data can be a powerful tool. It helps us to understand the world with more precision and greater clarity.  Data is often the foundation for research, news articles and social media posts. Authors rely on data to help tell their story or prove their point. Because of its power to influence our understanding and decision–making, it’s essential that we learn how to confidently and critically consume the data we encounter.  

If data is so intertwined with our daily lives, how then do we gain the skills to make sense of it, ask the right questions and draw the right conclusions?  

We will address these questions and more in this blog series and cover a number of data analysis and presentation topics.

Diving into charts and graphs

When we talk about data visualizations, we’re referring to charts and graphs that help people visually make sense of large amounts of data rather than comparing raw numbers. Charts and graphs make it possible to see patterns and trends more clearly. At times, however, they can create confusion due to the way they’re presented. They can be misleading even if the underlying data is accurate. We’ll explore some of the common decisions that graph designers make when presenting information and how these decisions may impact what you see and understand.  

Exploring statistics in the media

Whether it’s climate change or economic growth, statistics are often used to reinforce and better explain issues we face. Yet, there are many ways to use statistics to represent similar information. The type of measure or statistic used can significantly alter the story being told, so it’s important to be careful and understand the numbers. We’ll look at commonly used statistics and how they are often presented to help you understand what those numbers really mean.  

Understanding complications with data collection

Even though data represents relevant issues, it is largely impossible to capture a completely accurate picture of the world around us. Instead, researchers rely on data collection methods to gather a close approximation. Unfortunately, the tools used can unintentionally skew the results. Therefore, it is important to understand the context of data creation. We’ll discuss key questions about the data collection process  so you can determine what conclusions you can draw from the data.  

Evaluating claims made from data

Data is often used to justify claims or statements about our world. However, it’s important to consider the context in which that data was collected to understand whether those claims are justifiable. We’ll look at two areas of concern – when authors use data to make comparisons and when research funding may introduce bias. 

Special look at issues with infographics

Infographics are designed to be visually appealing tools that can communicate a lot of information. But their focus on visual design often makes them hard to interpret correctly. We’ll discuss some common issues with infographics and how they tie into the principles we discussed previously.   

Spotlight on data in social media

Social media is a powerful tool for communication, and many people are creating their own content to share messages broadly. However, individual content creators may be more likely to post data and graphs that are misleading. One reason is that the flashiest stories are often shared the most rapidly and widely. We’ll discuss how social media encourages users to forgo the guidelines discussed in previous posts. 

That’s a lot of information about data to cover, but it’s important. Data matters, and we’re excited to start the journey to understanding it better with you.

Test yourself: Take our data quiz (here or below)!

Related articles:

• Diving into charts and graphs in the news
• Exploring statistics in the media
• Understanding complications with data collection
• Evaluating claims made from data
• Special look at issues with infographics
• Spotlight on data in social media
• How to be savvy about data in the news
• Quiz: Can you make sense of data?

About SAS: Through innovative analytics software and services, SAS helps customers around the world transform data into intelligence.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaks at the March on Washington. National Archives, Records of the U.S. Information Agency, Record Group 306 (National Archives Identifier 542014)

The rights of all Americans to freely assemble and to bring grievances to the government’s doorstep are intrinsic to American democracy and  enshrined in the First Amendment. It’s what we’ve done for generations, perhaps most memorably on Aug. 28, 1963, when 250,000 people descended on Washington, D.C., to participate in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. That day, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, and it became a lasting touchstone of the civil rights movement.

But earlier that summer this now-seminal event was far from a sure thing. President John F. Kennedy initially opposed the march over fears of unrest that could derail civil rights legislation. After he decided to support the march, the Los Angeles Times received a message that its headquarters would be bombed unless the paper called the president a racial slur in print.

And during the planning, death threats targeted King and other key figures. Activists around the nation also received bomb threats. Meanwhile, opponents in Congress sought legislation to block the march. Some argued the demonstration was an “illegal assembly” that would cause violence and should be banned.

Despite this atmosphere of intimidation, the march took place peacefully, galvanized a movement and proceeded into the history books.

2020 march on Washington

This Friday, on the 57th anniversary of the march, the American tradition of public protest will continue when thousands of people again travel to Washington to call for racial justice. The Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network organized the march in response to frustration over the killing of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police in May, as well as other acts of violence against people of color. The Black Lives Matter movement also will march.

And just as in 1963, Friday’s demonstration faces challenges. Because of COVID-19 public health concerns, the event will include requirements for limited seating, social distancing, and other safety protocols. These concerns also prompted the NAACP to instead schedule a 2020 Virtual March on Washington, while the Movement for Black Lives will hold a virtual Black National Convention.

At NLP, we help young people understand the essential roles of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment in a robust democracy. As Americans, we all must recognize the importance of these rights and ensure their protection for everyone.

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women the right to vote. It took the women’s suffrage movement decades to achieve that goal, thanks to entrenched discrimination that severely restricted women’s lives.

Opposition to women’s suffrage relied on false narratives that seem particularly outrageous, and sometimes comical, even for that era. For example, an Atlantic magazine article Why Men Thought Women Weren’t Made to Vote  noted the common theory that the mental effort of voting could make women infertile. In addition, mainstream science also deemed women’s brains to be unfit. “And if women overexerted their already inferior brains, the thinking went, their health could suffer,” the article explains.

Brutality and discrimination

Yet, the supposedly fragile nature of women did not prevent authorities from treating suffragists with brutality. Consider the 1917 arrests and imprisonment of nearly three dozen women picketing outside the White House. Their jailers gave them maggot-infested food, beat the women and force-fed those who went on a hunger strike. The D.C. Court of Appeals ruled the arrests unlawful, and freed the women.

While the 19th Amendment extended the vote to all women, in reality, black women (and for a time, Native American women) could not broadly exercise that right. Discriminatory laws in the South kept many Blacks — women and men — from the polls until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. The voter suppression tactics targeted at people of color also were based on false narratives.

False narratives persist

However, while these events and the opposition to the right to vote might sound like relics of an ancient civilization, it’s important to remember that false narratives persist. Such tactics can boost efforts to deny people their rights as citizens and denigrate segments of our population. In modern elections, false narratives raise false alarms about voter fraud and sow distrust of widely accepted voting methods.

Remember, news literacy is essential to being well-informed about how government works and to recognizing false narratives. Use your news literacy skills and knowledge during this election season to avoid misinformation — and to help others do the same.

NLP is now offering its signature e-learning platform Checkology® free to help ease the transition to remote teaching and hybrid learning environments for educators and families. By removing barriers to access, NLP will support educators across the country with essential news literacy lessons at a time of urgent need. Misinformation about COVID-19, the upcoming presidential election and nationwide demonstrations against racial injustice has sown confusion, divided voters and put people’s lives at risk.

Checkology teaches young people to recognize and debunk misinformation, understand the vital role of a free press in a democracy, and become informed and engaged participants in civic life. Leading journalists, along with First Amendment and digital media experts, guide students through the platform’s 13 interactive multimedia lessons. (One foundational lesson is translated into Spanish.) Featuring real-world examples from social media and news sites, these learning experiences resonate with students, test their understanding and teach them critical-thinking skills. Checkology has been updated for the 2020-21 school year, making it even easier to use, with one-click integration, drag-and-drop lesson customization and in-platform support.

NLP now on Flipgrid

In addition to free Checkology, NLP is partnering with Microsoft’s platform Flipgrid to help educators connect with more students through social learning. Teachers create “grids” around available topics, or develop their own topic material for the platform, with question prompts that students answer by video. NLP’s content includes various news literacy topics, many building on Checkology lessons, as well as activities for students, including fact-checking “missions” and misinformation “quests.”

To further support educators, and to build a community around news literacy education, NLP is also creating a national news literacy educator network. As part of this new educator network, NLP is training teachers, librarians and school administrators across the country to support a news literacy curriculum, help find opportunities for local partnerships and build channels of communication for their communities as local news literacy champions.

Educators interested in becoming ambassadors can access NLP’s online application at www.newslit.org, starting on Aug. 17. The network will formally launch in January 2021. You can send questions to [email protected].

We are pleased to welcome two esteemed colleagues to NLP’s board of directors: Enrique Acevedo and Whit Ayres. Enrique and Whit bring diverse perspectives, significant professional expertise and a passion for our mission to NLP’s board. Their contributions will help us implement our strategic expansion and solidify our position as the nation’s leading provider of news literacy education.

Enrique Acevedo is a correspondent for the 60 Minutes spinoff program 60 in 6 on Quibi. Previously, he was an Emmy-award winning anchor of Univision’s Noticiero Univision Edición Nocturna, the network’s late-night news program. He has covered major news stories around the globe in English and Spanish for print, broadcast and online media, including three U.S. presidential elections, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the humanitarian crisis in Haiti and the drug wars in Latin America.

Whit Ayres is a leading Washington, D.C. political consultant with over 30 years of experience in polling and survey research for high-profile political campaigns and associations. He is the author of 2016 and Beyond: How Republicans Can Elect a President in the New America and founder and president of North Star Opinion Research, a national public opinion and public affairs research firm in Alexandria, Virginia.

The sixth of August marks 55 years since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. The legislation outlawed discriminatory voting practices adopted in many Southern states after the Civil War, including literacy tests and poll taxes.

The Act’s goal was to make it impossible to thwart the aims of the 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which nearly a century earlier established the right to vote for Black men in America. In the decades after the amendment was passed, Black voters faced obstacles to voting in many states, including voter intimidation. It took the Voting Rights Act of 1965, with its enforcement powers, to remove many of the barriers preventing Black people from fully exercising their voting rights.

Because of a Supreme Court ruling seven years ago, however, the issues the Voting Rights Act raised and the voter suppression it sought to address remain relevant today.

In December the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation to restore a key provision of the Act. The bill would return election oversight of some state and local jurisdictions to the federal government as a way to prevent voter suppression, a provision the Supreme Court struck down in 2013. And last week, the House approved a proposal to rename the legislation in honor of Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), the civil rights icon who died of cancer on July 17.

Voting rights in 2020

Efforts to suppress voting and disenfranchise marginalized communities continue. But today it often involves social media content that misleads voters. Tactics include spreading rumors that polling places have closed or moved, sharing falsehoods that an election has been canceled or wrongly telling voters they can vote by text or phone.

Such methods occur every election year, and you can expect to see them gain momentum as November’s presidential election nears. That’s why NLP will launch a voter education campaign this fall to help the public identify credible sources of information and become more news-literate.

That’s because news literacy skills enable voters to discern credible sources of information regarding early voting, voting by mail, and other voting issues. They also help protect every voter’s right to make his or her vote count in November. And news literacy can build the essential critical thinking skills citizens need to remain engaged and informed participants in our democracy.

This piece is part of a series, presented by our partner SAS, that explores the role of data in understanding the COVID-19 pandemic. SAS is a pioneer in the data management and analytics field. (Check out other posts in the series on our Get Smart About COVID-19 Misinformation page.)

As the United States enters its seventh month in the grip of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen myths created and debunked, fears and hopes elevated and dashed, and initial assumptions become lessons learned.

The most important piece of conventional wisdom proven false is that the virus targeted only older people and that younger generations were largely safe from infection. However, data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on June 19 tells a different story. As of May 30, 70% of those who tested positive for COVID-19 were under 60. In March, by comparison, approximately 25% of positive cases occurred in people under 50.

One theory for the surge of cases in those under 60 is that in the early days COVID-19 testing was restricted to only the sickest patients. Therefore, many people with mild cases — often those under age 65 — may not have been diagnosed. Regardless, the new CDC report underscores that younger generations are vulnerable to COVID-19 infections and can get very sick or die.

