Misinformation is one of the gravest threats facing us, but we are not doing enough to educate people how to recognize fact from fiction in the flood of information they encounter every day. MIT researchers found that tweets containing falsehoods reach 1,500 people on Twitter six-times faster than truthful tweets.
We live in the most complex information landscape in human history, where it is easier than ever to create and spread misinformation online. And we’ve likely all been fooled at least once by false or manipulated content in our social media feeds. Maybe it was a provocative quote from a celebrity that we later discovered the person never said, or an arresting photo that turned out to have been doctored or wildly taken out of context.
As a Montanan who is very concerned about the never-ending spread of misinformation throughout our country causing enormous problems with dire consequences, I contacted the News Literacy Project (https://newslit.org/), a nonpartisan national education nonprofit that provides programs and resources for educators and the public to teach, learn and share the abilities needed to be smart, active consumers of news and information, and equal and engaged participants in a democracy.
