Teaching news literacy in the midst of unfolding crises
The Russian invasion of Ukraine
Most Americans have come to agree that attention to news and media literacy is an important part of our curricula in a digital world; the questions often turn to leisurely discussions of How much, when? What kind? and Whose job?
Events such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine—much like the identification of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 or high profile events attached to hot button issues—immediately raise the pressure on all those leisurely questions. Emotions are, understandably, high and the desire, or need, to consume information is palpable. During such times, both we and our students benefit from strategies for assessing information and avoiding misinformation/disinformation. And we need them now.
As teachers of writing today, we face a distinctly different challenge than educators faced prior to the rise of social media and the read/write web: even our younger students are already writing and making media, publishing, and circulating ‘content’ to large audiences and at rapid speed. Less like young scholars pursuing a topic they may one day publish about after extensive research, our students are more like journalists facing unfolding and pressing deadlines in a sea of conflicting information…but without the preparation, editorial supervision, and professional norms.
Unfolding and rapidly changing events such as are happening now are an occasion to help students understand what is always true but sometimes less visible: social media has made us all media makers as well as media consumers.
So what follows are some resources that help us think about media literacy now and are geared to the crisis in Ukraine. As the crisis there unfolds, some of the links and references below may lose currency, so we begin with something that won’t become outdated in the next few days —the SIFT approach to information literacy by Mike Caulfield— and conclude with some suggested resources for educators and older students to read the web like journalists do.
Applying SIFT to the news from Ukraine
by Mike Caulfield
Here are some quick notes on how to help us all be careful with what we read and share right now on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, based on SIFT, with some slight shifts in emphasis for fast-moving foreign events. SIFT is an acronym for a set of “four-moves” that should become habitual when dealing with information today, and they can be covered in a one lesson.
STOP is always the first move of SIFT. When encountering new information, the first question you need to ask is not “Is this true?” but “Do I even know what I’m looking at here?”
Jumping immediately to questions of truth before assessing personal knowledge & capability is where most people go wrong. STOP is always important, but it is particularly important with events in a foreign, fast-moving context. It’s too easy to look at a video depicting events thousands of miles away in languages we do not understand shared by people we don’t know and think “This looks legit.”
Taking a moment or two (and you can do it in class!) to reflect on our limitations in in understanding the Ukrainian context is helpful. And with each piece of content, asking yourself “Do I know what I am looking at here?” becomes crucial, particularly when photos and videos are simply presented as fact with little additional information.
INVESTIGATE is the second move. When it comes to INVESTIGATE THE SOURCE, we look for two things: One, is source of the information likely to be someone we would call “in the know” — do they have significantly above average knowledge of a situation because of expertise, profession, life experience, or location? Second, is the person motivated to be “careful with the truth”?
Motivation to be careful isn’t about bias as much as it is about what the person’s personal and professional incentives are. Basically, pick people who pay a price if they get something wrong: academics, quality journalists, agency experts, and similar individuals pay a price in reputation and even income for being wrong. Others may have greater incentives to be provocative or to present a specific viewpoint. For a fast-moving situations: be extra picky. If something appears from a borderline source at 10 a.m., my life-changing advice to you is YOU CAN WAIT FOR A BETTER SOURCE. The world will not end if you tweet at 10:30 instead.
FIND BETTER COVERAGE is move three of SIFT. And there is an important modification here for foreign contexts. In FIND you discover a potentially true report from a borderline source and rather than share that source you try to find a high-quality source to read/share, usually by a search of Google or Twitter. In other words, you can choose the source to feature or retweet. You don’t need to amplify the first source you saw.
In domestic situations we often have a lot of background knowledge on sources that allows us to scan and select high quality sources from a stream of garbage. People don’t always leverage that knowledge, but it’s there. Some of that knowledge transfers to foreign contexts — knowing what Reuters is or the AFP can help. But we can vastly overestimate what we know about sources in more foreign domains.
If you want to find better coverage in a situation like this, you need to DO WORK UP FRONT.
Familiarize yourself and your students with high quality local sources like the Kyiv Independent and with people contributing important bridging expertise like @JaneLytv on Twitter. If you are going to act as a news amplifier, set aside an hour or so and familiarize yourself with reputable domain-relevant source BEFORE you’re staring at a tweet or post or TikTok video. This is also a place where making use of vetted lists, such as the list from @JaneLytv. Many resources for journalists will help identify key sources.
In these breaking news events, the temptation is always to drink the firehose, and the platforms amplify that behavior. But collective sense-making has many roles other than “breaking OSINT reporter”. Find the role best suited to your capabilities and engage there. Maybe what you do today is share someone’s Twitter list or a story about how Russia used disinformation in Crimea. Maybe you’re doing the boring work of amplifying stories from Reuters, or sharing fact-checks. Or maybe you are just staying quiet.
