Internet powerhouses have for days been scrambling to come up with a way to answer those who blame them for an onslaught of fake news and false information that permeates the Web and, some believe, may have affected the course of the presidential election. Yet students from middle school through college are easily duped by unreliable sources and deceptive advertisements peppered throughout news sites and social media feeds, according to a Stanford University study. Sam Wineburg, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education and lead author of the study, said even among college students, the “ability to discern truth from falsehood on the Internet is bleak.” Asked to research the U.S. health care system, more than 40 percent of middle school students said they would use statistics from an online comment by “Joe Smith.” When presented with a big, colorful chart sponsored by the oil company Shell versus a screenshot of an article from the Atlantic, high school students overwhelmingly argued that Shell’s post was the more reliable of the two “because it provided more data and information” than the article did. The “great majority” of college students tasked with evaluating information from the American College of Pediatricians, a conservative advocacy group that has been named a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its vehement opposition to women’s and LGBT rights, were unable to suss out the group’s bias, even when given the chance to independently check the group’s credentials. Fake news typically falls into one of two categories: those that seek to manipulate people, spread misinformation and sow mistrust of traditional media, and those that use sensational — and false — stories to attract enough readers to make money through advertising. [...] social media experts have said it likely won’t do much to stop fake news and false information from spreading. Google, which on the top of its main search tab offers a list of articles under the header “In the news,” will change that title to “Top stories,” to remove the implication that they are all news items. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, presented a seven-point plan that includes fitting fake news with a warning label once it has been confirmed false. “We’ve been working on this problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post on his own Facebook page Friday, just days after he claimed it was “extremely unlikely” that fake news and hoax posts on social media had altered the election’s outcome.
