Yesterday we let you know about The Fulcrum, a new online resource for those interested in the fate of American democracy.
As a follow up, here’s today’s lead story in The Fulcrum, which ran under the headline “Adults may need media literacy even more than students”:
The debate over how to fight disinformation in the digital age has divided leading experts and raised thorny questions about free speech and truth on the web.
Should Facebook ban political ads, as Twitter has done, or at least stop exempting politicians from its rules barring misinformation? Should social media platforms ban the “microtargeting” that allows politicians to hand pick narrow audiences while evading public scrutiny? Google recently took steps to limit microtargeting, but political players say that will just cut off small donors and hurt challengers.
Such dilemmas point to what may be the only real solution to the disinformation problem: Educating news consumers.
The article goes on to describe a new mobile app, Informable, that “trains users how to sort truth from fiction with games that develop fact-checking and other news literacy skills.”
To read the whole story, click here.
