Look it up
Learning how to distinguish fake from fact Karthik Krishnan examines the challenges that learners face due to the growing epidemic of poor and unverified information on the Internet. In 2017 ‘Fake News’ was named by the publisher Collins as its word of the year, with its use rising by 365 percent. A recent BBC survey, sent to 18 countries around the world, found that nearly eight in 10 people who responded said that they worried about what was fake and what was real on the Internet. The sad fact of today is that if you want to share information virally with as many people as possible, simply ensure it is false. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that false claims were 70 percent more likely to be shared on Twitter than those that were true. While a lot of information on the Internet comes from credible sources, sadly a huge portion of it doesn’t. These are troubling statistics, but it is interesting to frame them in the context of the evolution of consumer preferences. The attributes consumers value continue to change more rapidly than ever before, reducing product lifecycles. Take recorded music as an example. Vinyl records, that were a mainstay for decades, were replaced by cassettes because portability was the attribute consumers sought. When capacity and greater durability became more valued, CDs took over. MP3 devices cut short the CD run when consumers placed a higher emphasis on the number of songs that could be stored, even if it meant a drop in audio quality.
48
Autumn 2018
I grew up using Encyclopaedia Britannica books in the library. Perhaps you did, too. At the time, this big row of books was many people’s central source of knowledge. Then came the Internet and, because of the ease of access this offered, people switched from using printed encyclopaedias to sourcing information online, following a similar evolution in consumer preferences. Unfortunately, current search engine algorithms are not yet advanced enough to differentiate between plausible and credible information. A number of people are taking advantage of this limitation, and their understanding of search algorithms, to get their own biased or unsubstantiated views to the top of the search engine results page. So where does this leave teachers, who recognise the incredible value of the learning content on the Internet, but resist allowing children uncontrolled access due to the unreliable quality of the information? Finding credible information on the Internet has become an ordeal. In our busy lives we all, and especially children, tend to stick to the first few results on the search page and walk away with an ‘answer’, even if it may not be true. This puts the future of knowledge at risk. The increasing abundance of fake information on the Internet is not going away, and we all want it to remain a valuable source of information. So how do we combat this dualism? In the same way as schools teach their students to recognise online safety threats, the time has also come to teach them how to differentiate between trusted and fake information. For 250 years, Britannica has curated and provided trusted information to the world and helped knowledge evolution. While we stopped printing those hard copy encyclopedias in 2012, schools all over the world continue to access our trusted information online. The BBC’s Newsround recently reported on experts from the University of Salford who believe that children from the age of 10 should have classes teaching them how to spot fake news on social media. Beth Hewitt, who was in charge of the project, told Newsround: ‘Lots of children understand that fake news exists,
