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Study shows most students can’t tell fake news from real news

December 12, 2016 by Daniel Barker Leave a Comment

Most young people are incapable of determining the difference between real news and fake stories (or “sponsored content”) they encounter online, and have difficulty evaluating online content overall for accuracy and reliability, according to a recent study.

Researchers from the Stanford Graduate School of Education surveyed 7,804 middle school to college age students to find out how capable they were of assessing the credibility of online content, and how they arrived at their conclusions.

The researchers found that 82 percent of middle-school students couldn’t tell the difference between a real news story and sponsored content, for example, and most were unable to accurately judge which online news sources were credible.

Young people not as ‘internet-savvy’ as most believe

The findings tend to contradict the common belief that most young people are extremely internet-savvy and au fait with social media. In fact, the opposite appears to be the case.

From the Stanford website:

“The new report covered news literacy, as well as students’ ability to judge Facebook and Twitter feeds, comments left in readers’ forums on news sites, blog posts, photographs and other digital messages that shape public opinion.

“The assessments reflected key understandings the students should possess such as being able to find out who wrote a story and whether that source is credible.”

The researchers developed age-appropriate tests for middle school, high school and college level students.

“In every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students’ lack of preparation,” said the authors.

Middle school students were tested on basic skills, including the ability to evaluate the credibility of various news articles or tweets:

“One assessment required middle schoolers to explain why they might not trust an article on financial planning that was written by a bank executive and sponsored by a bank. The researchers found that many students did not cite authorship or article sponsorship as key reasons for not believing the article.”

Another test involved the middle-schoolers’ ability to discern between real articles and advertisements on a news website. Although most students were able to identify traditional ads, more than 80 percent mistook “sponsored content” for legitimate news articles.

The assessments of high school students included the testing of social media skills. For example, high-schoolers were asked to evaluate two Facebook posts regarding Donald Trump’s candidacy.

One post was from Fox News and accompanied by a blue verification checkmark, while the other was from a fake Fox News site. Only one out of four students could identify and explain the meaning of the blue checkmark. More than 30 percent favored the fake story because it contained “key graphic elements” that were convincing-looking.

The researchers said this suggests that students may be more influenced by the look of social media posts than by the legitimacy of the sources. If a tweet contained a large photograph, for example, it was considered more believable by the students.

This same basic principle seemed to also hold true for college level students. When asked to evaluate the credibility of different websites, the students tended to trust websites with “high production values,” even if the content was somewhat questionable.

Nine out of 10 young adults get the news from social media platforms

With nearly 90 percent of young adults aged 18 and over relying on social media for news, it’s crucial for them to learn how to separate fact from fiction, the researchers said.

The study’s authors also admit that the educational system has fallen behind the times in terms of equipping young people with the skills necessary for critical assessment of online content.

While waiting for educators to catch up to the digital age, parents can take an active role in helping children learn how to apply critical judgment to what they see and read online, say the researchers.

Encourage your kids to compare sources and research the validity of news items before drawing conclusions, and to learn how to “navigate the sea of disinformation they encounter online.”

Sources:

TechCrunch.com

WSJ.com

Ed.Stanford.edu

Turkey attempts to control email leaks by blocking Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and GitHub

October 18, 2016 by JD Heyes Leave a Comment

Authoritarian governments have historically had control of, or have attempted to control, the media – which is why our founding fathers put freedom of the press and freedom of speech at the very beginning of our Constitution.

Most other countries, however, have not adopted governing documents that recognize free speech and freedom of the press as inalienable rights that are natural and therefore not subject to the whims of government rulers. Count Turkey as one of those countries.

The website Turkey Blocks, which maps Internet freedom in real time, reported recently that Ankara, the capital of Turkey, has blocked access to Dropbox, Microsoft Onedrive, Google Drive and other transfer services in an attempt to keep a lid on leaked emails. The decision by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (pronounced ER-doh-wan) comes after hacktivist group Redhack leaked some private emails of the president’s son-in-law, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, Berat Albayrak.

The Next Web speculated that the decision was “likely a means to stop people from hosting the email dumps on their accounts and making it more widely available.”

The leak of about 17 GB of data is believed to cover some 57,623 emails that date from April 2000 to the end of September of this year. An order from a court in Ankara regarding the investigation of the hacking collective provides some authenticity of the leak.

The Daily Dot, which received the email dump, say the emails show how Erdogan used his position of power to influence the Turkish media and guide the publishing of select information in friendly newspapers (sound familiar?).

