The Pandemic and Misinfodemic

If you lived through the COVID-19 pandemic, you surely must have encountered one or more of these bits of information. 

• Eating garlic or sea lettuce or drinking bleach will kill the virus.
• High temperatures can kill the virus or stepping out in the sun weakens the virus. 
• Eating Chinese or non-vegetarian food can give you the virus.
• The virus was created in a Wuhan lab as a biological weapon. 
• The Russian president released 500 lions to make sure people stayed at home and didn’t spread the virus.
• COVID-19 spreads on 5G networks. 
• Children do not get COVID-19. Their immune systems are very strong. 
• Bill Gates engineered the ‘plandemic’ to profit from vaccine sales.

Some of these statements appeared to be disguised as news items, while others were credited to unknown doctors. Posing to be cures, preventive measures and useful facts, they were all merely dubious, fabricated lies. As the virus spread across the globe, the internet became rife with several other hoax remedies and rumors about the origin and spread of the virus. Let’s take a closer look at the viral messages above. What are the similarities between them? 

• They were shared widely on social media. WhatsApp and Facebook were used to share and reshare the messages. 
• They didn’t quote a credible medical practitioner nor an authentic research study. 
• They were not published by a reliable news organization.
• The statements have been labeled falsehoods and were listed in the myth-busting sections of reputable sites like that of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 
• They were all rumors with no evidence to prove them. 
• They were passed on using social media because gullible people did not validate the information and wanted to instantly share it with their friends. 

The hoaxes spread fast and wide thanks to speedy internet access and mobile proliferation making the United Nations declare it a misinformation epidemic. Doctors said the “coronavirus myths on social media were spreading faster than the virus itself” (Ebrahimji, 2020).

“COVID-19 is not just a public health emergency – it is a communications emergency too,” Secretary-General of the UN, Antonio Guterres (2020) has stated. He added that

“inaccurate and even dangerous messages proliferated wildly over social media, leaving people confused, misled and ill-advised” (Guterres, 2020).

Highlighting concern over the amplification and spread of misinformation, a joint statement on managing the ‘infodemic’ was issued by the WHO, UN, UNICEF, UNDP, UNESCO, UNAIDS, ITU, UN Global Pulse, and IFRC. 

“An infodemic… includes deliberate attempts to disseminate wrong information to undermine the public health response and advance alternative agendas of groups or individuals” (WHO et al., 2020).

Since there was little scientific information available in the early days of the virus, rumors became prevalent at the onset. Doctors, scientists and researchers around the world found themselves having to repeatedly debunk pseudoscience on social media. To stop the spread of rumors, myth-busting websites and webpages were created overnight. Fact-checking helplines and chatbots became the new norms of 2020. One such resource was a WhatsApp bot launched by the Indian government called ‘MyGov Corona Helpdesk’. Users could text the bot with questions and it would reply with verified data from the Ministry of Health.

It would not be inaccurate to say that this spread of disinformation would have happened at a much slower pace if news literacy had been a subject at the school and college level. If media and news literacy is taught as part of the curriculum, it will help make citizens who are more discerning. The idea of verifying information, before sharing it, would be understood and practiced more widely. 

News Literacy and Fake News

What is news literacy? 

News literacy is the ability to use critical thinking to judge the reliability and credibility of a piece of news along with its sources. It allows one to distinguish between fact vs opinion and propaganda vs truth.

Why is news literacy relevant? 

The relevancy of this subject today is critical to the functioning of a democracy. Fake News can erode trust in government. Just as information and facts can help us make informed decisions, misinformation and disinformation can deter us. Public opinions can easily be manipulated using the media. People end up making life-changing decisions based on dodgy information and that can be dangerous. This is why it is necessary to be discerning. 

One of the most-famous examples of Fake news that had a real-world impact was the 2016 viral conspiracy theory called Pizzagate. After reading fake news, a man was convinced that a pizza shop in Washington DC was being used to run a child trafficking racket. He was so convinced that the rumour was actually true that he decided to enter the shop with an assault rifle and fire shots. 

One cannot trust information simply because it has been broadcast widely, has several million likes or has achieved viral status on YouTube. Simply put, just because it’s on the Internet, doesn’t mean it is true. More often than not, it is questionable information that gets shared faster because of its sensationalist traits. People instantly share a piece of information that appeals to their emotions, and fact-checking or verifying it becomes an afterthought. 

