NLP News

An educator on the EdTech Round Robin episode of Wizards of EdTech Podcast promotes (11:48) the value of Informable as a news literacy resource for all ages as well as the Checkology® virtual classroom.

In Newsy’s April 30 segment on the coronavirus and misinformation, COVID-19 Limiting Press Freedoms, NLP’s Darragh Worland notes that the pandemic has empowered some governments to censor information or crack down on reporters trying to cover the crisis.

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…

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…

We recently asked educators what they most wanted us to feature in upcoming professional development webinars. Using that feedback, the News Literacy Project is holding a series of four free webinars, addressing essential news literacy topics, every Thursday in May (May 7, 14, 21 and 28) at 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT. We are allotting…

Under the heading, Tried-and-true tactics to help spot bogus claims, no matter the subject, Apple News Spotlight includes NLP’s easy-to-follow guidelines, How to Know What to Trust, in its comprehensive guide to COVID-19 misinformation.

NLP resources and initiatives are included in an April 24 Newsy piece regarding COVID-19 and kids. The segment, Kid-Centered News Shows Aim To Help Children Understand COVID-19, also quotes NLP’s Peter Adams.

COVID-19 and Bill Gates conspiracy theories are the topic of the second installment in a weekly series for Newsy featuring the News Literacy Project. Darragh Worland, NLP’s vice president for creative services, discusses how conspiracy theories linking the COVID-19 pandemic and Bill Gates have gained traction and become wildly popular across social media despite having been widely debunked.  “Public…

John Silva, NLP’s director of education, offers advice and tips for Well+Good’s audience as they navigate misinformation swirling around the coronavirus. The April 22 piece  Why social media has helped turn COVID-19 into an ‘infodemic’ includes interviews with public health and media literacy experts.

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…

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.…

COVID-19 and 5G conspiracy theories are the topic of the first installment in a weekly series for Newsy featuring the News Literacy Project. Darragh Worland, NLP’s vice president for creative services, discusses how conspiracy theories linking the COVID-19 pandemic and 5G wireless technology are circulating widely on social media despite having been debunked by scientists.…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Join the News Literacy Project and the University of Rhode Island’s Metcalf Institute for a four-part webinar series, COVID-19 in Context: News Coverage, News Literacy & Scientific Uncertainty. The series will explore one of the most urgent science communication challenges of our lives through the insights of journalists, news literacy education experts and scientists. Beginning…

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…

Suzannah Gonzales, NLP’s associate director of education, discusses misinformation and what each of us can do to avoid falling for it and to help others avoid it as a guest April 13 episode of the We Don’t Talk About That podcast with Lucas Land. “One thing I’m suggesting to people is, think like a journalist…

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…

In the article “Misinformation Is a Matter of Life and Death” published on Medium on April 9, NLP CEO and founder Alan C. Miller notes the true danger in misinformation about the coronavirus: “The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored a new reality that now permeates our lives: misinformation is a threat not just to the public…

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…

The Philadelphia Public School Notebook, an independent, nonprofit news service serving supporters of the Philadelphia public schools, put the News Literacy Project at the top of its list of  “Online learning resources you may have missed.” The article, published April 3, notes that Checkology is free for U.S. educators and parents affected by COVID-19 related school…

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 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.) The COVID-19 pandemic has plunged us…

  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…

Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education, is featured in the March 19 USA Today article “Welcome to the first social media pandemic. Here are 8 ways you can stop the spread of coronavirus misinformation.” Adams notes, “Really well-intentioned people are trying to make sense of this and help friends and family to the…

Natalie Y. Moore’s March 19 column in the Chicago Sun-Times, “Fighting back against the fake claim of ‘fake news,’” closes with thoughts on “fake news” from Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education.    

Ethan Shorey’s March 18 column,“During these times, trusted information so important,” in the northern Rhode Island newspaper, The Valley Breeze, a newspaper in northern Rhode Island, includes advice for navigating misinformation from Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education.    

The parallels between the spread of the new strain of coronavirus and the spread of misinformation and confusion about it — between the actual pandemic and what the World Health Organization calls an “infodemic” — offer a number of important and urgent lessons in news and information literacy. Just as COVID-19 has thrown the weaknesses…

Peter Adams, NLP’s senior vice president of education, talked with NPR’s Michel Martin about misinformation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic on the March 14 edition of All Things Considered. He began by describing the types of misinformation being spread about SARS-CoV-2, the strain of coronavirus that causes COVID-19. “This pandemic has brought out a really clear…

Michel Martin of NPR interviewed NLP’s Senior Vice President of Education Peter Adams for the segment “Misinformation Around The Coronavirus” on the March 14 segment of All Things Considered Weekend Edition. “The equivalent of taking 20 seconds and washing your hands is very much the same in the information space, where if you take 20…