Yet, the elderly and those with certain chronic health conditions do remain most vulnerable to severe illness and death. Experts have been exploring  questions about vulnerability and how to protect at-risk populations since an outbreak of 129 cases of COVID-19 among patients, staff and visitors resulted in 40 deaths at a Kirkland, Washington, nursing home in February.

COVID-19 risk factors about more than age

Initially, public health officials focused primarily on age when evaluating COVID-19 vulnerability. But the definition of vulnerability quickly expanded to include those with underlying health conditions like diabetes, asthma, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. We now know that individuals over age 65 who contract COVID-19 are more likely to develop severe complications not solely due to age, but also because they may also have underlying health conditions. This partly explains why 40% of U.S. deaths from COVID-19 have occurred in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.

Knowing that age and underlying health conditions help determine the risk of vulnerability is important, but it doesn’t fully explain why so many cases occur in those facilities.

Other factors that aid in the spread of infectious disease may be present:

• Shortages of personal protective equipment like masks and gowns can hinder necessary precautions.
• Shared bedrooms and common living spaces among residents make it nearly impossible to effectively socially distance.
• Transfers of residents from hospitals and other locations can introduce exposure to disease.
• Frequent visitors, employees and other providers coming from outside the facility further increase risk.

Data makes the difference

Analyzing data about aging populations helps us better understand why these individuals are at greater risk for COVID-19. For example, we can use data to see where the most vulnerable populations are located and how they are impacted by the virus. When we look at the geographic distribution of population by age along with data on secondary conditions that may be present, we get a better idea of the dangers facing aging populations. This deeper knowledge reveals how contributing factors can lead to high susceptibility to COVID-19 and helps us understand how to protect these populations

There are more than 50 million Americans over the age of 65. California, Florida, Texas and New York have the highest number of older Americans, with Sumter County, Florida, having the highest overall percentage in the nation.

As we might expect, those states also have higher concentrations of people over age 85, since that’s a subset of the 65-and-over population.

Do COVID-19 risk factors follow state lines?

Obesity and diabetes often go together, and according to CDC data, the states most affected by obesity and diabetes overlap and tend to be concentrated in the southern United States.

The CDC also reports cardiovascular disease in terms of hospitalizations, with a focus on those over age 65. The data shows an overlap with states that have higher numbers of diabetes and obesity. This could mean that those hospitalized with cardiovascular disease might also have diabetes and/or obesity, which would put them at even higher risk of severe complications from COVID-19.

Finally, we must look at data regarding lung conditions such as asthma. Some states with a high incidence of asthma cases overlap with those states that have large populations with at least one of the other risk factors we’ve examined.

What does all this mean?

The data appears to show that there are vulnerable people everywhere in the U.S., but there are concentrations in several areas. As states loosen restrictions initially put in place when the pandemic hit the U.S., it becomes important to evaluate population data within each state to ensure that those who are most vulnerable are protected. In recent weeks we have seen upticks in cases in some states that loosened restrictions.

It is crucial that we identify risk factors and set up proper safeguards. By evaluating additional risk factors and analyzing data within our own communities, we gain a more complete understanding of the COVID-19 impact. When we consider the whole individual, rather than age alone, we better understand what it means to be vulnerable during this pandemic and going forward.

Other articles in this series:

• • • Examining data behind racial disparities.
    • Comparing data across countries.
    • Comparing data across time.
    • Case fatality rate vs. mortality rate vs. risk of dying.

About SAS: Through innovative analytics software and services, SAS helps customers around the world transform data into intelligence.

Virginia educator Patricia Hunt is the recipient of NLP’s inaugural Educator of the Year Award for the dedication and innovation she brings to her teaching of news literacy — an essential life skill for the digital age — and for her wider advocacy of news literacy education.

Hunt, who teaches 12th grade government courses at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., first learned about NLP from a Maryland colleague in 2011, before NLP’s classroom program was active in Virginia. Hunt borrowed the NLP classroom guide from her colleague to use in her courses.

“Patricia has set the gold standard as the first recipient of our educator of the year award,” said Alan C. Miller, NLP founder and CEO.  “She became an early adopter of our Checkology^® virtual classroom e-learning platform when it was launched in 2016 and has made it an integral part of her government class. She’s also developed engaging activities to enhance her students’ ability to learn and apply news literacy skills, and her passion for improving the well-being of her students is contagious and inspiring. We are so proud to give her this award and spotlight her as a champion for news literacy education.”

Watch the video of Hunt receiving her award:

Soon after Hunt began using Checkology, NPR visited her classroom and made it the focus of this piece, The Classroom Where Fake News Fails. Hunt has also hosted classroom visits from several other news outlets. These include CNN.com; ABC News.com; HBO; WRC-TV; NHK, Japan’s public television station, and Czech public television. (Watch an NLP video about Checkology’s impact in her classroom.)

“My goal as an educator is to give students the tools that they need to become lifelong learners. My hope would be for them to continue listening to the news, to continue checking their news feed against other news feeds, to stop and pause before sharing. Checkology is the best tool I’ve found to meet that goal,” Hunt said.

It’s a good bet that Lyn Millner’s students will be ready to do some serious fact-checking this fall leading up to the presidential election.

They’re already experienced at it. Millner, who teaches at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, Fla., created the Vote Vetter project during the midterm elections in 2018. Her News Literacy class of 80 students teamed up with three professional journalists and the university’s media partner, Fox 4, to fact-check political claims in ads, tweets, mailers and news stories.

Millner was a finalist for the News Literacy Project’s 2020 Educator of the Year because of that steadfast dedication to teaching news literacy and for the many creative methods she’s used to engage students and the general public.

“I believe I have a responsibility to educate the public as well,” Millner said, noting she also speaks to community groups and book clubs. “And in the past five years, I’ve found that adults are really hungry for news literacy skills.”

Millner’s courses include News Literacy, Journalism Senior Capstone, News Editing, News Reporting and Writing and Writing for a Mass Audience — and she uses news literacy concepts in all of them. Millner requires her News Literacy students to use NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom and begins most of her classes with a misinformation moment taken from The Sift® newsletter.

Taught to suspend judgment

One of Millner’s signature approaches is what she calls the Suspend Judgment project. Students choose a controversial topic, write down what biases they might have about that topic, and imagine what their friends and family believe about it. Then they interview those friends and family members about their views. Students then research all sides of the issue and write a paper proving  they can suspend judgment on the topic, instead of winning an argument. The project tackles the confirmation bias many people fall into.

Millner also makes connections to real-life journalism for her classes. Once a week, her News Literacy students hear from a current or former professional journalist. Each semester, Mara Liasson, a national political correspondent for NPR and a Fox News contributor, visits the class. Students prepare for her visit by analyzing her use of language in NPR and Fox reports and preparing questions about her work.

Millner challenges her journalism students to think through difficult news decisions such as when to characterize a falsehood as a “lie” as opposed to an “untruth” or a “statement without evidence.” She  asks her News Editing students to consider their responsibilities as news consumers, how their own bias might enter into their decisions, the use of fair language,  journalism’s business model and other aspects of practicing quality journalism.

Measuring what students know

Students care about  the news, but Millner notes they aren’t always aware of the credibility of their news sources and whether their information is reliable. She measures students’ progress on becoming news-literate with a survey before the semester, and NLP’s quiz (How news-literate are you?) at the end.

“Throughout the semester, I test their skills in informal ways by presenting them with information that may or may not be true and asking them to make a plan for determining whether the item is true,” she says. “They must list their steps and what they found.”

Millner is encouraged that many students from her News Literacy course, especially in recent years, have returned as teaching assistants, taking an active role in delivering news literacy lessons to their peers.

News literacy across disciplines

Millner also integrates news literacy into other departments at the university. In 2018, when the school’s philosophy majors hosted a political debate for the community, her News Literacy class live fact-checked the event. Miller also co-taught an honors course with a biology professor and virus researcher, emphasizing to students the importance of using sound journalist principles to write responsibly, accurately and fairly about their research.

She also uses creativity to attract interest. Millner has hosted First Amendment festivals at the university, including one where students were offered free pizza in exchange for naming their First Amendment rights. Many students, drawn by the pizza, walked up knowing only one or two freedoms. They walked out knowing all five.

Her creative teaching methods and rigorous attention to detail have made Millner a stalwart in the FGCU teaching community. She’s also not fazed by the new reality brought by COVID-19. Millner begins each online session with a “This week in misinformation” quiz, and the students who check in early present their findings on a piece of misinformation to the entire virtual class.

With the pandemic and the 2020 presidential election, Millner’s students will be dealing with ample amounts of misinformation. But thanks to her dedication to facts, they’ll be ready.

Indira Lakshmanan, senior executive editor at National Geographic and a veteran foreign and national correspondent, is the 2020 recipient of NLP’s John S. Carroll Journalist of the Year Award. Lakshmanan is a frequent TV and radio commentator on journalism and journalistic ethics, served as the first Newmark Chair in Journalism Ethics at the Poynter Institute, and was executive editor at the Pulitzer Center.

“Last year, Indira did a superb job leading the revised Understanding Bias lesson for Checkology,” said Alan C. Miller, NLP founder and CEO. “Her expertise on journalistic ethics and practices proved invaluable to the development of the lesson, during both the video shoot itself and in writing the script.”

In November 2019, at NLP’s request, Lakshmanan led a high-profile session on news literacy at the National Council for the Social Studies conference in Austin, Texas, and interviewed Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron on a keynote panel.

“It has been such an honor to get this award and a privilege to get to work with you and the next generation in teaching them about news literacy and the importance of reliable journalism to a healthy democracy and society,” Lakshmanan said.

Watch the video of Lakshmanan receiving her award:

Named for one of the most revered newspaper editors of his generation, this award is given annually to journalists who have contributed significantly to NLP and its mission. The honorees, who receive $500 and a glass plaque with an etched photo of Carroll, are selected by a committee of NLP board members and staff. During an acclaimed journalism career spanning four decades, Carroll was the editor of three major U.S. newspapers — the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader, The Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times. He was a founding member of NLP’s board and served as its chair for four years until shortly before his death in 2015.

Kristen Locker, a new graduate of Florida Gulf Coast University, is NLP’s 2020 Gwen Ifill Student of the Year. Locker, the first college student to receive the award, was nominated by her professor, Lyn Millner, a finalist for NLP’s Educator of the Year Award.

“Kristen told us, ‘Checkology helped me navigate where I get my news.’ She says she no longer believes things at face value or relies on a single source and always researches information before sharing it,” NLP founder and CEO Alan C. Miller said. “We have no doubt that this will prove useful to Kristen as she moves on to film school and into her professional life.’’

Locker used Checkology while a student of Millner’s and became a teaching assistant in her news literacy course the following year. In addition, Locker delivered a lecture on verification tools, developed assignments for students and produced a video to promote news literacy to freshmen.

Watch the video of Locker receiving her award:

This award commemorates Ifill, the trailblazing journalist — and longtime NLP supporter and board member — who died in 2016. It is presented to female students of color who represent the values Ifill brought to journalism. Ifill was the first Black woman to host a national political talk show on television as moderator of Washington Week, and she was a member (with Judy Woodruff) of the first female co-anchor team of a national news broadcast, on PBS NewsHour.

“After reading more about Gwen Ifill, I saw how much she did and the weight of her work in corresponding, advocating, reporting, writing, all of that,” Locker said. “To see what she’s done in her lifetime, it’s just so inspiring. I want to follow in that legacy.”