A study by three Massachusetts Institute of Technology scholars found that false news spreads faster on Twitter than real news. The researchers examined about 126,000 stories shared by around 3 million people on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. Interestingly, the study by Vosoughi, Roy and Aral (2018) found that fake news was about 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true news.

The team (Vosoughi et al., 2018) observed the following:

Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. (para.2)

For years, political parties have been using social media for propaganda, disguised to appear like legitimate news or factual information. Satire, bogus claims are packaged and presented to appear like news and facts. They have clickbait and catchy headlines along with an attractive, often manipulated photograph that makes them share-worthy. Now an increasingly online population is tempted to share these with their friends and families instantaneously, at the click of a button. This gullibility of most netizens who are bombarded with a barrage of information every minute makes fake news go viral. They do not spend any time verifying the news before sharing it. And once it’s shared and re-shared, people are more likely to believe it’s true. 

Students constitute a large percentage of this online population because of the amount of time they spend on the Internet consuming all kinds of media. Often, their news comes from questionable sources on social media.

A 2016 Stanford study of 7,804 American students from middle school through college showed that they were not discerning while consuming news online, and were easily duped by information on the Internet. 

The study by Wineburg, McGrew, S, Breakstone, and Ortega (2016) from the Stanford History Education Group found that 80 per cent of the middle school students surveyed couldn’t differentiate between ‘sponsored content’ and a news article on a news website. High school students trusted a photo posted anonymously to a social media site. Over 80 per cent of them did not verify the source of the photo.

The researchers referred to the ability of students to reason about the information on the Internet as bleak stating that, “many assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally savvy about what they find there. Our work shows the opposite” (Wineburg et al., 2016, p.7).

Sadly, a 2019 follow up to the 2016 study had equally alarming results. The report that was released by the Stanford History Education Group surveyed 3,446 high school students across 14 American states. The researchers (Breakstone et al., 2019) called the results of their study “troubling”. An assessment by them revealed the following:

Ninety-six percent of students did not consider why ties between a climate change website and the fossil fuel industry might lessen that website’s credibility. Instead of investigating who was behind the site, students focused on superficial markers of credibility: the site’s aesthetics, its top-level domain, or how it portrayed itself on the About page. (Breakstone et al., 2019, p.3)

Why is fake news created?
 

It could be for one or all the following reasons:

1. To influence or manipulate opinions.
2. To make someone laugh.
3. To deliberately spread a rumor or malicious content.
4. To get more clicks, likes, shares – and eventually more money through advertising. 
5. To attack, discredit or harm a political opponent, business rival or competitor. 

It is important to note that as media houses build their online websites, journalists’ performance ratings are being tied to the number of clicks they get per story. This often pressurizes them to create deceptive content that lures clicks instead of quality journalism, leading to more noise and distortion. 

Fact vs Opinion and Beyond 

For several years, ‘fact vs opinion’ has been taught as a part of reading comprehension in school. Students are taught how to distinguish between what can be proven and what is a personal belief. This helps them with their critical and analytical skills. 

Just as signal words play an important role in highlighting the differences between fact and opinion, vocabulary also plays a role in determining whether news is fake or real. In this way, using a vocabulary exercise, fake news can be introduced as an extension to the lesson on ‘fact vs opinion’. 

Signal words

Fake news often uses exaggerated and provocative expressions, superlative adjectives and interjections.

How to Spot Fake News

When it comes to spotting whether a piece of information is fake or trustworthy, several guidelines have been devised to assist fact-checkers. There are plenty of resources available on the Internet. Click restraint should be practised so that fact-checking can take place before sharing a news item. Below is a basic Fake News Checklist that equips students with questions and pointers to identify fabricated news, more easily.

Fake news checklist

1. Check the source: The news story should clearly indicate the primary sources in the copy. The sources must be reliable. If experts have been quoted, they should be legitimate and not phony or fictitious. Eyewitnesses, spokespersons must be quoted from both sides of the story. 

