Social norms, peer pressure and reciprocity
How common young people think sexting is has been identified as one of the strongest factors influencing whether they send sexts.
Verifying Political Information - Introduction
There are four reasons why it’s especially important to engage critically with election news – and political news in general.
How Do Canadians Get Their News?
If a news consumer reads a headline from The Globe and Mail while searching Google News, is the story from Google or The Globe? What about if a friend posts the story on Facebook; is the story from the friend, Facebook or The Globe? How can the complexities of what is meant by “source” in a converged news environment be accounted for?
Sorting Fact from Fiction
The changes in how news is consumed (and produced) described above have also made it harder to verify if a particular news item is accurate – and made it easier for misinformation to be spread, either intentionally or unintentionally.
Verifying Online News - Introduction
Most of us turn to online sources for news, whether it’s reading a newspaper online or sharing a news story with our friends and family. But news stories are one of the hardest things to verify: sometimes early reports that turn out not to be true still circulate on social media and people may spread false reports for political or commercial reasons, or just for “fun.”
Election and Political News
Journalism has been described as the lifeblood of democracy, and elections, likewise, have long been journalism’s bread and butter. The relationship between the two, however, has always been fraught. ”
Political Disinformation
While it’s important to be skeptical of political news, especially during an election, it’s also important to be able to recognize and dismiss outright disinformation: the deliberate spreading of false or misleading information. To a large extent, attitudes towards information and expertise themselves have become politicized, with people on the left being more likely to trust experts and their advice and those on the right being less so.
Finding and Evaluating Science and Health Information - Introduction
Two of the most important kinds of information we look for online are about health and science: almost half of Americans, for example, report seeing science content in the previous few weeks, and a third follow a science-focused page or account online. However, nine in 10 Canadians, have seen misinformation on at least one of those topics.
Health and science misinformation
Though health and science topics are subject to the same kinds of misinformation found everywhere, there are two types that are particularly common in these fields: denialism and snake oil.