Student honorees receive a $250 gift certificate and a glass plaque with an etched photo of Ifill.

“Honoring the legacies of John Carroll and Gwen Ifill — as iconic journalists, exceptional board members and extraordinary individuals — reaffirms our values and who we are as an organization,” Miller said.

Here’s a “problem” any educator might like to have: Students find their class material so engaging that the teacher has to rein in the class discussion.

That’s exactly what Jake Cameron and Angelica Cardona experienced at Queens High School of Teaching, Liberal Arts and the Sciences in Queens, New York. Using the Checkology® virtual classroom from the News Literacy Project (NLP), they introduced news literacy education into their 12th grade government classes this spring. Students responded right away.

“The work we did with them was so powerful, they would come in and say, ‘See how this is being covered,’ or ‘Look at the partisan bias,’” says Cardona. “They make so many connections so quickly.”

The commitment of the two teachers to news literacy, even after New York City schools transitioned to distance learning because of the COVID-19 pandemic, earned them nominations for NLP’s 2020 Educator of the Year Award. Both were named as finalists.

The lively discussions showed Cardona and Cameron just how much news literacy resonated with students, even if they did have to sometimes step in and tell them it was time to move on to new material.

“It was nice to see that engagement happening,” Cameron says.

Civic engagement focus

The colleagues teach economics and government — with a civics focus — to approximately 280 seniors, developing the curricula together. They discovered Checkology through their school’s partnership with Civics for All, a New York City Department of Education initiative to provide students skills and knowledge related to democracy that features NLP resources.

“We are trying to improve civic engagement among high school students, how to improve democracy through civic duties. It’s a civic responsibility to be informed and to know what it means to be informed,” Cardona says.

She and Cameron customized Checkology lessons and resources to accommodate their workshop-style classes and created activities and tests to measure learning. In addition, they worked with English Language Arts colleagues to incorporate news literacy in their classwork. Students gained insights into how issues of race, social justice, technology and current events impact them in school, in their communities, and in the world.

Cameron also saw students apply what they learned about logical fallacies to discussions on climate change in their science classes. The students were able to examine multiple tweets regarding a meme on the topic and determine which fallacies applied, he says.

“All you can ask for as a teacher is that they take what they learn into the world and use it,” Cardona says. “It definitely made a mark.”

Students committed to news literacy

The flexibility of the platform proved particularly useful during distance learning, as the teachers moved away from a workshop model of teaching to more independent study. They also incorporated content from The Sift®, NLP’s weekly newsletter, which provided fresh and relevant examples regarding COVID-19 misinformation and related topics.

There were even some distance learning advantages. “Remote learning allowed the students to take their time with news literacy,” Cameron says, and they did not feel rushed to complete a lesson that might have been due at the end of a period lasting 40 or 50 minutes.

This fall, the teachers will further integrate news literacy into their government classes, with a focus on information and misinformation about the election. Looking ahead, they would like to create a more intentional inclusion of news literacy among humanities courses. They also hope to one day begin to offer students news literacy education in 9th grade.

“The one highlight that we take away from this is that our students have started to commit themselves to news literacy. We have seen a tremendous change in the way students are integrating the news literacy skills into their own lives,” Cameron says. “They began looking for information beyond the headlines.”

Conor Murphy built the course “Social Media: Navigating Current Events” largely around NLP’s Checkology virtual classroom (Photo by Martha A. Hennessey).

Editor’s note: Earlier this year we wrote about Conor Murphy, a teacher at West Genesee High School in Camillus, N.Y.  Murphy recently was named a finalist for NLP’s 2020 Educator of the Year Award. At that time he described NLP’s impact on his teaching:

“My entire craft as an educator has been influenced so heavily by the News Literacy Project since joining the ranks in 2017 (the year Murphy began using the Checkology^® virtual classroom in his teaching).

“Without hesitation or exaggeration, I can say that the News Literacy Project has completely revamped how, what, and why I teach social studies.

“I believe so much in the importance of a news literacy education that I went through the rigorous process to create an elective course with the sole focus of news and media literacy education. Checkology is the guiding source throughout the elective course, Navigating Current Events.”

This February 2020 article illustrates Murphy’s innovative and creative approach to teaching news literacy:

Some days, events outside the classroom disrupt high school teacher Conor Murphy’s lesson plans. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

Murphy, who teaches at West Genesee High School in Camillus, New York, believes current, real-world examples engage students and enhance learning in ways that no textbook can. When fire struck Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in April 2019, misinformation, rumors and doctored photos seemed to spread faster than the flames. So Murphy shelved his social studies lesson and had students explore misinformation in real time.

In fall 2019, Murphy took this approach a step further. He created the elective course “Social Media: Navigating Current Events” to teach students critical news literacy skills through real-life events and issues as they arise. He developed the course largely around the News Literacy Project’s Checkology® virtual classroom, which he began teaching in his other classes in 2017.

“As a social studies teacher, I get really excited when current events prove what we are talking about,” said Murphy, who has been teaching for 12 years. “In media literacy, you can throw the lesson plans by the wayside.”

Understanding what they encounter

The U.S. drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s top security and intelligence commander, in Iraq in early January provided another teachable moment. Murphy and his students discussed how the incident unfolded on social media. Students described and analyzed what they saw online, from credible reporting to doctored images, false context and propaganda.

The Checkology lesson on misinformation resonates strongly with students, Murphy said. “It teaches them to recognize what they experience, like false equivalency and fabricated content. These are the things kids are seeing and not recognizing.”

He encourages students to point out false and misleading content when family members and friends share it online — and to help them fact-check it. “The important thing is to bring this home. Bring it to the dinner table, talk about it with your friends at lunch,” he tells students.

Emma Santola, 18, who took Murphy’s new course, does just that. “I have been ready to call out people, try to educate them, even if it’s not challenging them, but just giving them more information,” she said.

‘Moment of clarity’

The Checkology lesson “Introduction to Algorithms” is another eye-opener for students. While they know that social media platforms use algorithms to filter what people see based on their online activities and interests, the extent of algorithms’ influence surprises students. “There is kind of an ‘aha’ moment of clarity,” Murphy said.

Santola said she and many peers know that advertisers are targeting them and that tech companies are “listening.”

“It’s not something I think about, even though I know it can do damage,” she said. “Most of us just don’t care. But we should care. Because at what point does it stop? They’re selling my data. My information is valuable to somebody, but who is that someone and what is that going to do for me in the future?”

To drive home this point, Murphy paraphrases a takeaway from a lesson on media literacy from the YouTube channel Crash Course, telling students: “If you’re not paying for a service, you’re the product.”

Right time for news literacy

Santola said she also found Checkology’s lesson on “Press Freedoms Around the World” particularly illuminating. “It was the most important lesson we did, and most surprising was the treatment of journalists,” she said. “We have this notion in the U.S. that we are No. 1 in that, but we’re not. I would have thought we were at least in the top 10.” (The U.S. was ranked 48th in Reporters Without Borders’ 2019 World Press Freedom Index.)

Classroom discussion around that lesson addressed how different U.S. government leaders have treated the news media. “That led to what is fake news and how to distinguish fake news from what is news we just don’t like. Calling them fake news media is really dangerous. Some students don’t hear that at home,” Santola said.

And she found herself revisiting her own online habits after completing Checkology’s “Understanding Bias” lesson. “It made me more skeptical because I think I can be quick to be caught up in my own confirmation bias,” Santola said. “Diversifying my media diet is important to learning more and getting the full scope.”

Of Murphy’s new course, she said: “I feel like it’s important for everyone to take. It seems extremely relevant. If any time is the time to take it, it’s now.”

As the COVID-19 pandemic began delivering a surge of misinformation to our social media feeds and inboxes, a student in Denise Wood’s Honors World Literature and Composition class emailed her.

“I thank you for teaching us about misinformation last semester. It has helped a ton in recent days as I see loads of false claims, pseudoscience, and logical fallacies,” sophomore Afnan Ahmad wrote regarding his fall 2019 news literacy instruction.

Wood, an educator at Union Grove High School in McDonough, Georgia — outside Atlanta — teaches news literacy using the Checkology^® virtual classroom. “I had become very concerned about the credulousness I noticed in my students. They often seemed to believe that if something was published, it must be true,” she says.

But she was not surprised to see Ahmad apply what he learned to critically assess information about COVID-19. “Afnan is a very committed student who is intensely curious about the world,” she says. He was definitely engaged (in Checkology) from the get-go. He asked questions in class and came up with several relevant examples.”

Ahmad says Checkology helped him to learn how to filter online content and be more discerning. “The unit really taught me how I should be aware of what I’m exposed to on Instagram and Twitter,” he says. “So much information is created to scare someone and instill hatred.” Previously, Ahmad said he assumed all news sources were credible.

And throughout this pandemic he has seen plenty of dubious content. “It’s a problem especially for more vulnerable populations,” Ahmad says. “A lot of family back in Bangladesh, where my parents are from, they don’t have the exposure to information we have. They might see a fake cure and believe that.”

Helping others

He also helps his parents view social media content with more skepticism. For example, regarding posts from imposter websites that mimic legitimate news outlets, he demonstrates the steps he follows to verify credibility. These include examining the source, checking for biases and considering them, and looking at how other sites report the same information.

And he does the same with peers, especially regarding COVID-19. “For the most part, I’m the one educating my friends about it. They are often surprised that everything they see is contradicted. It is hard to keep up with the information and the contradictions.”

Still, some of what Checkology taught Ahmad is less tangible. “It makes me have a sense of confidence that I’m looking at the correct post and correct source and can help my family and people around them.”

International perspective

Ahmad travels widely and brings an international perspective to his news consumption. “News stories in other countries focus on global news, but in the U.S. we focus on domestic news,” he says. “We have a focus on empowering ourselves.” Other countries focus internally, but also pay attention to what’s occurring around them, Ahmad observes. “It’s important for me to have all those perspectives.”

He also has a strong interest in propaganda, content that distorts and manipulates facts and information. Wood covers that topic in class. “I’ve combined the Checkology lessons with a larger unit on propaganda, which I connect with both current events and literature,” she says. “We usually use this concurrently with reading Animal Farm.”

And he said he is more attuned to spotting propaganda. “Now I know even a public announcement can be bias and propaganda. It’s not straightforward, and it can be subconscious in really subtle ways.”

And he expects to apply news literacy skills as he considers a career in medical research. “It has a grounding in what I’ve learned about information being credible.”

As a former Reuters correspondent in Chicago, I often reported on excessive force by law enforcement, including the deaths of Black people and the ensuing protests. The awful, unjust events of recent weeks and months — the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and the racism faced by the Central Park birder — unfortunately did not surprise me.

But last week, as I watched — outraged — video of live coverage of CNN reporter Omar Jimenez’s arrest, I found myself asking out loud: “Why?”

Jimenez also is a journalist of color. He had properly identified himself as a member of the media while covering protests in Minneapolis, just as I had done time and time again during my career. He was nothing but respectful and professional to authorities, and more than willing to accommodate them by repeatedly offering to move.

Immediately after watching the video, I read LZ Granderson’s powerful piece in the Los Angeles Times. In it, Granderson, a columnist for the paper, reflected on his experiences as a Black man in America, recounting “just a fraction of the times I’ve been pulled over for looking like someone.

“So, yeah, on most days I choose to be numb just to survive.”

I wound up sobbing at my laptop — sad, tired and angry about the state of the country. I’m still crying: over the discrimination experienced by me, by people I love, and by people of color. And over our suffering — past, present and future.