When the news story links to a website, check the web address (URL) to make sure it’s not a hoax site. Sites with suspicious domain suffixes like ‘.offer’, or even ‘com.co’. You can also visit the About Us and Contact Us pages to check for authenticity by looking up the website’s name and credentials. Popular satire sites like The Onion clearly state that they are satire and should not be mistaken for news.

Questions to ask:
Is the news story reported by a well-established news organisation, fake news site or news satire company?
Have reliable sources been quoted in a balanced manner?

2. Read beyond the headline: Often, news stories carry sensational headlines that do not match the content of the story. This is a common practice that is carried out to get more clicks. An easy way to detect a clickbait headline would be to see if phrases like, ‘You won’t imagine…’ or ‘Shocking truth behind…’ have been used.
   
   Questions to ask:
   Does the content of the story match with the headline?
   Was the headline intentionally misleading and sensationalist?
   
3. Photos should be authentic and related to the content: Photographs and illustrations can be lifted from anywhere on the Internet. It is also very easy to manipulate photos and make them look realistic. Tools like Google’s Reverse Image Search (www.google.com/imghp) can be used to check if the photo has previously appeared somewhere else.
   

Questions to ask:

Do the photos appear to be doctored? 

Is it a meme or old photograph? 

Is it a photo from another unrelated article?

4. Check for typos, grammatical errors, incorrect punctuation: 

This is the fastest way to dismiss a story to be fake news. A credible news site will have its checks in place with skilled editors going through each copy for accuracy and grammatical correctness. Errors in news copy are the easiest way to determine whether a story has been edited.

Questions to ask:
Does the headline have extra exclamation marks or unnecessary capitalisations?
Does the text have many spelling errors?
Does the copy have words from other languages without an explanation?

5. Check for bias: Stories that are one-sided with the opinion of only one person showcase obvious bias.
   
   Questions to ask:
   Could there be an agenda?
   Could the article be used as a form of propaganda?
   Has the author made any effort to seek the other point of view?
   
6. Check the author: Research other stories written by the author to authenticate their expertise in the subject matter.
   
   Questions to ask:
   Is the person a credible journalist? Is it a real writer? Is the writer known to have bias?
   
7. Check the date: A story could be true at the time of publication but events change with time and an old story may no longer hold true. 

Questions to ask:
Does the news story have a current ‘Updated On’ or ‘Published On’ date?

Is it an article from the past that has resurfaced online?

8. Check the believability: In a world where clicks decide ad revenue, stories are sensationalised to attract more readers. 

Questions to ask:
Is the story unbelievable, outlandish or too preposterous?
Does the story make you feel like it’s too good not to share?

9. Crosscheck facts with other credible sites: Lateral reading on the Internet is easy. It just takes a couple of clicks on a search engine. 

Questions to ask:
Has any other outlet reported the story?
Have fact-checking websites validated the information or declared it a hoax?

10. Check for advertorial content: Stories that are marked with tags like ‘paid content’, ‘sponsored content’, ‘advertorial’, ‘partnered with’, ‘presented by’ should be treated as advertisements disguised to appear like news. This is known as native advertising. In India, this practice of Paid News is widespread. It involves companies paying news organisations to create positive content about their products and package it as news is widespread. 

Questions to ask:

Does the article have a tag like ‘sponsored content’ or ‘advertorial’?

11. Check for sensationalism and emotive language: Language plays a key role in deciphering the difference between real news and propaganda. 

Questions to ask:
Is the article provocative?
Does it overuse emotive language with startling anecdotes?
Does it have a call-to-action or inflammatory words that may incite violence? Does it make you feel an intense sense of outrage?
Is the language persuasive? 

In conclusion, if a news report has a sensational or scaremongering headline with doctored photos and unbelievable facts, it is most likely, untrue. 

Fact-checking websites, you can use:

In addition to the following cheat sheet, teachers can use the assistance of websites dedicated to busting fake news. Fact-checking websites list popular viral news and state whether they are true or not. They trace claims back to the original sources to check authenticity and highlight any biases or misreporting. A host of advanced tools are used to verify the authenticity of photos, origin and location of messages and to check if manipulation has been carried out. 

International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) 

Non-profit journalism school, The Poynter Institute has developed an international list of fact checking websites from around the world that are committed to a set of fact checking principles listed on their website. Sites can apply to be listed and only those that are compliant with the principles, when vetted and evaluated, get the IFCN badge.

