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…
This is the first of a three-part 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. The COVID-19 pandemic has plunged us into a global public health crisis that has experts looking back 100 years for…
Educators and parents: If school closures mean that you’re teaching students through distance learning or homeschooling, join NLP for a one-hour webinar on Tuesday, April 7, starting at 1 p.m ET / 10 a.m. PT. The ability to sort fact from fiction — to identify reliable sources of information and recognize misinformation — has…
AllSides featured NLP’s new Checkology virtual classroom lesson, “Understanding Bias,” as a resource in the Media Bias section of its homepage on April 1. AllSides is a news website that strives “to display the news as it is covered from a breadth of perspectives. That includes different perspectives on the same story, as well as…
When a news event or a significant issue grabs hold of the public’s attention, it’s human nature for us to want to get our hands on as much information as we can as fast as we can. It’s also human nature to act on an impulse to share that information with friends, family and the…
In the last week, both Twitter and Facebook have announced additional measures to combat the spread of misinformation about COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2, the strain of coronavirus that causes the disease. Twitter announced on March 18 that it would remove coronavirus-related content that goes “directly against guidance” from public health and government authorities, such as false…
The News Literacy Project makes Teen Vogue’s list of “10 Ways to Fight For Social Justice During the Coronavirus Pandemic,” published on its website on March 30. NLP is included under No. 8 Combat Misinformation as a resource because, “There is so much information and misinformation about COVID-19 floating around online.”
John Silva, NLP’s director of education, advises the public to “act like a journalist” in the March 22 Associated Press article “Virus outbreak means (mis)information overload: How to cope.” Silva says anyone searching for accurate information about the virus needs to act a little like a journalist by verifying suspicious claims. Be wary of information…
Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education, is quoted in the article “Health experts embrace social media to fight coronavirus,” published by The Hill March 21. “A lot of experts are speaking directly to the general public. It can be very valuable. The challenge for the public is knowing who is really telling the…
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread and so has related misinformation. Much of the false and misleading content is being shared widely on social media. Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education, discusses the topic live on Univision News on March 20, noting the danger inherent to the spread of misinformation related to the…