As I read more reports about violence against journalists, I wondered where I would be and in what condition if I were still reporting. Over the past several days, journalists have been targeted by law enforcement and protesters, arrested like Jimenez and his crew, struck with rubber bullets, pepper balls and other projectiles, beaten and hospitalized, and their equipment and property damaged and vandalized.

Protesters: The same First Amendment that gives you the right to free speech, to assemble peacefully and to seek redress of your grievances from the government is the very same First Amendment that gives journalists the right to free speech and a free press.

These attacks on journalists are not acceptable, and they are dangerous — not only for journalists, but for democracy. They challenge, ignore and undermine America’s constitutional principles.

Standards-based journalists are not trying to cause trouble or become part of the story. To the best of their ability, they are striving to inform the public, report truthfully about what is happening, document events and give voice to the voiceless — putting themselves at risk in the process.

Journalists are integral to American democracy. They hold people in power accountable. The more informed people are, the better they understand the issues we face, and the more likely they are to be active, engaged participants in society and to cast well-informed votes. Attacking journalists, arresting them and failing to protect them — as well as protesters who gather peacefully — are attacks on our democracy, as well as the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Journalists are used to at least some level of hostility. For decades before journalists were publicly called “the enemy,” some elected officials and members of the public did not like reporters, did not want to give them information, criticized their work and questioned their motives.

But these are more intense times.

Attacks on journalists occurred against the backdrop of COVID-19, which has designated members of the media “essential” and disproportionately affected communities of color. Journalists risk their health to do their essential work, reporting near crowds of people and interacting with the public.

Journalists of color must carry additional burdens, including having to temporarily suppress personal anger, grief, and trauma about the racial injustices they witness and experience in order to do their work under constant deadline pressure. Also, the journalists covering the unrest may not have been provided with hostile environments training.

In addition, journalists may be extra slammed because many already-downsized newsrooms have slashed staff and resources through layoffs, furloughs and pay cuts. Some news operations have shut down completely. All of this at a time when inaccurate information could lead to death.

Journalists — human beings and absolutely not “the enemy of the people” — work hard in perilous conditions, have families of their own and want to get home safely when their jobs are done. To law enforcement, protesters and others targeting journalists: Let them do their essential jobs. Our democracy demands it.

Suzannah Gonzales spent more than 20 years working in journalism, most recently as a Reuters correspondent in Chicago. She currently serves as the associate director of education for the News Literacy Project, a nonpartisan national nonprofit working to empower educators to help young people sort fact from fiction.

Once again, our nation must face the scourge of racial injustice with the recent killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, among too many others. These deaths have sparked protests around the country, highlighting the critical importance of our rights: to seek racial justice, to seek a redress of grievances, and to safeguard a free press.

We stand by the Black Lives Matter movement’s call to end these injustices and the violence inflicted too often on Black people and other communities of color. The United States will never realize its high ideals of forming “a more perfect Union” until this injustice ends.

We believe that our democracy depends on a free press holding the powerful accountable. We stand with journalists working to tell the story of our democracy in action through accurate, fair and contextual reporting. Without the transparency they provide as eyewitnesses to history, our freedoms are imperiled. We deplore the escalating attacks on journalists by police and call upon elected and appointed officials everywhere to put an end to such abuses.

We are also committed to free speech and the right of people to peaceably assemble and protest. Democracy depends on these rights, as protected by the First Amendment, as well.

In response to growing concerns about how Twitter handles tweets from elected officials that violate the social media platform’s rules and community standards, News Literacy Project Founder and CEO Alan C. Miller issued the following statement:

“This is a very important issue that grows more pressing each day and is only amplified by the current pandemic and the upcoming United States presidential election. Twitter’s recent decisions to add labels to tweets from President Trump are part of what has been a years-long debate about how social media companies should apply their community standards to public officials, weighing the potential harm of an inaccurate or misleading tweet against the public’s need to know what elected officials are saying. That’s why I believe it’s urgent that we, as a country, take steps to make sure that the next generation is prepared to understand and meet these challenges.

Aspects of this debate offer opportunities for engagement and learning in the nation’s classrooms and homes. We can help students understand whether social media platforms should be considered publishers; whether labeling or removing tweets from an elected official amounts to censorship; whether social media platforms are taking actions in ways that are consistent and fair, and how community standards should be enforced among other users.

Young people are inheriting an information ecosystem that has unfolded in ways we never imagined, and thus it is imperative for us to provide guidance on how these platforms should be used. Today’s students are tomorrow’s voters and leaders. Now is the time to make sure they are prepared to recognize and reject misinformation that spreads on social media platforms. As this issue demonstrates, news literacy skills must be built into the education system so students can determine what is fact and fiction in the information they consume, share and act on.

As the leader of a nonpartisan education nonprofit, I welcome these critical conversations. It is vital that we all understand the terms of the debate if we’re to land on a solution that is fair, informative and productive.”

A few years ago Heather Turner, a teacher librarian in the Fabius-Pompey Central School District in central New York, saw social media posts from other librarians about Checkology® virtual classroom, and she was intrigued.

“I was looking for something to augment what I was already doing with digital citizenship,” says Turner, who has been an educator for a dozen years.

She then began using Checkology, NLP’s e-learning platform, in her classroom. “I teach media literacy in all of its facets so that my students are citizens who can discern the bias and information behind and about media,” she says.

Teaching remotely

And when the COVID-19 pandemic forced the closure of schools in Turner’s district earlier this year, she relied on Checkology as she transitioned to distance learning.

Perhaps surprisingly, she found similarities in online and classroom teaching. “I find that sometimes the students need a little bit of direct instruction as well as the videos and questions,” a major component of Checkology. She also supplemented Checkology’s 13 lessons with hyperdocs, which include comprehensive resource links, so the students can demonstrate their learning.

Two months into the COVID-19 education disruption, Turner has found that her students are adapting to the changes needed with distance learning. “They are doing much better now than when it first started,” she says.

But there are still challenges  for students, educators and families, she notes. “I think we have to think of this as emergency school, not distance learning. This is not something students or staff signed up for and the stress has been hard for everyone.”

As COVID-19 continues to impact our lives, Turner said she is working to help students see the connections between the pandemic and the related “infodemic” of an overwhelming amount of information, much of it false and misleading.

While 58% of Americans report being “well-informed” about COVID-19 and the virus that causes it, more than a third (36%) say they feel “overwhelmed” by the information (and misinformation) circulating about the pandemic: That’s a key finding from a new survey conducted by Gallup and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as part of the Gallup/Knight Foundation Trust, Media and Democracy initiative.

The survey was conducted online between April 14 and April 20 with a random sample of 1,693 members of the Gallup Panel (a research panel designed to be representative of the U.S. adult population); the margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points. Results were published on May 11.

Other findings

• Almost 80% of respondents said that “false or inaccurate information about the coronavirus has been a major problem.”
• Almost half (47%) named “the Trump administration” as the primary source of misinformation about the pandemic; a third (33%) named “the mainstream national news.” But when respondents’ second choices were added in, “social media websites and apps” was the combined “winner” (the first choice of 15% and the second choice of 53%, for an overall total of 68%), followed by the Trump administration (the second choice of 7%, for an overall total of 54%).
• Respondents were evenly divided (42% for both) over whether social media platforms should immediately remove posts that are suspected of containing coronavirus misinformation or whether they should leave the posts up until the information in them is either confirmed or debunked.

In addition, younger adults (18-34) were more likely than older adults (55+) to say they are overwhelmed, though the reasoning for this was unclear.

Trust in news organizations played a part in responses, the survey found: Those with a favorable opinion of the media were “nearly twice as likely as those who view it negatively to say they are well-informed, 79% to 41%.

Classroom discussion

The World Health Organization describes the overwhelming spread of information — and misinformation — about COVID-19 as an “infodemic.” How would you describe your experience with this “infodemic”? How difficult is it to find credible information about COVID-19? How often do you encounter information that you’re not sure about? Where do you encounter questionable information? Have mainstream news outlets gotten anything wrong about the pandemic? If so, what was it?

Another idea

Have students review the Gallup report and replicate it by asking people 18 and older in their households the questions featured in the report. How do students’ results compare with the survey findings?

Conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic can be described in a variety of ways — alarming, outlandish, dangerous — but they shouldn’t be surprising. Even the Plandemic “documentary” that suddenly swept its way across social media earlier this month did so on a path paved with fragments of pandemic conspiracy theories that were already in circulation.

But as a report by Adrienne LaFrance in the June issue of The Atlantic points out, if one theory has established conspiratorial thinking as an “acceptable” option in the modern marketplace of ideas, it’s QAnon.

Born in the aftermath of the Pizzagate debacle with two cryptic, anonymous posts published to the controversial message board 4chan in October 2017, QAnon has grown into a large and nebulous belief system. Its “leader,” known only as Q, is “a purportedly high-ranking government official.” At its heart is the baseless notion that President Donald Trump is secretly working to bring about a “Great Awakening” to expose an elite cabal of child sex abusers — including prominent political figures in Washington — that has been concealed by intelligence agencies, or “the deep state.”

QAnon conspiracy theory aims to simplify complex issue

In many ways, QAnon is a quintessential conspiracy theory: It offers its adherents simple explanations in place of complexity, a coherent entity on which to place blame for the transgressions of modern life, and a sense of control and populist purpose. But in other ways, it seems to have tapped into deeper veins of moral gratification: an apocalyptic vision of a renewed America that resonates deeply with evangelical Christian beliefs about the End Times. (Indeed, at least one church has been founded on QAnon belief principles.)

Whether they see QAnon as prophecy, as self-described “research” or as an “open source intelligence operation,” its followers have grown so numerous, and pushed its rhetoric so persistently on so many fronts online, that its most anodyne permutations — vague references to a coming reckoning for immoral Washington elites — are disturbingly present in mainstream discourse. They appear as Q icons and slogans at political rallies and are popularized by an increasing number of social media influencers and public officials.

As it has grown, QAnon has expanded to absorb other conspiracy theories, explain away its own inconsistencies and incorporate new developments, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. So-called wellness influencers are spreading QAnon talking points alongside posts that tout unfounded “cures” or praise “holistic living.” And an April 8 “Q drop” — a post, said to be by Q, on an internet message board — had the cryptic message shown at left.

Related

• “’Immune to Evidence’: How Dangerous Coronavirus Conspiracies Spread” (Marshall Allen, ProPublica).
• “I was a conspiracy theorist, too” (Dannagal G. Young, Vox).

Discuss: What are the characteristics of conspiratorial thinking? How can entirely baseless conspiracy theories “feel” so right to some people? What role does evidence play in conspiracy theories? Why do you think conspiracy theories tend to arise during periods of great social and economic change? How do fear and anger contribute to the belief in conspiracy theories?

The 26-minute video Plandemic which pushed an array of dangerous and provably false conspiracy theories and other misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic ignited fringe communities last week and went massively viral before major social media companies took steps to remove it from their platforms.

Purporting to be a preview of an upcoming “documentary,” Plandemic relies on a single source — Judy Mikovits, a discredited scientist — to vaguely contend that a powerful cabal of public health officials and others is exaggerating the current outbreak and seeking to exploit it for profit. Mikovits also makes a number of demonstrably false medical statements, including that wearing a mask “activates” viruses that people might be carrying and that “healing microbes” in seawater and “sequences” in sand can boost immunity.

The video, posted May 4, garnered more than 8 million views and hundreds of millions of engagements on social media before YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook started to remove it three days later. Produced by filmmaker Mikki Willis, whose Ojai, California-based production company, Elevate Films, creates “transformative media,” Plandemic positions Mikovits as a victim-turned-whistleblower, presenting a highly misleading and one-sided account of her career that includes a number of accusations made against Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.

