As Facebook and other Internet sources continue to come under fire for promulgating fake news, Google decided that more education at a younger age is required.
Pledging $3 million to fight the “fake-news epidemic,” Google is seeking to educate teens so that they can differentiate between online fact and fiction. The project aims to reach one million students, at least 50 percent of whom live in underserved or low-income communities.
Google’s education program, dubbed “MediaWise,” draws from the expertise of the Local Media Association, the Stanford Graduate School of Education, and the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism school based in Florida that owns the Tampa Bay Times.
Stanford will develop curriculum for use in schools which will “teach better information literacy and improve what it terms ‘civic online reasoning.’” Civic online reasoning could include asking questions such as “What’s the evidence?,” “What do other sources say about this?,” and “Who is funding this information?” Stanford already provides some resources for teachers to teach this skill.
In addition to Stanford’s curriculum, the Poynter Institute will pioneer a “fact-checking” experience in which teens will work with professional journalists to sift through Internet sources. The teen fact-checkers’ work will be presented online via graphics to peers and adults.
The motivation for the project was driven by a 2016 Stanford study that revealed teens’ inability to differentiate between credible and dubious online sources.
This initiative is part of a larger $300 million Google promise to combat fake news through Google News and boost subscriptions to the site. Some states have begun requiring “media literacy” education in schools, with four passing bills related to this topic in 2017 and a dozen others calling for such bills.
