I made it forced watching for my sons, and that actually led to a lot of conversation. They clearly wanted to reject or minimize some of the concerns that were presented in the film, but I think it planted a seed that will keep them thinking as they become adults.
One hard and fast rule I have is to not ever read news on Facebook. I will occasionally click through on a Yahoo landing page (on way to sports scores), but even there I take with a grain of salt and always look at their source. Huff Post seems to come to my feed a lot, and nowhere near as left as it is. I don't click through news or ads at Facebook at all. It's ONLY for sharing seeing pictures with far-away friends or family or contacting them. Of course, they have some of my data, but I do think you can control (to an extent) the influence of social media. Like with manipulative advertising, I think it makes sense to really consider and remain skeptical of much of the input.
On that note, here is a pretty good Facebook post that a college friend of mine put out yesterday. It's loosely for his high school students (he teaches Government to Seniors as well as other Social Studies) about how to manage information with respect to the recent election issues. I liked his message. Shared it with my kids, and they saw his logic right away. Sorry that it's so long, but I think it's really good and worth sharing.
"UNDERSTANDING CLAIMS AND EVIDENCE--Election Fraud and Social Media
I am a social studies teacher. As a result, I teach inquiry skills. Conducting inquiry means that we actively evaluate claims or we make claims (arguments) based on evidence.
It is very common for students who begin the inquiry process to evaluate claims or make claims based solely on what another source told them. For example, they will quote someone making the claim they are making. That's their evidence.
We see this type of thinking on social media when someone posts the opinion of someone else and they treat this claim like it is a fact. "Politician A is a criminal because they said _________" (fill in the blank). This statement is treated like evidence, when, in fact, it is a claim.
My job is to assist students to look beyond the claim and evaluate the actual evidence and then draw their own conclusions based on the evidence. In the above example, it would be easy to find Politician A's quote and evaluate the quote based on what they actually said (I would highly recommend going outside your original source to find the actual quote). This is essentially what good fact check sites do. They try to dig down and find evidence that can be evaluated so the readers can make their own decision.
Many times, however, the actual quote cannot be found, because someone made it up. This is unbelievably easy to do. In fact, I can do it right now...a bird just flew out of my butt. Did a bird just fly out of my butt? Not very likely, but if you really, really trust me, then you might believe this ridiculous claim. You might even change your belief system to account for this new claim, "I guess birds can fly out of people's butts!" However, the real lesson here is that it is really easy to make claims. It is much harder to produce and find evidence.
Try it yourself. Make five claims right now. Then try to find evidence for even a simple claim like the sky is blue. I just looked out my window thinking I could take a picture of the sky to prove the sky was blue. It was grey! This is also why we have science. Science is the practice of proving something with evidence--which is actually really challenging!
Human beings can start making claims when they are three. My then three year old son told me his brother broke the lamp, as he stood in the midst of the remains of the lamp. His brother was not even home at the time. I doubt he could have provided evidence to support this claim. The fact that three year olds can make claims explains a lot about our current political situation and the current evidence free zone of social media.
Making claims does not make something true, even when it is repeated over and over again. This is why our judicial system requires people to provide evidence to support their claims. You cannot be convicted of a crime without evidence. You cannot win a lawsuit without evidence. You cannot win in court without evidence.
So, if someone, let's say, files dozens of claims in dozens of courts across the country, with both conservative and liberal judges, and all the claims are rejected, we might decide that there was not enough evidence to support the claims. Or, we might decide, a more unlikely possibility, that all of these judges and courts were biased. Of course, court records are public, so you can actually see the decision a court made and see the evidence that was presented. This is what I would encourage my students to do--go find the actual evidence before drawing a conclusion. Read the court documents. Don't rely on other people's claims about the documents--remember how easy it is to make claims.
Good journalists and good journalism can be recognized by their use of evidence. Instead of telling the reader what to think, they provide the reader with the actual evidence, like direct quotes from people, so that people can draw their own opinions. In fact, real journalists can get sued if they misrepresent people's opinions or make a claim without evidence.
If I were a devious person and I wanted to make wild claims and get away with it, I would attack journalists and try to erode the public trust in journalism because journalists ask pesky questions like "Where is the evidence?" and then, even worse, they go out of their way to actually find evidence. If I can erode people's trust in journalists and other legitimate sources then I can make claims like, a bird flew out of my butt, and when the journalists ask for the evidence of this event, I can attack them for being fake news. In addition, my followers will avoid reading their articles that will ask those difficult questions about evidence and even provide a counterclaim from an expert. According to Dr. Osprey of Yale University Medical School, "It would be virtually impossible for a bird, even a tiny bird, to fly out of someone's intact anus....the human anus is just not big enough to accommodate a flying bird." If I want to be able to make claims that I hope others will take as fact, even without evidence, then I need to attack journalists.
Here is some advice: when someone makes a claim, ask yourself, what evidence do they have to support the claim? Can I look at the evidence myself? Can I find this evidence from multiple sources? Also, remain skeptical about claims. No claim has a 100% chance of being true nor does any claim have a 0% chance of being false. Instead, we evaluate an initial claim and then determine how much we believe that claim based on the evidence. In other words, keep an open mind. Finally, before re-posting something, go to a fact check site and see what they say. Do they provide the actual evidence and see if they tracked down the source of a specific claim."