The updated list of websites that are verified signatories of the IFCN is available at https://ifcncodeofprinciples.poynter.org/signatories

Below are a few of the most popular international fact-checking websites:

PolitiFact.com (2007): This is a Pulitzer Prize-winning site run by editors and reporters from the Tampa Bay Times newspaper. PolitiFact.com (2020) uses a Truth O Meter that “reflects the relative accuracy of a statement” by rating it in “decreasing level of truthfulness as ‘true,’ ‘mostly true,’ ‘half true,’ ‘mostly false’, ‘false,’ and ‘pants on fire’.”

The ratings as explained by (PolitiFact.com, 2020) are as follows:

True – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing. 

Mostly true – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information. 

Half true – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context. 

Mostly false – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. 

False – The statement is not accurate. 

Pants on fire – The statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim. (para. 31)

FactCheck.org (2003): This nonpartisan, nonprofit project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania caters to US voters. It monitors the “factual accuracy of what is said by U.S. political players, including politicians, TV ads, debates, interviews and news releases” (FactCheck.org, n.d., para 1).

Snopes.com (1994): This website started as a site for verifying or discrediting urban legends, and internet rumors. Today, it regularly fact-checks popular trending stories. 

In India, fact-checking websites have been a recent emergence. Indian sites like AltNews.in (2017), SMHoaxSlayer.com (2015) and BoomLive.in (2017) are some of the well-known ones.

Niche fact-checking sites have also gained popularity. The speciality sites focus on one theme and all the hoaxes and dubious content related to the field. For example, ClimateFeedback.org is dedicated to checking climate news, GossipCop.com fact-checks celebrity news and QuoteInvestigator.com debunks false origins of widely-circulated quotes.

Keeping a handlist of fact-checking websites is a best-practice technique that students can use to verify claims of viral stories. The sites are resourceful to students to better their own critical eye. Here’s what makes them relevant. 

• They determine if a story is a hoax or not by giving substantial evidence and quoting credible sources. 
• They usually carry the most popular viral stories. 
• Some allow their readers to submit a story for verification. 
• They list their fact-checking techniques in detail. 

News and Media Literacy in Education 

Schools and colleges around the world are introducing media literacy to curriculums. Finland is at the forefront of this movement and is considered to be “best equipped to withstand the impact of fake news due to the quality of education, free media and high trust among people” (Open Society Institute Sofia, 2019). This is what helped it reach the top of the Media Literacy Index 2019 by the European Policies Initiative (EuPI) of the Open Society Institute – Sofia. Finland has national policies that emphasize media literacy and it is also promoted by the government. Critical thinking and media literacy are part of their core curriculum. 

In the US, educational institutions are using different methods to train students to be discerning of the news. 

1. Checkology: One of them is the Checkology course by nonpartisan national education nonprofit, the News Literacy Project (NLP). The virtual lessons taught by real-world journalists are available free of cost to students, teachers and members of the general public. NLP’s website also has a section for educators titled the Educators Resource Library which offers “lesson plans, classroom activities, posters and infographics, quizzes, training materials and videos for educators teaching news literacy” (News Literacy Project, n.d.).

2. CRAAP: Some schools are using the CRAAP method to verify the credibility and reliability of news stories and their sources. The test was created by Sarah Blakeslee, of the University of California at Chico’s Meriam Library. According to this method, each news story is analyzed to check for the following factors. 

CRAAP (Blakeslee, 2010) is an acronym for:
Currency: The timeliness of the news.

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. (Blakeslee, 2010)

3. Civic Online Reasoning: This curriculum developed by the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) is another popular course. It includes 30 free lessons and assessments for teachers. Their website states that the “curriculum is designed to help educators teach students the methods that fact checkers use to evaluate the trustworthiness of online sources” (The Stanford History Education Group, 2019). The curriculum covers topics such as “the wise use of Wikipedia, evaluating claims on social media, determining website reliability, and identifying trustworthy evidence” (The Stanford History Education Group, 2019).

4. Factitious: For teachers who want to introduce a fun and interactive way for students to play fact-checker, there is a virtual game, Factitious. The website (http://factitious.augamestudio.com) tests player skills at identifying fake and misleading news stories. There are various levels – easy for middle school, medium for high school and hard for college level. The instructions are simple: You read the sample news story and then, swipe right if you think the article is real, or swipe left if you think the article is fake. 

