[Infowarrior] - Stanford: Students Have 'Dismaying' Inability To Tell Fake News From Real, Study Finds

[Richard Forno]

(NB: First, before reading, we must stipulate that "fake news" is not just "stuff you disagree with or runs contrary to one's 'beliefs'"--- and also isn't a new phenomenon brought about by the internet in 2016 or only impacts students. The lack of news literacy and critical thinking/analysis in society is a problem that's been gestating for a long time prior, I think.  After all, why *think* about things in the media when its passive consumption, acceptance, & redistribution among one's own social network is easier and more enjoyable?  And thus the echo chamber of fake reality is constantly fed by its own inhabitants. -- rick)

Students Have 'Dismaying' Inability To Tell Fake News From Real, Study Finds

November 23, 201612:44 PM ET
Camila Domonoske

If the children are the future, the future might be very ill-informed.

That's one implication of a new study from Stanford researchers that evaluated students' ability to assess information sources and described the results as "dismaying," "bleak" and "[a] threat to democracy."

As content creators and social media platforms grapple with the fake news crisis, the study highlights the other side of the equation: What it looks like when readers are duped.

The researchers at Stanford's Graduate School of Education have spent more than a year evaluating how well students across the country can evaluate online sources of information.

Middle school, high school and college students in 12 states were asked to evaluate the information presented in tweets, comments and articles. More than 7,800 student responses were collected.

In exercise after exercise, the researchers were "shocked" — their word, not ours — by how many students failed to effectively evaluate the credibility of that information.

The students displayed a "stunning and dismaying consistency" in their responses, the researchers wrote, getting duped again and again. They weren't looking for high-level analysis of data but just a "reasonable bar" of, for instance, telling fake accounts from real ones, activist groups from neutral sources and ads from articles.

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http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/23/503129818/study-finds-students-have-dismaying-inability-to-tell-fake-news-from-real

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It's better to burn out than fade away.