A handy lesson for kids about fact checking the fake news

This article was written by Glenn Kessler for the Washington Post and was included in the Grade 7 textbook Connections English Language Arts published by Perfection Learning in 2019. These pages from the textbook and included in this post are from the teacher's guide, and this makes it even more entertaining. Teachers are directed to show students pictures of the Twitter and Facebook sites or the actual sites themselves so that students understand what these are. What a great advertisement for these sites! Also, note how teachers are given instructions twice in two different places to show students Mr. Kessler's blog that he runs for the Washington Post entitled "Fact Checker". I am sure there is no bias there!!!

Although the author, in a vain attempt to appear unbiased, does concede that "there are fake news stories generated by both left-leaning and right-leaning websites", "(Donald) Trump" and "anti-Trump protestors" are mentioned several times as fake news, but no left-leaning or liberal politicians are mentioned. Of course, we realize the opportunities for teachers to inject their own political agenda into class discussions about this article.

Mr. Kessler suggests that students use Google to fact check the news in lines 79-80 of his article. He also suggests that they use Snopes. According to a U.S. News and World Report article written by Robert Epstein and published on June 22, 2016, "Google, Inc., isn't just the world's biggest purveyor of information; it is also the world's biggest censor. The company maintains at least nine different blacklists that impact our lives, generally without input or authority from any outside advisory group, industry association or government agency." He went on to describe the blacklists and gave examples of political conservatives who were blacklisted. He also wrote, "If a librarian were caught trashing all the liberal newspapers before people could read them, he or she might get in a heap o' trouble. What happens when most of the librarians in the world have been replaced by a single company? Google is now the largest news aggregator in the world, tracking tens of thousands of news sources in more than thirty languages and recently adding thousands of small, local news sources to its inventory. It also selectively bans news sources as it pleases. In 2006, Google was accused of excluding conservative news sources that generated stories critical of Islam, and the company has also been accused of banning individual columnists and competing companies from its news feed." He also discussed YouTube and wrote, "YouTube, which is owned by Google, allows users to flag inappropriate videos, at which point Google censors weigh in and sometimes remove them, but not, according to a recent report by Gizmodo, with any great consistency – except perhaps when it comes to politics. Consistent with the company's strong and open support for liberal political candidates, Google employees seem far more apt to ban politically conservative videos than liberal ones." So, the bias of Google has been known for some time.

In the article from the textbook, Mr. Kessler also refers to "our friends at Snopes" in line 76. That should tell you everything you need to know since he seems to be quite cozy with them. By "our friends" he might mean the New York Times which published an article praising Snopes on April 5, 2010 called "At Snopes, a Quest to Debunk Misinformation Online" and the Washington Post which published an article on April 15, 2020 called "There Are So Many Coronavirus Myths That Even Snopes Can't Keep Up." NOT EVEN SNOPES!! That really says something. Of course, you can look at Snopes to see what they deem to be fake news. The Daily Mail on September 25, 2021 said that Facebook will use Snopes as a fact checking site and that "Snopes.com will benefit from Facebook's decision to allow users to report items in their newsfeed which they believe to be fake." My bet is that even Snopes won't be able to keep up with that either.