January's Lyceum Brings Awareness to Fake News

The first EHS Lyceum event of 2017 was held on January 22 with the focus on fake news, presented by Kate Newton, EHS technology and systems librarian.
The catalyst for Newton’s Lyceum talk was the deliberately inaccurate news that entrenched Facebook and other social media platforms during the 2016 election cycle. A bit of a popular culture enthusiast, Newton has researched how trends and ideas spread, and how swiftly they can “go viral” given how many people use the internet at a given time.

“As a librarian, my job is to protect and enable people to access information, so librarians tend to be big First Amendment supporters,” she said.

Newton was initially inspired to get involved in the lyceum to help in providing additional information for the EHS community to research if they wanted to know more about a given topic beyond the one-hour presentations. The “fake news” trend was a perfect opportunity combine her research knowledge and her interest in current events into its own lyceum topic.

During Newton’s presentation, she discussed and shared research into about how young people get their news. For example, according to Media Insight Project, 88 percent of young adults say Facebook is their primary news source. A Stanford University study found that 30 percent of high-schoolers surveyed would be more likely to trust a fake news site containing graphics over a legitimate news site without graphics.

“People share things online without thinking,” Newton said. Information comes through Facebook and Twitter like a fire hose: constant and at a high volume. It can be difficult for people to keep up with the stories they want to read. The danger in getting news information from social media is that it may be only from people you tend to agree with. If that is the case, she advises readers to look to other sources for news, or even go directly to news websites themselves.

What can you do about fake news? Newton advocates for critical thinking. If you aren’t sure a story is true, search the internet to see if other websites have written about the subject. If your search turns up zero results, Newton says the story is either fake or you have found the first scoop. She suggests proceed with caution and consider not sharing the news until you are certain the information is true.
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