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- Media Literacy: Spotting Fake News
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Media Literacy: Spotting Fake News
Criteria for Evaluating Websites
It is important that we are critical consumers of all websites that we find. Try these three checklists provided below:
CRAAP Test. Developed by the Meriam Library, California State University, Chico, this is a set of questions designed to help you evaluate information based on the following points:
- Currency: The timeliness of the information
- Relevance: The importance of the information for your needs
- Authority: The source of the information
- Accuracy: The reliability, truthfulness and correctness of the content/
- Purpose: The reason the information exists.
PARCA Test. A similar set of questions but presented as: Purpose, Authority, Relevance, Currency and Accuracy. From: SPARK at York University, 2013.
OWL at Purdue also provides a checklist for Using Research and Evidence, specifically to determine the type of evidence/research to use and how to determine if a source is credible.
Quizzes
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FactitiousHow the Factitious news game helps people learn to detect fake news.The American University Game Lab .released its Factitious news game on July 3rd, 2017. With little promotion and only personal appeals to our social networks, we hoped for the best … maybe 10,000 plays of the web app, if we were lucky. But the game went viral beyond our wildest dreams: 69,032 game plays* on the first day–251,450 in the month of July. The numbers continue to soar– more than 730,000 game plays (and counting).
Our analysis of more than 2 gigabytes of data has revealed how people can use our game to sharpen their skills for spotting fake news.
Browser Plugins/Apps for Detecting Fake News
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B.S. DetectorB.S. Detector searches all links on a given webpage for references to unreliable sources, checking against a manually compiled list of domains. It then provides visual warnings about the presence of questionable links or the browsing of questionable websites.
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Media Bias/Fact Check Browser ExtensionUsing mediabiasfactcheck.com data, each news story is annotated with a brief graph showing the bias of the news source.
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Project FibThis Chrome extension goes through your Facebook feed in real time and verifies posts. AI runs a fact check using image recognition, keyword extraction, and source verification. BETA version currently available.