Tracing information back to its source
by Elyse Eidman-Aadahl
TRACING CLAIMS, QUOTES, AND MEDIA BACK TO ITS SOURCE is the fourth move in the SIFT approach.
This step is likely familiar to many teachers as a strategy in more expansive academic writing where student writers are encouraged to find the original source or quote and examine it in its full context. When sources are linked and cited, it’s not hard to do. But in cases where they are not, it can be time consuming and confusing. Perhaps reading a post with an untraceable source is a signal not to amplify. And while it’s certainly true that information in social media can be entirely made up, it might equally be the case that in “the fog of war,” information can be misunderstood or distorted, even by reliable sources.
For example, one reliable journalist posted on Twitter, erroneously, that fighting at Chernobyl had damaged the dome. But the original source had said that fighting “might” damage the dome. Following back to the original source identified the error, and the journalist corrected and deleted the original report. Mistakes do happen, and how a writer or publication handles mistakes is an important element of analyzing credibility, as the News Literacy Project argues.
In fast-breaking situations, however, much of what appears in social media consists of images and videos with little sourcing at all. The effect is that “you are seeing it yourself.” But images can be misunderstood too, particularly in situations where (as Mike reminds us above), we often don’t know what we’re looking at, and images can be used by bad actors in campaigns of disinformation.
A common investigation of the source of an image is a ‘reverse image search.’ A reverse image search allows you to see where an image has been posted on the web and will alert you if the original image pre-dates the current use or is otherwise spurious. A reverse image search takes just a few minutes and can be done on Google Images or through a dedicated tool such as TinEye.
For example, a commonly circulating image of tanks set afire with Molotov cocktails purporting to be from the current conflict, is easily traced back to 2014 in a simple TinEye reverse image search.
Images also often contain metadata that more sophisticated checkers can examine. This will be beyond most media consumers, but there are organizations that specialize in this sort of verification. For example, Bellingcat, an award-winning independent collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists around the world, uses open source and social media investigation to probe a variety of subjects and make their findings available to the public. They have taken a special interest in evaluating the images and video purported to be coming from the Ukrainian conflict given that such images are often a pretext for futher escalation and misinformation. They have decided to track and detail such claims as well as the circumstances surrounding them, sharing what they find via this public spreadsheet that will continue to be updated in the days ahead.
If you have older students or journalism students, learning about organizations that specialize in approaches to verifying social media content may be of interest to you. You may find that your librarians are expert at some of these techniques. See, for example, this resource from the Upstate University of South Carolina Library. Regardless of whether you actually teach some of these approaches, however, it is useful for students to see the work that journalists and researchers put into tracing the validity of their sources so that they can come to understand the effort that stands behind high-integrity information sources.
Of course, a very direct approach is to visit some of the well-known facr-checking efforts. This is particularly useful in situations where lots of what is circulating is video since reverse image search doesn’t always work well with video, and some media, like TikTok, is currently not checkable in this way.
A particularly helpful checking site for international news is at Reuters and can be accessed on Twitter as @ReutersFacts. Students may be familiar with others, though, like Snopes, and that’s fine too.
And journalists and fact-checkers are especially generous and cooperative when working together to understand and cover an especially dynamic sitation. Currently, an international network of fact-checkers are collaborating on #UkraineFacts. The contributors, all members of the International Fact-Checking Network, share their fact checks to avoid duplicate research. The database is interesting for showing how misinformation circulates globally.
In an ongoing Twitter thread, Lisa Muth has been updating links to maps of activity provided by a wide range of publications, making them easy to compare and to trace to their original sources.
Teaching about Ukraine more generally
A lesson in SIFT might most usefully serve to deter students from circulating unverified information now as well as alert them to the a whole slice of media literacy work that they could learn in the future. That alone would be a great outcome.
In an information ecology characterized by abundance— abundance of good information and abundance of bad information—simply learning more about a topic is one of the best news literacy strategies there is. Misinformation is easier to spot when we have more knowledge about a topic, and trusting sources of good information is far better and more efficient than poking around with untrusted sources. Pointing students to the wide range of “explainers” that provide short backgrounders to the terms, people, and institutions figuring in the news can be useful for students. Outlets like Vox have created a specialty around explainers, but they are increasingly available through other outlets as well. The example below fits the model.
Finally, this may be the time to explore some high quality curriculum such as those gathered by the CLE Teaching Collaborative, material from the Choices Program or from the list assembled by Larry Ferlazzo. Other useful sources include C-Span Classroom where teachers can access video clips. For older students or teachers looking for more detailed content, the list of Teaching Resources at Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute might provide that link they need.
At the very least, we can try to learn to say the name of the Capitol, Kyiv, as the Ukrainians do and leave the Russified name, Kiev, for the name of the chicken dish. The Guardian explains why it matters.