Lesson plan ideas and classroom activities

News and media literacy can be introduced in classroom lessons at various levels and for different subjects. It doesn’t have to be a one-off lesson and can be integrated into various lessons.

Two general activities that can be carried out in the classroom as a warmup or icebreaker are:

1. Create your own fake news: Students are given online fake news generator tools and asked to create their own fake news. The teacher highlights the characteristics of fake news before the activity: is factually incorrect, shows bias, has an obscure clickbait headline, contains fabricated quotes.

2. Fake or not quiz: The teacher provides students with fake and real stories and asks them to use the checklist to decide which are true and which are fiction. These stories can be sourced from fact-checking websites.

Subject-wise Lesson Plan Ideas 

English plan idea for middle school:

The teacher starts the class by playing a game of Chinese Whispers. She starts by whispering a sentence in one student’s ear. The message is then passed on from student to student. The last student is asked to repeat the sentence. The result will be a distorted version of the actual sentence. It may include exaggerations, inclusions of added information or exclusions of something important. 

The teacher then compares this to how facts are often distorted in the news. Sometimes journalists sensationalize information to get more views, sometimes they highlight and focus only on a minor detail, ignoring something more important. Most often the focus is on the negative aspects of the news because that’s what gets more hits or views. Headlines are written in a ‘clickbait’ style. This means that their purpose is to entice you to click without telling you the truth. This is done to get more readers to visit the website and in turn, get more money from advertising. However, clickbait reduces the credibility of a news organisation especially if the headline doesn’t match with the content of the story. This is a type of disinformation where untrue information spreads with a malicious intention. On the other hand, if the journalist misreports the facts due to human error, it is considered to be misinformation. 

Exercise: Clickbait vs regular headlines

The teacher cites examples of stories with clickbait headlines from popular websites. She asks them to ponder on the impact it could have on readers who do not read the story and simply believe what the headline states. 

1. Neil deGrasse Tyson warns asteroid could hit Earth the day before the election (Headline from TheHill.com)
On reading the story, it is revealed that the asteroid will only be the size of a refrigerator and that NASA has stated it poses no threat to Earth.

2. Volunteer in Oxford coronavirus vaccine trial dies
(Headline from WashingtonPost.com)
The story clarifies that the clinical trial participant reportedly was in a control group and did not receive the vaccine. 

As a follow up, students are asked to rewrite the headlines in a credible, truthful way. 

Assignment: 

Students are asked to find and list the definitions of the following vocabulary:

Fake news, credibility, clickbait, disinformation, misinformation, hoax, propaganda, sensationalize, satire, post-truth, bias, filter bubble, echo chamber, conspiracy.

Science plan idea for middle and senior school: 

The teacher reads the following headlines:

• Lightning does not strike the same spot twice
• Organic food is pesticide-free 
• Human nails grow after a person has died
• Vaccines cause autism
• Humans have extraordinarily large brains 

The teacher asks students whether the news stories sound believable or true. Would it be something they have read online? Have they come across such news stories on the Internet? Do they check the supporting evidence for such stories? Did a family member ever forward a similar story to them? 

They are all fake news and untrue yet, these stories have been forwarded around. What makes them so appealing to forward? 

The teacher tries to elicit answers that describe the nature of these news stories. 

Probable answers include: 

• The stories sound mind-boggling but possibly true.
• It’s something I’ve read or heard before, a common belief.
• The headline sounds interesting and since it appears like a news story, it probably must be true.
• When a friend or trustworthy family member forwards some story, you tend to believe it’s true. 

The teacher then defines the concept of pseudoscience and explains why it’s popular. Anti-science movements keep repeating theories that are false and dismissing science. Two of the most famous conspiracy theories belong to the Flat Earthers and Climate Change Deniers groups. Flat earthers believe the earth is flat. Climate change deniers believe man-made global warming doesn’t exist. 

Group activity: 

Students are asked to choose a fake science myth and debunk it citing only credible sources.