Falsifield details

It paves over the retraction in 2011 of a controversial study of chronic fatigue syndrome that Mikovits had co-authored two years before; it also falsifies details about her arrest in 2011 on two charges related to the theft of a computer, flash drives and other materials from the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, Nevada, where she had worked as research director. (The charges were dropped.)

Footage of the interview with Mikovits, who in recent years has been an outspoken critic of vaccinations, is interspersed with a number of video segments that seem to bolster her claims but are actually highly misleading or unreliable. The b-roll footage includes out-of-context clips of Fauci, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and other public figures; a portion of a report from CGTN, the Chinese state global news network; and several clips of people in medical scrubs calling into question the scientific consensus about the pandemic, including YouTube footage of Eric Nepute, a St. Louis chiropractor who suggested that the quinine and zinc in tonic water could treat COVID-19. Also prominently featured is footage from an April 22 press conference held by two physicians, Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, who own urgent care facilities in Bakersfield, California, and have made a case to reopen California based on deeply flawed statistics.

 Note: While the viral spread of Plandemic was aided by its slick production values and slippery sourcing, it also stitched together a number of baseless conspiratorial claims — anti-vaccination rhetoric, misinterpretations of COVID-19 Medicare payments to hospitals, possible COVID-19 treatments such as hydroxychloroquine, and the complicity of tech platforms — that felt familiar to a broad number of people who had already seen them online.

Related

• “I’m an Investigative Journalist. These Are the Questions I Asked About the Viral ‘Plandemic’ Video.” (Marshall Allen, ProPublica).
• “Why It’s Important To Push Back On ‘Plandemic’—And How To Do It” (Tara Haelle, Forbes).
• “The Falsehoods of the ‘Plandemic’ Video” (Angelo Fichera, Saranac Hale Spencer, D’Angelo Gore, Lori Robertson and Eugene Kiely, FactCheck.org).
• “Virus Experts Aren’t Getting the Message Out” (Renée DiResta, The Atlantic).
• “How covid-19 conspiracy theorists are exploiting YouTube culture” (Abby Ohlheiser, MIT Technology Review).

Discuss: What made Plandemic spread so widely so quickly? Were social media platforms correct to remove it? Why might a video like this — offering a simple explanation and a focal point for blame — appeal to so many people right now? What other conspiracy theories do this?

Idea: Have students share their stories of seeing Plandemic go viral last week, and ask whether they still have questions about points it raises. Work together to seek credible sources to answer those questions.

Not long after schools closed in Jackson, Wyoming, in March due to COVID-19 health concerns, Charlotte Krugh found that her daughter, Julia, 11, had too much free time on her hands. The sixth-grader’s distance learning assignments occupied her about three hours a day. Her sister Eliza, 9, who attends a different school, had a full day of work.

Krugh and her husband Brad were unhappy with how much time Julia spent watching YouTube videos while they were busy working from home. So they began to look into resources that would be meaningful and that Julia also might enjoy.

“We wanted something that would keep her engaged and not be busy work,” Krugh says.

That’s when she discovered that the News Literacy Project was offering its Checkology® virtual classroom free to U.S. educators and parents in response to school closures.

“At first she didn’t want to do it,” says Krugh, who, a former teacher well familiar with students’ resistance to additional work. “Then last week, she started to get into it.”

‘Aha!’ moments in distance learning

After a few lessons, Julia made some discoveries. For example, she had never given much thought to propaganda — a category of information in the InfoZones lesson.  And she gained a new perspective on the YouTube crafting channel she watches. Krugh had told Julia that her favorite crafter might be getting paid to feature some of the products used in her videos, but she dismissed that idea. After completing a Checkology lesson that discussed sponsored content, Julia changed her mind. She told her mom: “You know, she might want to be trying to sell me something.”

Julia Krugh, 11, works on a Checkology lesson. Photo courtesy of Charlotte Krugh

“She is learning and we’re really pleased,” says Krugh.

And Julia wasn’t the only one in the family benefiting from distance learning. “One of the things that surprised me, I feel like I am pretty news savvy, but I got a few things wrong,” Krugh says. She was referring to the Checkology lesson on Branded Content that describes how some blog posts are actually deftly disguised advertisements. “I think there is something we all can learn from it.”

With that in mind, she also might introduce Eliza to Checkology. And she hopes to engage the group of friends Julia has virtual lunch with most days. “I’m hoping that some of her friends might be interested in it. It would be fun to have them do it,” Krugh says.

In the context of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic also provides opportunities for Julia and Eliza to broaden their perspectives, based on diverse sources of information. They take part in video calls with a great aunt who is an infectious disease doctor and stay in touch with friends they made in Spain, where the family once lived. That country has been hit hard by COVID-19, and the girls’ friends have been allowed outside to play only recently after many weeks indoors.

And a slide presentation that Eliza worked on provided a chance to discuss the validity of sources for COVID-19 information the friend provided. “I think that having a variety of ideas inform you is super important,” Krugh says. “It gives us an opportunity to talk about different ideas and where they come from.”

That’s also a basic tenet of news literacy education. This resonates with the family.

“We are not teaching critical thinking skills early enough. Anything we can do to improve academic success and beyond, we should be doing,” Krugh says. “We want our kids to question and wonder and be curious.”

YouTube users in the United States will soon see information panels from third-party fact-checkers at the top of some search results, the company announced on April 28, citing the rapid spread of misinformation about COVID-19. The panels will appear in searches for specific claims and will feature relevant articles from “an open network of third-party publishers” of fact checks.

More than a dozen U.S. fact-checkers are already involved, the company said. These include FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker and The Dispatch. Participants must use the ClaimReview tagging system, a protocol developed by Duke Reporters’ Lab that extracts key details from fact checks so they can be displayed on other platforms. (Bill Adair, creator of PolitiFact, is head of Duke Reporters’ Lab.) Fact-checkers must be what YouTube calls an “authoritative publisher.” This is what YouTube considers an “established and relevant” source whose “expertise and trustworthiness” have been evaluated by external raters. Otherwise, fact-checkers must be verified signatories of the code of principles of the International Fact-Checking Network.

YouTube said its systems “will take some time” to “fully ramp up.” It piloted this feature in Brazil and India last year and plans to expand it to more countries over time.

Donation to fact-checking network

The announcement also said that the Google-owned video platform’s Google News Initiative is donating $1 million to the International Fact-Checking Network. The network is based at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training and advocacy center in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Also note: Citing violation of “community guidelines,” YouTube removed a widely disseminated video of a April 22 press briefing by two California doctors, Daniel Erickson and Artin Massihi. They used results from more than 5,000 COVID-19 tests conducted at their Bakersfield-area urgent care centers and private testing site to argue that shelter-in-place orders and business shutdowns are no longer needed. Erickson urged reporters to check with emergency doctors, who, he said, would support their conclusions. However, the American Academy of Emergency Medicine and the American College of Emergency Physicians condemned their remarks.  They said “as owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.”

Ask students:

Do you think YouTube’s move to highlight fact-checked articles in searches will help slow the spread of misinformation on its platform? Why or why not? What else could YouTube do to combat the spread of falsehoods?

Test the new feature

Once this feature is live, have students test it by searching for a specific COVID-19 claim. The company’s announcement uses “covid and ibuprofen” as an example. Ask them to provide a short summary of their experience. It should include the claim they searched, their search results, and whether a fact check appeared above the results. Then ask them to do the same search on other sites (such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest). Finally, ask students to evaluate which is best at highlighting credible, authoritative information and demoting misinformation.

The European Journalism Centre, a journalism training and advocacy nonprofit in Maastricht, Netherlands, has released the third edition of its Verification Handbook, an online primer designed to help journalists investigate online content. The guide is edited by Craig Silverman, the media editor at BuzzFeed News and a digital fact-checking pioneer, and includes contributions from a range of distinguished journalists and misinformation researchers.

The book is divided into three parts: an introduction, which explains the stakes of digital verification work; a section on investigating individual accounts and pieces of content; and a section on analyzing platforms and influence operations.

Though it was created to help journalists avoid being exploited by “coordinated and well-funded campaigns to capture our attention, trick us into amplifying messages, and bend us to the will of states and other powerful forces,” the book is also broadly useful for anyone interested in honing digital verification skills — especially educators working with students.

Every article addresses a vital topic; several stand out for adoption in the classroom:

• “The Age of Information Disorder” by Claire Wardle, the head of strategic direction and research at First Draft. It includes three important elements for students: a taxonomy for categorizing different types of misinformation; an explanation of approaches to the thorny topic of determining the intent behind a piece of misinformation; and a graphic — the Trumpet of Amplification — that shows how bad actors “use coordination to move information through the ecosystem,” promoting falsehoods in closed groups and conspiracy communities until they trend on social media and gain the attention of professional media.
  • Idea: In groups or individually, ask students to collect 10 recent examples of misinformation (by using fact-checking websites or this newsletter’s viral rumor rundown). Then have them trade those examples with another group or student and determine which of Wardle’s seven forms of information disorder best fits each example.
• “Spotting bots, cyborgs and inauthentic activity” by Charlotte Godart and Johanna Wild, two open-source investigators affiliated with the online investigations collective Bellingcat. It offers an approachable yet detailed look at automated and semi-automated accounts. This section also gives clear steps anyone can take to investigate suspicious accounts; explains common red flags for automated accounts; and links to several useful online tools, including three — Botometer, Bot Sentinel and accountanalysis — that analyze Twitter accounts for bot-like patterns.
  • Idea: Review with students the common characteristics of automated accounts on Twitter, such as usernames that the platform automatically assigns, a lack of a profile picture, and unusual account activity. Have them work in teams to collect a number of accounts that they suspect are bots. Then have the teams trade their collections and use one of the free analysis tools linked above to evaluate the likelihood that the accounts are automated.
• “Investigating websites,” by Craig Silverman. It explains how to explore who is behind a website; how to uncover networks of shady sites; how to analyze web content (including webpages that have been deleted); how to use tools such as BuzzSumo and CrowdTangle to map the spread of specific links or domains across social media; and how to investigate domain registrations and IP addresses using tools such as DomainBigData.
  • Idea: Ask students to read this article, then divide them into groups. Give each group a different tool mentioned in this piece; ask them to explore it, and then explain it, to their classmates.

NLP resource

Check Center, part of NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom, includes tutorials and fact-checking missions for students. (Registration is required for teacher or parent access; NLP is currently waiving new student license fees for those affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Teachers and parents engaged in distance learning or homeschooling as a result of school closures can apply here for access through June 30.)

The next decade is critical for the future of journalism, and the COVID-19 pandemic is deepening existing crises that already threaten free and independent reporting, Reporters Without Borders said April 21 as it released its annual World Press Freedom Index, which ranks 180 countries and regions on the level of freedom they afford journalists.

Christophe Deloire, secretary-general of the global media advocacy organization (also known as Reporters sans frontières, or RSF), said that the pandemic is exacerbating “the negative factors threatening the right to reliable information”: a geopolitical crisis, a technological crisis, a democratic crisis, a crisis of trust and an economic crisis.

In its overview of the rankings, RSF noted “a clear correlation between suppression of media freedom in response to the coronavirus pandemic and a country’s ranking.” China (177th) and Iran (173rd) censored information about the spread of COVID-19, RSF said.

The director of RSF’s London office, Rebecca Vincent, rebuked the Chinese government for its lack of truthful reporting when it first had the opportunity to provide information.