In addition to the radical censoring measure, the Erdogan government also banned any newspapers from reporting on the leak – thereby depriving Turkish citizens of the right to a) hear about the leak itself; and b) know whether or not the emails revealed any government corruption.

But also, according to The Daily Dot, the hack and resultant leak of the data underscore the Turkish government’s vulnerability regarding operational security (OPSEC). Minister Albayrak “shared business deals with partners and discussed government policy documents over U.S.-hosted email servers” including those belonging to Google, Apple (iCloud), and Yahoo, a very questionable practice, The DD noted.

The Next Web reported as well that Turkey has a long history of Internet censorship and blocking Internet services because it seeks to control what its citizens get to see and read about the government. In July Ankara blocked WikiLeaks after a leak of emails belonging to one of Turkey’s political parties, Motherboard noted. That decision came shortly after a failed military coup in the country.

And in March the Erdogan administration banned Web users from accessing Twitter and Facebook following a car-bomb explosion in the capital.

As secretive as the Obama administration has been and as corrupt as Hillary Clinton is, without our First Amendment we would have never found out about all the things that have been going on to protect the latter from prosecution and to help her defeat GOP rival Donald J. Trump. That said, the political Left in America – those who side with Obama and Clinton – want to change that.

Sources:

Tech groups urging Congress to sue Obama admin to block giving control of Internet to authoritarian regimes

August 31, 2016 by JD Heyes Leave a Comment

An alliance of technology organizations and conservatives are urging Congress to file suit against the Obama administration to block the transference of control over Internet domain names to an international board. The alliance claims that doing so will give authoritarian regimes power to decide who can and cannot have a presence on the web, Fox News reported Saturday.

Since 1998, a division of the U.S. Commerce Department called the National Telecommunications Information Administration, or NTIA, has issued domain names. But in September the Obama administration is set to allow the U.S. government’s contract to lapse so that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will then be operated by a global board of directors, and the responsibility will fall to it instead.

Critics of the administration’s decision fear that it will allow Russia, China and Iran to then have a stake in governing the Internet, giving them “de facto” power to tax domain names and quash free speech.

Twice Congress has included riders in appropriations legislation to expressly prohibit U.S. tax dollars from being spent on the transition, which President Obama has signed into law. So, if the White House goes forward and allows the contract to lapse next month it would be yet another potentially unconstitutional action by this president.

And that is what the coalition of tech groups fully expects, which is why it is pressing House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., and other congressional leaders to support a lawsuit similar to action the House took against the administration regarding unauthorized spending on Obamacare in 2014.

“Suing to enforce the appropriations rider and extending it through FY2017 are amply justified by the extraordinary importance of the constitutional principle at stake,” the coalition letter says.

In addition, the letter states that the administration has not guaranteed the United States will maintain ownership of the domain names .mil or .gov, for military and government websites respectively.

“Without robust safeguards, Internet governance could fall under the sway of governments hostile to the freedoms protected by the First Amendment,” the letter says. “Ominously, governments will gain a formal voting role in ICANN for the first time when the new bylaws are implemented.”

What’s more, there is concern that ICANN is no longer an impartial entity. The letter noted that the organization has already transformed from a technical coordination agency established in 1998 to something more resembling an actual governing body, in that it now has de facto authority to apply a tax to some domain names. It added that there are a number of reasons to be concerned about what ICANN may do with that power next if the incentive for self-restraint created by the contract it has with the U.S. is removed.

The groups contend that the administration would be in violation of the law if it moves forward with the transition. But officials with the NTIA say that’s not the case.

NTIA spokeswoman Juliana Grunewald told Fox News in an interview that current laws prohibit the agency from utilizing taxpayer funds to “relinquish the responsibility” over the Internet in the current 2016 fiscal year. This is due to the way that it pertains to Internet domain name functions. But, she noted further, the law does not ban NTIA from analyzing transition proposals or undertaking additional activities in preparation for a transition. Grunewald said that, in fact, Congress has directed her agency to make a thorough examination of any transition plan that may be proposed, and to then provide lawmakers with updates on said transition every quarter, “which we have done.”

That said, the coalition of groups obviously believes that the Obama administration has already made its decision and will pursue handing over control of the Internet anyway it can. Once control is gone, the U.S. will likely never get it back.

Sources:

FoxNews.com

TechFreedom.org