Assignment: 

Scientific studies are often sponsored by companies with an agenda. For example, chocolate companies spend large budgets sponsoring studies to highlight the health benefits of eating chocolate. Look for two examples of sponsored studies that are misleading.

The Future: Deepfake Video

An insidious tool that uses state-of-the-art technology in artificial intelligence to create lifelike videos of people to make them say and do things they never said or did. Welcome to the future of fake news where videos that appear to be true are manipulated to deceive and if you’re not tuned in to this development in the tech world, you will easily be fooled. The term originated in 2017 on networking site Reddit, when a user used the tool to face swap celebrities like Taylor Swift and Gal Gadot with participants in porn videos. Face swapping is when one person’s face in a video or photo is digitally removed and replaced with another person’s face. 

Since then, deepfake technology that studies thousands of photos to create the videos has been used to create several incriminating and even comedic videos. Today, anyone can make a deepfake video by simply downloading free apps like Reface and Mug Life onto their phone.

Teachers can let students play fact-checkers by displaying both convincingly real deepfake and untouched videos, and then asking them to identify the deepfakes. 

How to detect a deepfake?

While deepfake technology is constantly evolving, there are a few methods one can use to identify a deepfake video. The following clues can be handed out to students, as guidelines. 

• Inconsistent motion and blurriness around the mouth and jaw area while speaking.
• Unusual coloring of skin and, or awkward difference in lighting.
• Sudden peculiar jerks in movement.
• If the speaker is well-known, audio that doesn’t match their voice or accent
• Delayed or hastened lip sync.

References

Blakeslee, S. (2010, September 17). Evaluating Information – Applying the CRAAP Test. Meriam Library, California State University, Chico. Retrieved from https://library.csuchico.edu/sites/default/files/craap-test.pdf

Breakstone, J., Smith, M., Wineburg, S., Rapaport, A., Carle, J., Garland, M., & Saavedra, A. (2019, November 14). Students’ civic online reasoning: A national portrait. Stanford History Education Group & Gibson Consulting. Retrieved from: https://purl.stanford.edu/gf151tb4868

Ebrahimji, A. (2020, September 1). Doctors say coronavirus myths on social media are ‘spreading faster than the virus itself’. CNN. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/01/business/coronavirus-myths-social-media-doctors-trnd/index.html

FactCheck.org. (n.d.). About Us. Retrieved from https://www.factcheck.org/spindetectors/about/

Guterres, A. (2020, September 23). Secretary-General’s video message for WHO Side Event: “Infodemic management: Promoting healthy behaviours in the time of COVID-19 and mitigating the harm from misinformation and disinformation”. The United Nations. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statement/2020-09-23/secretary-generals-video-message-for-who-side-event-%E2%80%9Cinfodemic-management-promoting-healthy-behaviours-the-time-of-covid-19-and-mitigating-the-harm-misinformation-and

News Literacy Project. (n.d.). Educator Resources. Retrieved from https://newslit.org/educators/resources/.

Open Society Institute Sofia. (2019, November 29). The Media Literacy Index 2019: Just think about it. Retrieved from https://osis.bg/?p=3356&lang=en

PolitiFact.com. (2020, October 27). The principles of the Truth-O-Meter: PolitiFact’s methodology for independent fact-checking. Retrieved from https://www.politifact.com/article/2018/feb/12/principles-truth-o-meter-politifacts-methodology-i/

The Stanford History Education Group. (2019, December 4). The cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning. Retrieved from https://cor.stanford.edu/about/

Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018, March 9). The spread of true and false news online. Science. 359, (6380), 1146-1151 doi: 10.1126/science.aap9559

WHO, UN, UNICEF, UNDP, UNESCO, UNAIDS, ITU, UN Global Pulse, & IFRC. (2020, September 23). Managing the COVID-19 infodemic: Promoting healthy behaviours and mitigating the harm from misinformation and disinformation. WHO. Retrieved from https://www.who.int/news/item/23-09-2020-managing-the-covid-19-infodemic-promoting-healthy-behaviours-and-mitigating-the-harm-from-misinformation-and-disinformation

Wineburg, S., McGrew, S., Breakstone, J., & Ortega, T. (2016, November 22). Evaluating information: The cornerstone of civic online reasoning. Stanford Digital Repository. Retrieved from https://purl.stanford.edu/fv751yt5934