“If there had been a free press in China, if these whistleblowers hadn’t been silenced, then this could have been prevented from turning into a pandemic,” she told CNN Business. “Sometimes we can talk about press freedom in a theoretical way, but this shows the impact can at times be physical. It can affect all of our health.”

A spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Geng Shuang, dismissed RSF’s criticism, saying that the organization “has always held deep-rooted prejudice against China” and its report “is not worth rebutting.”

USA not number one

The United States was 45th this year in the RSF rankings, an improvement of three places from 2019. Norway ranks first, as it has since 2017, and North Korea dropped one place to become the least free country, as it was in 2018 and 2017 (Turkmenistan occupied last place in 2019). Due to change brought about by general elections in May 2018, Malaysia had the largest improvement (22 places) to 101st, while Haiti — where protesters have targeted journalists — experienced the most significant drop (21 places) to 83rd.

While RSF’s “global indicator” — its measure of the overall state of press freedom — improved by 0.9% in 2020, it has declined by 12% since its creation in 2013. According to that indicator, press freedom is in a “very serious situation” in 13% of the countries and regions around the world, an increase of 2 percentage points from 2019.

For discussion

What makes the press in a given country “free”? Why is freedom of the press important? How does the level of press freedoms in the United States compare with what is found other countries? What role does a free press play in democratic societies?

Activities for students

Ask students to guess which countries around the world have the greatest and least amount of press freedoms. Then have them research their hypotheses using Reporters Without Borders’ 2020 rankings. Finally, help them contact a journalist in one of the countries they researched so they can ask questions by email or request a brief videoconference.

NLP resource

Press Freedoms Around the World” (NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom). Note: This lesson will be updated with the 2020 rankings this summer.

Both Facebook and Google have announced new transparency measures intended to give users more information about who is behind the posts and ads they see. In an April 22 Facebook Newsroom post, Anita Joseph and Georgina Sheedy-Collier, product managers for Facebook and Instagram (owned by Facebook), said that the platforms will be providing “the location of high-reach Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts on every post they share.” The following day, John Canfield, Google’s director of product management and ad integrity announced that beginning this summer, the company will require all advertisers on its platforms — including those using the Google AdSense program, which places targeted ads on almost 11 million websites across the internet — to provide “information that proves who they are and the country in which they operate.”

Joseph and Sheedy-Collier said that the new feature would be piloted in the United States, starting with “Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts that are based outside the US but reach large audiences based primarily in the US,” though they didn’t specifically define what was meant by “high-reach.” Canfield said that Google would start by verifying information for advertisers in the United States before expanding the program worldwide, noting that that this initiative would take years to complete.

The world’s largest social media company and the world’s most popular search engine have introduced a variety of measures to improve transparency since their platforms were used by state-sponsored disinformation agents seeking to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election (PDF).

Take note

Despite an announcement by Facebook in February that it had banned ads for products that claim to cure or prevent COVID-19, and a post from its chairman and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, on April 16 stating that “harmful misinformation” about COVID-19 will be taken down, two investigations last week found evidence that neither of these policies is being consistently enforced. An April 23 report in The Markup discovered that Facebook’s Ads Manager — which makes it easy for advertisers to target extremely specific groups of users — offered an audience segment of people interested in pseudoscience. An April 24 NBC News investigation found active Facebook ads promoting ultraviolet lights for medical treatments that violated the platform’s COVID-19 misinformation policy.

In addition, a search on Facebook on April 27 for “Miracle Mineral Solution” — a dangerous form of bleach hyped as a “cure-all” — showed that there are at least one page and two groups dedicated to promoting the toxic solution. (At the COVID-19 briefing with reporters on April 23, President Donald Trump suggested evaluating the use of ultraviolet light and “disinfectant” inside patients’ bodies for their effectiveness in treating COVID-19.)

Related reading

“Google Will Require Proof of Identity From All Advertisers” (Tiffany Hsu and Daisuke Wakabayashi, The New York Times).

For discussion

What impact do you think these transparency measures will have? Should Facebook and Google have taken these steps sooner? How challenging is content moderation for tech companies? Are there transparency features and tools that should (but don’t) exist on major social media and digital advertising platforms? What are they? What other kinds of tools could social media platforms add to help their users better understand what they see?

Another idea

Review with students the existing transparency features on Facebook, including its page transparency section and its instructions on viewing the data the platform has collected about them, and Google’s “Why This Ad?” link and data profile tools.

Georgia educator Erin Wilder at a NewsLitCamp in Columbia, South Carolina, in January 2020. Photo by Miriam Romais / The News Literacy Project

Earlier this year – back in the days before the U.S. largely shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic – we held a NewsLitCamp® in Columbia, South Carolina. In attendance was a team of educators led by Erin Wilder, who had driven nearly three hours and 200 miles from Hoschton, Georgia, to be a part of that day’s professional development session.

When we heard that, we knew we had to find out more: Why was it so important for her and her team to be there?

“I’ve been preaching NLP for years,” Wilder told us in a recent interview, “but I told my team you have to go see them in-person to get the whole picture. So our principal gave us the day off, and we drove over and got a lot of great new information and ideas. We just gabbed and gabbed on the drive back and shared ideas and started making plans so that we could better help our kids understand everything about news literacy.”

One of the key NewsLitCamp takeaways for Wilder was lateral reading.* “We realized we had to have kids go to different sites and look at how those sites present similar ideas. Typically, kids will just see one side of the news. And that’s good because we’re not trying to force an opinion on them. We just wanted them to see how different sides approach a topic and then let them develop their own consensus about it.”

What the kids need to become adults

Wilder has been teaching high school English for 17 years and has been at Mill Creek High School for the last eight. She says that in recent years she has realized that in addition to the standard reading and writing curriculum, some newer skills and tools were needed to help them leave high school armed to be literate citizens as well. As a result, her team decided to take the last few weeks of their language arts program to “get them ready for the world.”

That process took a big jump forward when she watched a webinar led by Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education, and John Silva, NLP’s director of education. She remembers thinking, “This is so great, we need to do this,” and she began using the first generation of the Checkology® virtual classroom. “I had to get permission to circumvent the firewall, and we started doing the lessons once a week in the computer lab,” she told us. “The students absolutely loved the Checkology lessons. They would sit at their computers and go at their own pace. It was my first foray into adding news literacy lessons for them and they enjoyed it, and I loved the work we were getting back from them.”

Overall, she adds, “They felt it was so much more valuable and applicable to their lives and what they felt they needed going out into the world. They realized they have so much digital contact, but didn’t have the internal ability to process it. But they’ve really enjoyed getting these tools to build a better understanding of what’s going on.”

Using The Sift during COVID-19 pandemic

Around early March, Wilder says she began hearing more and more people talking about drinking bleach or snorting cocaine as a cure for COVID-19. And she realized right then, “This is what we’re studying. I took a bunch of articles and put them together and went in to show everyone that we are literally living in this moment of harmful misinformation and that’s why we have to learn these news literacy skills.

“And then the next issue of The Sift® came and it had great stuff in it – lots of great ideas. It’s easy to tell kids misinformation is out there, but it can be hard to show an example. The Sift gave us a lot that we can actually show them. I started using that issue to pull sample articles and posts to create a two-day activity where the kids could look at all these different rumors that were spreading and what fact checking sites had to say about them. And then they said, ‘OK, we’re closing schools’ and that was the last thing we got to do with them face-to-face. But it was so rewarding to see the kids applying the skills we have been working on to something that was so current.”

In the end, while Wilder is disappointed that schools are closed and she won’t be able to finish using Checkology with her students, she plans to continue using all of the tools that NLP provides. And with a little luck, she said she’s dedicated to, “trying to make a NewsLitCamp happen in Atlanta. I’m hoping to work with you on that.”

*The lateral reading concept and the term itself developed from research conducted by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), led by Sam Wineburg, founder and executive director of SHEG.

Xenophobic incidents, racism and attacks against Asian Americans — based on false narratives that COVID-19 came from the “other” — are sadly predictable, says Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a journalism education and advocacy organization in St. Petersburg, Florida.

“Here is how the contagion of irrationality works,” he wrote in an April 13 column. “Someone blames it on China. By extension, the blame extends to the Chinese people. In a diverse country like America, blame — by pure ignorance — is extended to Chinese Americans (many who have never been in China); and because the ignorant do not discriminate between the varieties of Asian cultures, blame extends to all Asian Americans.”

It’s a view shared by Russell Jeung, chair of the Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University. In an interview with Columbia Journalism Review published on April 14, he discussed the role of news organizations in reducing such attacks — by, for example, providing broader coverage of Asian Americans and using accurate terms (such as “COVID-19” instead of “the Chinese virus”). Having reporters who are culturally sensitive and can communicate in communities where English may not be widely spoken can also help, he said.

Xenophobia and racism

Jeung and his graduate students have analyzed xenophobia and discrimination in COVID-19 news coverage, and he has helped to collect firsthand accounts of anti-Asian violence. Among the patterns they saw in global English-language news reports about the pandemic were these: First came racialized memes about eating Chinese food (including eating bats, which were a possible source of the coronavirus) and wearing masks (a common sight in Asian countries during flu season). Those were followed by reports on cancellations of Lunar New Year events and the decline of Chinese businesses. Next came worldwide reports about racism against Asians.

Speaking out

Media outlets “could be contributing to the xenophobia by calling the virus the ‘Chinese virus,’ calling it the ‘Wuhan virus,’ by showing pictures of Chinese people wearing masks when they’re talking about the virus, or running stories about conspiracy theories,” Jeung told CJR. (The Jan. 27 issue of The Sift referred to COVID-19 as the “Wuhan coronavirus”; other news organizations used the same language around that time.)

But when he and his students looked solely at U.S. domestic news coverage, those anti-Asian patterns were followed by reports on elected officials, health officials and Asian Americans themselves speaking out against racism and condemning harassment and violence. Such reports, he suggested, may have been partially responsible for President Donald Trump’s tweets on March 23 that Asian Americans should be protected and that the spread of the virus was not their fault.

Still, Jeung added, Trump has “a clear ‘us’-versus-‘them’ dichotomy. We call that Orientalist language, saying that the West is different from the East. Therefore Asian Americans are considered perpetual foreigners. That language puts us in the out-group, and it’s easy to blame and attack the out-group.”

Related reading

• “’A Perfect Storm’: Extremists Look For Ways To Exploit Coronavirus Pandemic” (Hannah Allam, NPR).

• “Racism is a virus too” (Nancy Spiegel and Tam Huynh, Bangor Daily News).
• “Political correctness is a virus that kills, too: John Phillips” (John Phillips, Orange County Register).

For discussion 

How could associating COVID-19 with a geographic location contribute to xenophobic and discriminatory attitudes? In what ways would having a culturally and linguistically diverse newsroom staff be helpful in covering the COVID-19 pandemic? How would you rate your local news organizations’ coverage of COVID-19 as it reflects and relates to the Asian American community? How would you rate national news coverage?

Another idea

Have students review COVID-19 coverage relating to Asians and Asian Americans since January from one standards-based news organization. Then have students summarize their findings, including whether terms such as “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan virus” were used, whether any photos of Asians or Asian Americans wearing masks were used without appropriate context, and whether reports included first-person accounts from Asian Americans about how they have been affected by the spread of COVID-19 and the racial perceptions of others.

Facebook groups coordinating efforts to protest stay-at-home orders in cities and states across the country have been established in the last week alone. Three brothers who also manage a number of hard-line gun advocacy organizations and websites created at least four of them — targeting New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, The Washington Post reported.

