{"id":86250,"date":"2020-10-08T15:02:22","date_gmt":"2020-10-08T12:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/this-weeks-reading-all-the-fake-news-you-can-handle\/"},"modified":"2020-10-08T15:02:22","modified_gmt":"2020-10-08T12:02:22","slug":"this-weeks-reading-all-the-fake-news-you-can-handle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/this-weeks-reading-all-the-fake-news-you-can-handle\/","title":{"rendered":"#This week’s reading: All the fake news you can handle"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#This week’s reading: All the fake news<\/a> you can handle<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n A crop of courses on fake news have been cropping up in Canadian universities. Many of them pull insights from political science<\/a>, philosophy, history and psychology.\n <\/div>\n
\n For an assignment in the course Fake News and Alt-Facts: Navigating Post-Truths Politics at Simon Fraser University, Mark Pickup\u2019s students create their own fake news articles. One student\u2019s story featured a Photoshopped image of Elizabeth May posing jubilantly over a dead lion in a forest in Victoria. Another detailed an elaborate conspiracy in which the Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 crash was orchestrated by a Barack Obama administration chemtrail distribution operation. The stories are riddled with typographical errors, poor typesetting, charged language and rhetorical questions. \u201cAs a class, we discuss which elements of these articles are different from what you might see in a more trusted source that follows strict journalistic standards,\u201d says Pickup.<\/p>\n

In recent years, courses about fake news have been cropping up in Canadian universities. Many of these courses transcend departments and pull insights from political science, philosophy, history and psychology. Their theme<\/a>s typically fall into two buckets: one tends to focus on digital media<\/a> literacy, teaching skills and strategies aimed at helping students spot fake news, while the other explores the consequences of fake news for democracy.<\/p>\n

These themes are not necessarily new; university courses have long emphasized careful reading and critical thinking. But following the revelations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, the appearance of viral stories such as the discredited \u201cpizzagate\u201d conspiracy and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, professors like Pickup feel an added sense of urgency to help students navigate the cascades of information in digital media and better understand what\u2019s at stake when fake news becomes the norm.<\/p>\n

Fake news itself is not new. In her 2020 book, True or False: A CIA Analyst\u2019s Guide to Spotting Fake News<\/i>, Cindy Otis traces how fake news has historically been used as a political tool. Benjamin Franklin, for example, used it to tip the scale in favour of the American Revolution. What is different today, she writes, is the extent of its reach.<\/p>\n

The term \u201cfake news,\u201d a somewhat ambiguous concept, is also new. On the first day of class, Pickup often asks students to define it. His whiteboard is then scattered with a web of terms and phrases, including \u201cconspiracy theory,\u201d \u201cpropaganda,\u201d \u201crumour\u201d and \u201choax.\u201d Pickup uses the exercise to underscore that there is no standard definition of the term, despite there being different kinds of fake news. For example, many scholars use \u201cdisinformation\u201d and \u201cmisinformation\u201d\u2014terms used by Claire Wardle, a leading academic expert on the relationship between social media and politics\u2014to distinguish the purposeful creation of false content (disinformation) from the inadvertent sharing of inaccurate information (misinformation).<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2009\u2018Fake news\u2019 can be the term that gets us all in the room,\u201d says Mark Busser, a professor at McMaster University. \u201cBut if we are going to ask intelligent questions, we should focus on exactly what we mean.\u201d Ten years ago, Busser noticed that some of his students were citing conspiracy websites such as Alex Jones\u2019s Infowars<\/i> in their essays. In response, he developed courses to promote digital media literacy and help students think like fact-checkers. In one of these courses, students examine a new conspiracy theory each week and learn criteria to distinguish between reliable and questionable outlets and content. Busser also teaches his students to \u201cfind the healthy balance between cynicism and gullibility.\u201d If you are gullible, he says, you believe everything you\u2019re told and implicitly trust every authority; if you are cynical, you believe that the government is always lying and is inherently untrustworthy. \u201cReal conspiracies and betrayals of the public trust have happened,\u201d Busser says. \u201cBut the truth is often stranger than fiction and usually a bit more bureaucratic and mundane.\u201d<\/p>\n

While some professors have developed entirely new courses, others have simply given the concept of fake news more prominence in their existing syllabi. In his undergraduate introductory course Critical Reading and Writing: Politics and Governance, Lucian Ashworth, a professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland, now talks to students about rhetorical tricks such as \u201cfirehosing,\u201d a propaganda tactic adopted by the Vladimir Putin administration that involves spraying the media with an untruth that begins to stick over time. According to the New York Times<\/i>, in 2019, the Russian television and internet network RT America started stoking fears that 5G phones pose significant health risks as part of a larger goal to \u201cdestabilize the West by undermining trust in democratic leaders, institutions and political life.\u201d For Ashworth, this concept of firehosing illustrates the \u201cabandonment of the notion of there being any kind of truth\u201d and the undermining of expert knowledge.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no textbook for teaching this,\u201d says Asha Rangappa, whose course, Russian Intelligence, Information Warfare and Social Media, at Yale University explores how Russia infiltrates and feeds disinformation to the citizens of Western democracies. Students learn why people are susceptible to disinformation and how it can lead to mistrust in democratic ideals such as freedom and institutions such as the justice system. \u201cI think students get a little bit more self-awareness of their own habits and how they are consuming information,\u201d says the former FBI agent. \u201cThey general<\/a>ly leave my class kind of terrified. Some of them delete their Facebook accounts, which I see as a win.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Jason Blahuta\u2019s course at Lakehead University, Defence Against the Dark Arts, explores faulty types of reasoning and logical fallacies through a digital media literacy prism. For Blahuta, the \u201cdark arts\u201d refer to manipulations that range from propaganda and fake news to more subtle information pathologies, such as vague language in a phone contract or the use of food-marketing buzzwords such as \u201cfarm fresh\u201d and \u201c100 per cent natural\u201d to describe concentrated animal feeding operations. \u201cWhen someone tries to convince you of something, you will be able to figure out what is a scam, what is not, and what is in your interest,\u201d Blahuta tells his students. \u201cAnd you will be able to make a much more informed choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

These days, making informed choices is more important than ever. I attended the first lecture of Blahuta\u2019s course this summer, which ran online as required by public health guidance. He put up a series<\/a> of true-or-false statements involving current events. For each one, his students unmuted themselves and weighed in, probing the meaning of ambiguous terms and raising compelling questions. The final statement suggested that COVID-19 has a higher fatality rate than any seasonal variation of influenza. This one struck me as obvious. \u201cOf course the coronavirus is deadlier than the flu!\u201d I thought. But one student asked whether the statement took into account the 1918 influenza pandemic. \u201cWow, good question,\u201d Blahuta said excitedly\u2014and I realized that maybe the answer wasn\u2019t obvious at all. At a moment when new information\u2014some of it faulty\u2014is emerging about the virus every day, nothing is obvious, and every question is worth asking.<\/p>\n

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“#This week’s reading: All the fake news you can handle” A crop of courses on fake news have been cropping up in Canadian universities. Many of them pull insights from political science, philosophy, history and psychology. For an assignment in the course Fake News and Alt-Facts: Navigating Post-Truths Politics at Simon Fraser University, Mark Pickup\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":86251,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/FAKE-NEWS-VLADIMIR-PUTIN-UNIVERSITY-BERESKIN-SEPT21-766x431.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[74909,75234,67806,75191],"class_list":["post-86250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-2021-university-rankings","tag-campus-life","tag-editors-picks","tag-macleans-university-rankings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86250\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}