What your relationship with fake news says about you

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

Given the topic of information literacy and technology for this blog post, I thought it would be apropos to try some of the online content generators. So, I popped the topics of information literacy, news literacy, fake news, and information diets into a few of the blog content/headline tools.

Portent.com suggested the following headlines:

• Why information diets will make you question everything << Not too bad.
• Why everyone is obsessed with information diets
• Why information diets are more popular than Beyonce
• How a top model makes information diets work << I almost used this one as the title of this post.

ContentRow.com generated:

• News literacy is failing us
• Is it just me, or is fake news totally overrated?
• The simple formula for success in news literacy
• What your relationship with fake news says about you << The one I did use!

NeuralText.com offered up less sensational headlines, like:

• How to recognize fake news and disinformation << I didn’t add “disinformation” as a keyword. It suggested it.
• 5 tools for better understanding the news

With those few suggestions, it’s easy to see how headlines are crafted in order to garner our attention, or as clickbait. In this post, I will describe how information literacy and technology intersect, considering if this is a new problem or the same problem with unique characteristics.

The same problem seems new every time

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Technology and information literacy are not unique to the Information Age.

In Bawden and Robinson’s (2020) extensive summary, they describe how since the advent of Gutenberg’s press, technology has impacted the amount of information available, including the ways in which we access it, the ways in which we use it, and the ways in which we it impacts us. This impact reinforces the need for information literacy.

What is unique to the Information Age is the sheer amount of information available to us. As a simple accessible metric, the number of articles in the English version of  Wikipedia in 2002 was 19,700. As of today, just over 20 years later, there are 6,673,343 articles with over 58 million pages (“Wikipedia,” 2023). The amount of information available for us to access on the web, as well as pushed to us in social media, can be overwhelming (Bawden & Robinson, 2020). It can, of course, be difficult to determine the accuracy, credibility, and reliability of information and its sources (Valenza, 2016).

What’s new here?

But the calls for information and media literacy are not new.  In 2009, I wrote about the need for educators to include information literacy skills in our curricula:

We must continue to teach children to respect copyrights and intellectual property of others.  Students will illegally download text, images, music, videos and software, because they perceive it to be freely available and in the public domain (Rader, 2002).  With the use of many Web 2.0 tools, it is easy to combine media from various sources with little regard to copyright.  Plagiarism is synonymous with copyright infringement (Johnson & Groneman, 2003).  In particular, Baron and Crooks (2005) warn against “cut and paste plagiarism.”

Finally, we must continue to remind students of information and media literacy skills.  Identifying sources of information, as well as the quality of information sources, remains important.  Some Web 2.0 tools—blogs and wikis in particular—are susceptible to questions of quality.

— Grant and Mims (2009)

Certainly, the proliferation of deceptive information practices, such as fake news, disinformation, clickbait, and native advertising, over the past decade or so has heightened educators’ awareness of issues related to information literacy (Valenza, 2016). More recently, the use of deep fake media, dark patterns in user interface designs (Kollmer & Eckhardt, 2023), and generative artificial intelligence tools has made it even more difficult to evaluate the credibility and reliability of information.

Joi Ito, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Our personal strategies to handle the amounts and diversity of information, unfortunately, may make our situations worse (Bawden & Robinson, 2020). Techniques, such as avoidance, satisficing, and filtering, may create negative consequences, such as confirmation bias and echo chambers. As Johnson (2012) suggests in The Information Diet, if we consume too much information from a single source or from a filter bubble, we may become biased in our thinking.

What is our relationship?

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So, let’s head back to the title of this post, “What your relationship with fake news says about you.” Is it possible that we as information consumers create the fake news we consume? Is it possible that clickbait headlines and sensationalized informational content, which is then liked and shared, will iteratively generate new exaggerated headlines and content for us to then consume? Clay Johnson in an episode of The Liturgists podcast (Gungor & McHargue, 2017) suggests phenomena like rage sharing and affirmation/confirmation bias (i.e., “Who wants to hear the truth when you can hear you’re right?”) fuel our emotions and then fuel similar information content production.

So, how do institutionalize and normalize information literacy into our daily brief, episodic, smartphone-scrolling lives? Share your thoughts in the comments below. I’d love to hear what you’re thinking.

References

Association of College and Research Libraries. (2016). Framework for information literacy for higher education. Association of College and Research Libraries. https://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/infolit/framework1.pdf

Bawden, D., & Robinson, L. (2020). Information overload: An overview. In Oxford encyclopedia of political decision making. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1360

Gungor, M., & McHargue, M. (Hosts). (2017, March 7). Fake news & media literacy [Audio podcast episode]. In The Liturgists. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy81NmVhMWU3OC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw/episode/aHR0cDovL3BvZGNhc3QudGhlbGl0dXJnaXN0cy5jb20vZS9tZWRpYS1saXRlcmFjeS0xNDg4ODkyNDg1Lw

Johnson, C. A. (2012). The information diet: A case for conscious comsumption. O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Kollmer, T., & Eckhardt, A. (2023). Dark patterns. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 65(2), 201–208. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-022-00783-7

Valenza, J. (2016, November 26). Truth, truthiness, triangulation: A news literacy toolkit for a “post-truth” world. Neverending Search. https://blogs.slj.com/neverendingsearch/2016/11/26/truth-truthiness-triangulation-and-the-librarian-way-a-news-literacy-toolkit-for-a-post-truth-world/

Wikipedia:Size of Wikipedia. (2023). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia&oldid=1161014113