Some of the groups are sharing advice and even Facebook event descriptions with each other as they organize protests against what they consider “excessive” measures undertaken by states to fight the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Protestors held at least 13 demonstrations to “reopen America” in the last week. More are planned in several states this week.

The protests have drawn a significant amount of news coverage. That coverage produced shocking images, including provocative signs, Confederate flags and armed demonstrators. However, much of the coverage noted that these events do not represent the views of most Americans about the pandemic response.

Noteworthy

A Facebook spokesman told the Post that the platform had removed promotions of protests in New Jersey and California. The spokesman said that “events that defy government’s guidance on social distancing aren’t allowed on Facebook.” On April 20, a CNN reporter tweeted that Facebook had also removed events in Nebraska and was checking with officials in New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin “as to whether anti-quarantine protests breaks those states’ social distancing measures.”

Related reading

• “Protesting for the Right to Catch the Coronavirus” (Charlie Warzel, The New York Times).
• “What the anti-stay-at-home protests are really about” (Jane Coaston, Vox).

For discussion

Are these protests newsworthy? Why or why not? Are news organizations giving them too much attention? What could be the inadvertent effects of reporting on movements like these? Are members of this movement exercising their rights or endangering others? Should Facebook take action against the groups where many of these protests are being organized? Why or why not?

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored both the threat to public health posed by pervasive misinformation and the need for expanded news literacy education to combat it. The News Literacy Project has long had a critical role in ensuring that students have the skills and tools to distinguish fact from fiction. In today’s rapidly evolving circumstances, the ability of everyone to do so can be a matter of life and death.

Our mission has never been more urgent. If you’re able to help, please consider a gift in addition to your annual support.

Our response to COVID-19 pandemic

These times call for thoughtful, innovative and immediate measures, and NLP has responded swiftly. Last month, we removed all barriers for accessing our news literacy programs by offering our Checkology® virtual classroom at no cost to U.S. educators and parents. The rapid and robust reaction to this initiative validates that our expertise is needed now.

We have already received more than 1,700 requests from educators and parents in all 50 states to use Checkology with more than 140,000 students. In addition, more than 500 educators registered for our recent webinar, “What does it mean to be ‘news-literate’?” — and we have received a flood of requests for additional sessions.

With so much at stake, it has been humbling and gratifying for us to see educators and parents turn to the News Literacy Project as a reliable and credible partner. Now we’re turning to you for your help. Your support at this critical time will enable us to bring our resources and programs to more communities without delay.

Help us meet this escalating need by reaffirming your support today.

We will continue to share stories from educators and students and will keep you updated on the programs and resources NLP is developing to address this crisis. Thank you for standing with us at this extraordinary time.

Since Brian Winkel began teaching high school in 1993, he has posed countless questions to his English and journalism students. But now his goal is to ensure they are the ones asking questions — specifically about the information they encounter online. “I wanted them to be more media savvy,” he says.

Recognizing that young people needed a better understanding of what they were consuming, creating and sharing online, he redesigned a film-focused course at Cedar Falls High School in Iowa into a 21st Century Literacy class.  When Winkel began re-imagining the course in 2017, he discovered the News Literacy Project’s Checkology® virtual classroom. “NLP was a godsend. When I spent the summer trying to build this, I was like, ‘holy cow,’” he says.

He now teaches two sections of 21st Century Literacy per semester with Checkology as a main resource. Winkel also uses content from NLP’s free weekly newsletter The Sift to bring even more timely content to his classroom.

Real-life events intervene

But with concerns about the health risks to students, educators and staff from the COVID-19 pandemic, Winkel’s district closed schools until at least April 30. Educators had provided students with material to reinforce topics covered previously and encouraged them to explore new learning opportunities. However, because of the inequity of access to the internet among students, the district cannot require those options, he explains. Still, Winkel sees ample learning opportunities in current events.

“Each and every day of this epidemic has been rife with teachable moments for drilling down on truth. Whether it be examining the credibility of the sources who are providing guidance, comparing the approaches that different government officials have used locally, nationally and globally or examining the investigations of watchdog reporters who are following the actions of officials,” he says. “I wish that I could have all of my kids with me every day, but I’m confident that they have been independently navigating the digital details in these trying times of COVID-19.”

‘It’s very eye-opening’

When in the classroom, Winkel finds students are highly engaged by the Checkology platform. “They love this kind of learning. I think I get pretty much 100% of the kids to go through 100% of the platform,” he says.

And sometimes he is surprised by what this digital generation doesn’t know. That’s often what happens when he teaches Checkology’s InfoZones lesson — which describes different types of information based on their primary purpose. “I thought it would be very elementary, that kids could understand the difference between facts and opinion, but they can’t. It’s very eye opening,” Winkel says.

He also makes sure his students grasp how tech companies and advertisers follow their habits online and target them with advertising and other content based on their behaviors.

His students are often unaware of how algorithms are used to influence what they see. “And it’s not just the algorithms, the politics behind it, the intent. They are always surprised that there are malevolent forces out there influencing their social media feed,” Winkel says.

Ultimately, he aims to ensure that his students are well-informed, critical thinkers when they leave his classroom. (Learn how Cătălin Vilae, an exchange student from Romania who graduated from Cedar Falls High School in 2019, applies what he learned in Winkel’s classroom.)

“I want kids to be able to understand what’s going on in the information landscape, to see who is trying to influence them and then teach them techniques to be savvy about that,”  he says.

Given the “infodemic” surrounding COVID-19, that ability is more important than ever.

Catalin Vilae, a former exchange student from Romania who studied news literacy at Cedar Falls High School in Iowa. Photo courtesy of Catalin Vilae

As an exchange student at Cedar Falls High School in Iowa during the 2018-19 school year, Cătălin Vilae spent his senior year exploring new landscapes — literally and figuratively. Living and studying 5,300 miles away from his home, family and familiar surroundings in Alexandria, Romania, he learned to navigate Iowa’s physical landscape and the information landscape with confidence.

Adjusting to a new environment in a strange country can be challenging enough. And then Vilae ventured more deeply into the online information landscape during a 21st Century Media Literacy class in spring 2019. English and journalism teacher Brian Winkel developed the course, introducing students to news literacy using NLP’s Checkology® virtual classroom. (Read about Winkel’s experience teaching news literacy.)

“Well, I have to admit that I wasn’t really familiar with it,” Vilae says of news literacy in an interview conducted through email in early April. “I was just reading the news without being fully aware of the fake news or misinformation.”

He soon discovered just how easy it is for people to share falsehoods, rumors and misleading or manipulated content on social media, often without realizing they are doing so. “People just share stuff without even thinking,” he observes.

Skills for daily life

For Vilae, Checkology’s use of real-life examples gives the lessons authenticity. “By doing that, it makes you realise that it is really important to pay attention when you watch/read the news.” He also acquired skills that he applies in his daily life. “I learned how to verify pictures. Now I do that every time I am not sure whether a picture is real or fake,” he says of learning digital forensics, an important skill for becoming news-literate. “And I really enjoy it, because I can actually be a watchdog when I’m online.”

After graduating from Cedar Falls High School in May 2019, Vilae entered the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom to study journalism. But like students around the globe, his college experience has been interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and he is back home in Romania.

However, the global public health crisis has only reinforced the importance of news literacy for Vilae. He identifies plenty of false and misleading content amid a torrent of misinformation regarding the pandemic. “For instance, there was the picture with a train car that had COVID-19 written on it. My mom saw the picture and she almost freaked out,” he says. “And that is the moment when my skills learned in class came in. I showed her how to verity if it’s real or not. Also, with this occasion I made her realise that we have to be responsible while on social media.”

From the United States, to the United Kingdom to Romania: Vilae’s experience proves that news literacy skills apply regardless of national borders.

Online conspiracy theories pushing false connections between 5G technology and the COVID-19 pandemic are continuing to rapidly gain momentum. Social media accounts and groups dedicated to advancing these theories have accumulated hundreds of thousands of new followers, including a number of celebrities, in recent weeks. In the United Kingdom, where these theories have particularly taken hold, there have been more than 30 acts of arson and vandalism to cell towers and roughly 80 incidents in which technicians have been harassed while working.

The theories range across a spectrum of false beliefs, including provably untrue claims that 5G radio waves cause COVID-19 or suppress the immune system, and the even more outlandish notion that the entire pandemic is a hoax perpetrated by governments and media outlets around the world to facilitate the installation of 5G networks. One factor behind the recent rise of such theories was an interview published on Jan. 22 by the Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws, in which a doctor made a number of highly speculative and unfounded claims about 5G technology. (The article was taken down “within a few hours,” the publication’s editor said, but not before the doctor’s claims had been disseminated widely.) There is also evidence that the recent surge in 5G conspiracies is being intensified by coordinated disinformation campaigns online — some of which appear to be state-sponsored, researchers say.

5G conspiracy theory not new

A New York Times report last May highlighted the role of RT America, the U.S.-focused arm of a Russian state-run television outlet, in kindling unwarranted public fears about 5G in other countries, possibly as part of a Kremlin strategy.

Also note

Conspiracy theories often appeal to people seeking to make sense of complex, alarming events. Not only do such “explanations,” however unfounded, offer comfort by offering a scapegoat, they also (falsely) suggest solutions — which is also appealing.

Related reading

• “Why Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories Flourish. And Why It Matters.” (Max Fisher, The New York Times).
• “What Role Should Newsrooms Play in Debunking COVID-19 Misinformation?” (Claire Wardle, Nieman Reports).
• “Here’s where those 5G and coronavirus conspiracy theories came from” (Grace Rahman, Full Fact).

Classroom discusion

hy do conspiracy theories appeal to people? What other technological advancements have spawned conspiracy theories? Should social media companies delete posts that encourage violence against 5G towers? Should they ban all speech that attempts to connect 5G with the pandemic? Why or why not?

Teaching opportunity

Use this example as an opportunity to teach students about how coordinated disinformation campaigns work, and specifically how state-run media — such as RT America — can use speculation and story selection to strategically advance state interests.

As news organizations have continued to lay off, furlough or cut the pay of their employees during the COVID-19 pandemic (28,000 and counting, The New York Times reported last week), fundraisers and other supportive efforts are emerging to assist affected journalists and newsrooms. For example, Microloans for Journalists, a program created by journalists, connects journalists in the United States who need financial assistance with other U.S. journalists who are willing to lend them $500, interest-free. The Philadelphia COVID-19 Community Information Fund is providing more than $2.5 million in grants to several local news organizations to support their coverage of the pandemic.

On April 7, the News Media Alliance, a trade association for news publishers, noted that the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had refined its language about “essential” businesses to include “publishing news.” The next day, 19 Senate Democrats sent a letter (PDF) to the chamber’s Republican and Democratic leaders and the chairman and the vice chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, requesting that any additional COVID-19 stimulus package include financial support for local news outlets, which have been hit particularly hard in this crisis, even as their work becomes more important.

Discuss news outlets’ roles

What role do news outlets play during a public health crisis? What are some of the ways that you can support local journalism in your community? Are you seeking out more local news coverage now than you were before the pandemic? What are some differences between national news coverage of the pandemic and the news provided by your local outlets?

Track COVID-19 news coverage

Ask students to track local news coverage of the pandemic and select what they believe is the most valuable piece of coronavirus-related local news. Then have students share their selections in small groups and agree on one story to share with the entire class. Finally, have the class vote on the best local story about the pandemic, then email or message the journalist to see if they would be willing to join the class for a short video conference about their reporting.

