Kids urged to be more skeptical about information they encounter

Social media posts leaving many unanswered questions

During the creepy-clown scare of October 2016, when rumors and social-media posts about threatening clowns shook schools across the country, kids in Danina Garcia-Fuller's eighth-grade language-arts class mostly shrugged in disbelief.

"Some people were getting scared because they saw things on social media," said 13year-old Patricia Visoso, one of GarciaFuller's students at St. Francis International, a Catholic school in Silver Spring, Md. "But they never looked into seeing who was saying this."

The Instagram and Facebook posts were made not by mainstream news outlets, but by teenagers who offered no hard evidence that clowns really were plotting to attack students. The story turned out to be a hoax.

"I think a lot of people just look at one thing and automatically assume it's true," Patricia's classmate Ivy Brooks, also 13, told KidsPost recently. "It's really important to know what's going on, so you need to look at the right sources and pay attention to what is opinion and what is fact" — or, in the case of the crazy clowns, to what is simply rumor.

Garcia-Fuller's students are some of the many kids across the country working to think critically about information they're seeing in the news and on the internet. It's an increasingly important skill at a time when stories can spread lightning-fast and when seemingly anyone can make a website to frame opinions, or outright lies, as facts.

According to a new report by Common Sense, a nonprofit organization that studies the way kids interact with the media, only 44 percent of kids said they feel that they can tell real news stories from "fake news" that is intentionally wrong or inaccurate. About one-third of kids said they had shared a news story online that they later found out was inaccurate.

There are a few ways kids can avoid falling for fake news stories and be better consumers of "real" news, says Peter Adams, a senior vice president of the nonprofit News Literacy Project.

"One of the first steps is to slow down," Adams told KidsPost. If a story or socialmedia post or even a photo seems "too perfect, too good to be true," stop and think: Is there evidence that supports what's being claimed? And where is this coming from? Is it from a news organization that has standards, such as correcting things when it gets them wrong? Does the author or organization have any bias or prejudice?

Distinguishing between fact and opinion, as well as between fact and fiction, is a crucial skill that allows democracy to work, Adams said.