LOS ANGELES — These days it’s easy to consume news through social media. For Maya Henry, a Girls Academic Leadership Academy junior, she remembers taking things she saw online as fact, at first glance.
“I think a lot of times when you see people you are great friends with or have trust for and you are seeing them post things, why wouldn’t you assume that they are true? Because you’re not going to assume that someone is just lying to you,” Henry said.
It wasn’t until she started her journalism class where she came across the nonprofit News Literacy Project’s Checkology program that teaches students the importance of checking sources, researching information and more. She soon began to realize what an impact misinformation on social media could have.
“There are stakes that are a lot higher than just someone’s perception and it’s coming down to things like anti-Semitism or it’s coming down to if someone is going to vote for someone and how those elected politicians will make laws. It’s interesting and kind of frustrating,” she said.
One Stanford University study found that two-thirds of high school students couldn’t tell the difference between a news report or an ad. Henry's teacher Adrianne Warlick said the program made an impact in her classroom.
“They are much better able to identify opinion pieces from news reports, which is extremely important. They are also very much able to identify partisan bias in the news sources that they read and they’ll go out of their way to determine what multiple news sources have said about one particular event,” Warlick said.
The program is free and available in schools throughout all 50 states. It recently became available throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District. Chuck Salter is the president and CEO of the non-partisan nonprofit who received a $10 million commitment from the Lundquist family. He said that donation will help expand the program and reach more people.
“We’ve seen in the COVID pandemic, we’ve seen in elections, we’ve seen in financial scams that people really need to be better and more aware of the types of information that they are coming across and be able to determine fact from fiction,” Salter said.
Class assignments have helped Henry learn more about the content found online, she said.
“We can all be more open-minded people if we base our opinions and our voting choices and actions off of what is actually happening, rather than who we are seeing and what they are saying,” she said.
The Checkology program is also free and available to the public.