Related reading

• “As newsrooms face coronavirus-related cuts, 54% of Americans rate media’s response to the outbreak positively” (John Gramlich, Pew Research Center).
• “Amid Pandemic, News Attention Spikes; Media Favorability Flat” (Zacc Ritter, Gallup).
• “Critical in a public health crisis, COVID-19 has hit local newsrooms hard” (Clara Hendrickson, The Brookings Institution).
• “Removing paywalls on coronavirus coverage is noble. It also makes no sense.” (Howard Saltz, Poynter).

This piece is part of a series, presented by our partner SAS, that explores the role of data in understanding the COVID-19 pandemic. SAS is a pioneer in the data management and analytics field. (Check out other posts in the series on our Get Smart About COVID-19 Misinformation page.)

Case fatality rate vs. mortality rate

COVID-19-related data and information can be hard to interpret if you’re not an expert. We have learned a lot of new terms in the last few weeks. One of the terms we see most often is case fatality rate, or CFR. This is an important metric because it helps us understand how many of those with a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19 die as a result of the disease. However, like the comparisons mentioned previously in this series, this number must be considered in context.

First, it’s important to differentiate case fatality rate from other metrics, such as mortality rate, or even a person’s risk of dying if they were to become infected. Case fatality rate is represented as a ratio.

Graphic courtesy of SAS.

Unfortunately, it is hard to measure both of these numbers with total accuracy. The number of people currently diagnosed with COVID-19 is not equal to the number of people that actually have it. And it’s possible we may never get an accurate assessment of that number. The current case fatality rate is likely elevated compared to the actual risk of dying if you were to catch the disease. That is because the people most likely to get tested are those with the worst symptoms, making them more likely to experience life-threatening complications.

Consider other factors

Underlying factors such as age and pre-existing health conditions make your individual risk different from the overall risk. And while certain reports of case fatality rates include some of those demographics as well, remember that those numbers have the same context-based biases as the overall case fatality rates.

Finally, a metric we are seeing less often, but still merits attention, is the overall mortality rate. This refers to the portion of the population that dies as a result of the pandemic. This number is typically very different from the case fatality rate because not everyone is exposed to the disease. Imagine a country with just 100 people in it. If 20 of those people got infected, and 1 of them died, the case fatality rate — the proportion of those infected who died — would be 5%. However, the mortality rate is only 1%. That is, 1% of the total population passed away.*

The takeaway here is to carefully look at the percentages you’re seeing reported and make sure you understand what population it applies to. Is it an entire population? Only those infected? Only those with severe symptoms? These are all important questions to ask yourself when interpreting the information.

Conclusion

There is a common perception that numbers and data are facts, but it is wrong to assume that they are a completely accurate picture of the world. The data we have are the best measurements available at the moment. The only way we could know for sure how the number of cases changes daily is if we could test every single person every day. This simply isn’t feasible, so instead we must rely on our imperfect measurements. This makes understanding the pandemic and its progression more challenging; but data analysis is still a powerful tool to give us insight and help us make decisions.

*The original version of this blog post included incorrect figures in the section discussing mortality rate vs. case fatality rate. They were corrected on April 14, 2020, the date of publication. We apologize for the error.

Other articles in this series:

• • Examining data behind racial disparities.
  • Comparing data across countries.
  • Comparing data across time.
  • Age isn’t everything.

About SAS: Through innovative analytics software and services, SAS helps customers around the world transform data into intelligence.

The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored a new reality that now permeates our lives: misinformation is a threat not just to the public life of our country, but to our public health as well.

For weeks, the internet has been awash in what the World Health Organization is calling an “infodemic” (PDF): “an over-abundance of information — some accurate and some not — that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it.” A lot of it is bogus — for example, “advice” about ways to protect yourself from the coronavirus has included taking warm baths, drinking water to wash the virus into your stomach, eating bananas and inhaling hot air from a hair dryer. None of these work.

Moreover, those who have downplayed the risks have undermined efforts to create the physical distancing that public health experts say is essential to avoid further spread of the virus — thereby jeopardizing the lives of many people.

Taking responsibility

While we can’t control what our friends post on social media, what appears in search results or what pops up in the texts we receive, we can decide what to do with it. We can push back by taking responsibility for checking sources, looking for evidence-based information and calling out false and misleading content when we encounter it. Doing so is now literally a matter of life and death.

We need a new ethos for what we read, watch and listen to, and for what we trust, share and act on. When it comes to “information hygiene” (a term popularized several years ago by Mike Caulfield of Washington State University Vancouver), it’s not enough to simply take care of ourselves right now; we have to help take care of others and “flatten the curve” of the rampant spread of false information. If we truly value our health and the health of our communities, we must accept that we have a personal responsibility to both educate ourselves about fabricated and misleading content and become more mindful about combating its dissemination.

We can affirm our role in countering the damage misinformation might do — and lessen the impact of both deliberate purveyors of false content and people who think they are helping friends and family by sharing what they think is legitimate medical advice — by following these simple steps:

Keep an eye on your emotions

If what you read, watch or hear triggers a strong visceral reaction such as fear, outrage or hope, take a moment to assess whether you’re being manipulated.

Don’t “like” or share something that is not clearly sourced

It might seem obvious, but you’ll be wise to take a few minutes to evaluate the credibility of the post, tweet, image or video to ensure that you’re not endorsing or spreading something that’s not true.

Learn to spot patterns in misinformation

For instance, breaking news events usually result in a spate of unverified information on social media. By now, this pattern — a major event followed by widespread misinformation as journalists scramble to confirm the facts — is predictable. It compels us to slow down and follow a story over time and through a variety of sources before sharing and acting on initial reports.

Be wary of deepfakes or “cheapfakes”

If a video appears to show someone in authority saying something outrageous, check to see if trustworthy news sites have confirmed its authenticity. Doing so will help you avoid falling for something that’s not true.

Be skeptical, not cynical

It’s tempting to believe that you’re powerless, and that nothing you see online is credible. But such thinking plays into the hands of people who want to make us doubt the very notion of truth. Facts are verifiable, and knowing that we are able to check them should empower us in the fight against misinformation.

It’s a sad truth that in what should be a golden age of information, we have to be vigilant about fabricated news, deceitful videos and phony websites. These days, anyone can be a producer of false or misleading information, shared with the click of a key or a tap on a touchscreen — and everyone must be an editor — and a fact-checker. As we pull together as a nation (while keeping six feet away from each other), our health depends on it.

This piece is part of a series, presented by our partner SAS, that explores the role of data in understanding the COVID-19 pandemic. SAS is a pioneer in the data management and analytics field. (Check out other posts in the series on our Get Smart About COVID-19 Misinformation page.)

In addition to comparisons of COVID-19 data across countries, other information that can keep us glued to our seats is seeing how the number of cases and deaths are changing over time. While these insights can help us draw some conclusions, it’s important to consider the numbers critically. Because this disease and our responses to it are changing daily, so are the factors that go into each number.

For example, consider the two graphs in this Business Insider article, showing the case fatality rate by country.

It’s interesting to see that just a few weeks ago, the U.S. had the worst case fatality rate of any country. Was that because we were woefully unprepared? Or was it because our medical system was failing? Or was it because of the lack of tests we had available at the time?

The final factor is likely a big part of the answer. We can infer this because the fatality rate appears to have declined significantly since that time. We’re either getting better at treating COVID-19, or we are improving our detection of less severe cases through increased testing. An increase in testing results in a rise in the number of cases reported, thus lowering the case fatality rate. Either way, the fundamental sources driving the data are changing over time.

You can see a very clear example of this when you look at almost any graph of cases in China (including the one below). Most show a significant jump in cases on or around Feb. 12, when China made a decision to reclassify thousands of people as positive for COVID-19 without confirming those cases through diagnostic testing. This additional context is critical in being able to accurately interpret the data.

By Phoenix7777 – Own work
Data source: Coronavirus disease (COVID-2019) situation reports, World Health Organization (WHO), CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

Unfortunately, most of the changes in underlying factors don’t have such a clear demarcation. In many countries, testing has slowly ramped up, making it possible to detect more cases over time but difficult to determine if an increase in cases is due to wider testing or simply the spread of the disease.

Similarly, changes to policy — in various degrees and with various impacts — have rolled out in many countries. This includes differences in social isolation requirements or whether people with mild symptoms should be tested. Each decision impacts the data we see, so we can’t interpret the resulting changes in cases or deaths over time as concrete evidence of how the disease spreads. It also makes it challenging to predict what will happen in the future.

Other articles in this series:

• • Examining data behind racial disparities.
  • Comparing data across countries.
  • Case fatality rate vs. mortality rate vs. risk of dying.
  • Age isn’t everything.

About SAS: Through innovative analytics software and services, SAS helps customers around the world transform data into intelligence.

A baseless conspiracy theory about the COVID-19 pandemic migrated from fringe internet communities into more mainstream conversations last week, spreading dangerous doubt about the seriousness of the pandemic across the United States and around the world.

The theory — that the pandemic is a staged hoax or “false flag” event — had emerged among anti-vaccination and QAnon communities online by mid-March. But the idea was galvanized on social media following a powerful March 25 New York Times report featuring video of Colleen Smith, an emergency room doctor at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens. She provided a firsthand account and video of conditions at the hospital the day before, when 13 people died of COVID-19.

Three days later, Twitter user @22CenturyAssets tweeted: “#filmyourhospital Can this become a thing?” Hours later, the far-right talk radio host Todd Starnes tweeted (archived here) a video of “not much happening” at the Brooklyn Hospital Center — his neighborhood  hospital. He said he did so to highlight “what’s really going on out here instead of what the mainstream media is telling you.”

COVID-19 conspiracy spreads

By the following day, more than a dozen photos and videos said to have been shot outside hospitals across the U.S. and around the world had been tweeted with the #FilmYourHospital hashtag. In posts on April 1 and 2, influential QAnon adherents attempted to discredit Smith on Twitter and YouTube. They falsely claimed that she did not actually work at Elmhurst Hospital, They also misinterpreted her background in medical simulation training, and picked apart the video she provided to the Times.

Also fanning the flames of the #FilmYourHospital conspiracy movement was CBS News’ March 30 acknowledgment that it had erroneously used several seconds of footage of a crowded hospital in Italy in a March 25 report (go to 0:45 for the clip) about the impact of COVID-19 on hospitals in New York City. CBS News has offered no further explanation about its mistake.

Safety and privacy issues

Safety and patient privacy concerns largely prevent the press from providing the public with photos and videos from inside hospitals, where the realities of the pandemic are most apparent. That may help explain why this has become such a focal point of conspiracy communities online.

Also note that another widespread conspiracy theory falsely connecting 5G cell towers to the COVID-19 pandemic spiked online last week. It led to a spate of viral rumors — including a variety of false claims that governments are faking the public health crisis to distract the public and push through dangerous new technologies.

Related:

• “What We Pretend to Know About the Coronavirus Could Kill Us” (Charlie Warzel, The New York Times).
• “British 5G towers are being set on fire because of coronavirus conspiracy theories” (Tom Warren, The Verge).
• “YouTube moves to limit spread of false coronavirus 5G theory” (Alex Hern, The Guardian).
• “The latest wildly false COVID-19 conspiracy theory puts the blame on 5G” (Ruth Reader, Fast Company).
• “Here’s why 5G and coronavirus are not connected” (Bob O’Donnell, USA Today).

Discuss: Why are people drawn to conspiracy theories? In what ways could these conspiracy theories about COVID-19 be dangerous? What can we learn from the way the false notion that the pandemic is a hoax went mainstream with the #FilmYourHospital hashtag? How can we work to stop such theories from spreading? Can people be inoculated against conspiratorial thinking? How?