Fighting Disinformation Can Feel Like a Lost Cause. It Isn’t.; The New York Times, March 7, 2022

Jay Caspian Kang, The New York Times; Fighting Disinformation Can Feel Like a Lost Cause. It Isn’t.

"Joel Breakstone, the director of the Stanford History Education Group, believes that there needs to be more attention paid to what, exactly, is taught in these media literacy programs. Frequently used lessons like the memorably named Currency Reliability Authority Purpose (CRAP) test ask students to put their information through a gantlet of questions. But Breakstone believes they do not really work for a variety of reasons, the most salient being that most people don’t really know how to check sources and the reliability of information.

What he and his group suggest, instead, is a more comprehensive approach that teaches kids how to assess not only the reliability of the specific information they’ve found online but also who published it and for what purpose. In doing this, students are looking at the whole ecosystem in which the information resides, which improves their ability to question things that may seem to come from sources that look reputable enough."