Israel and Palestine Resources: News Literacy/Fake News

In recent years fake and misleading news has become prevalent. It is perhaps unsurprising that Oxford Dictionaries named "post-truth" as its 2016 "Word of the Year." This guide can help readers evaluate news sources for accuracy and harmful bias.

Reasons that fake news has become a growing problem include:

• The growing use of social media as the primary source for news consumption: 
  According the a Pew Research Center report over 40% of adults in the US go to Facebook for their news.
   
• The appeal of sensational and often false "clickbait" information:  
  News that goes "viral" and is widely share is far more likely to be false or misleading.


• Social media users, specifically middle, high school and college students, have difficulty with what Stanford University researchers call "civic online reasoning - the ability to judge the credibility of information that foods young people’s smartphones, tablets, and computers". 


• "Filter bubbles" that result from the personalized web:
  Search engines and social media usually present a us with information intended to fit with own own individual interests and perspective. We then miss information that others with different perspectives are more likely to see.
   
• Confirmation bias: 
  People are predisposed to believe information that fits their worldview and to discount information that does not.

These factors reflect a need to carefully evaluate news sources and where and how we get our news.

" IFLA has made this infographic with eight simple steps (based on FactCheck.org’s 2016 article How to Spot Fake News)  to discover the verifiability of a given news-piece in front of you." 
The infographic is published under CC BY 4.0.