Fake news: How to teach your kids to spot disinformation - for media literacy week

Watch more of our videos on ShotsTV.com 
and on Freeview 262 or Freely 565
Visit Shots! now
A major report found most children don’t have the skills they need to tell real news from fake 📰
  • Studies suggest fake news spreads faster than real news online, and it’s humans rather than bots doing much of the spreading.
  • Children are growing up in an increasingly online world, but one investigation found just 2% had the skills they needed to tell if a story was real or fake.
  • If news has been published elsewhere, who has written it, and whether it identifies where its information comes from can all be used to assess how trustworthy it is.
  • Photos can’t always be trusted either - but there are helpful tools anyone can use to find out more about them.

So-called ‘fake news’ seems to be everywhere sometimes, and just like anyone else, children need the tools to see through it in our fast-changing digital world.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

We’re now nearing the end of UNESCO’s Global Media and Information Literacy Week, an annual event aimed at building the knowledge, skills and attitudes people across the world need to better search, critically evaluate, use and contribute to media. To mark the occasion we’ve taken a look at the UK’s only newspaper for young people - First News - and the advice in its recently-updated Making Sense of the News special edition on helping children navigate fake news, to create a guide for parents.

‘Fake news’, a phrase popularised by former US president Donald Trump, and other disinformation can spread like wildfire across social media platforms, frequently reaching bigger and more diverse audiences than real news. This is even backed up by research, with a major Massachusetts Institute of Technology study analysing more than 100 thousand news stories shared on X - formerly known as Twitter - across 2016 and 2017 finding that fake news was “70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth”, even when bots were filtered out of the results.

Disinformation can be as dangerous as it is pervasive, with its potential consequences including undermining the democratic process, spreading harmful or discredited science, creating a platform for conspiracy theories and hate speech, and even creating distrust in credible news sources, according to the University of Exeter.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

And while it is certainly not only young people that struggle with telling real news from not, a 2018 investigation by the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Literacy, the National Literacy Trust, First News and others found that just 2% of children had the critical literacy skills they needed to tell if a news story was real or fake. Half were worried about not being able to spot fake news, and about two-thirds of them trusted the news less as a result.

Here are some of First News’ tips for helping the young people in your life develop the skills they need to see through fake news:

A 2018 Parliamentary investigation found that nearly half of UK children felt concerned about telling real news from fakeA 2018 Parliamentary investigation found that nearly half of UK children felt concerned about telling real news from fake
A 2018 Parliamentary investigation found that nearly half of UK children felt concerned about telling real news from fake | (Photo: Adobe Stock)

How to tell if source is trustworthy

Whether it’s a website, a magazine or newspaper, or even a TV broadcast, children need to know how to evaluate whether they can trust something as a reliable news source. Some of the questions First News encourages children to ask themselves are: Have you heard of it before, how long has it going, and do people trust it?

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

If they don’t know, you should encourage them to ask a parent or teacher what they think, or to do some research. They can search the name of the website or publication find out about it, and see what sort of reputation it has.

News sources can often have slightly different political leanings, but quite a lot of the UK’s major publications are considered to be high quality and relatively impartial. Encourage children to check whether they are known for telling both sides of the story and being fair - even if they primarily cater to people with particular views.

Finally, just because they’ve found an article via Google, Bing, or Yahoo! doesn’t immediately mean it is automatically trustworthy, First News advises. Search engines aren’t infallible, and the algorithms they use to select top results can also be manipulated by things like bot activity or artificially-boosted web traffic. You should tell your child that even if it has been sent to them by a friend, people make mistakes too - and their friend might not have checked it too thoroughly either.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Learn what makes a ‘good’ article

While knowing whether a source can be trusted is a good thing, it is important to teach children what makes an individual story reliable too - especially as they will often come across them on social media.

If something seems particularly shocking or outrageous, First News says you should advise children to look up whether the story has been published elsewhere, on a trusted site. Exclusives do exist, but if a news story is strong enough, other publications will tend to look into the issue as well.

Good news stories should also list their sources - or tell readers where the information they present is coming from. When reading a news article with your child, point some of these out. If it’s an online article with hyperlinks, try following them to see if the source really says what they claim it does.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

You should also encourage them to think about who has written the story. You can search the writer’s name to find out if they are a proper journalist, what else they have written about, and what kind of sites their articles have been published on.

Some people also write opinion pieces, and while they may be on a newsworthy subject, these are typically based more on one person’s views than straight facts. Opinion pieces in news publications should be clearly labelled, so encourage young people to be on the lookout for this. But people will often share their opinions on news on places like social media, and so it’s important to remind kids that even though it’s not a bad thing to have strong feelings about a topic, this sometimes means they are not presenting all sides of a story.

You should also remind your kids to watch out for jokes (even journalists get fooled by them sometimes), especially around times like April 1. But there are also satirical news sites like The Onion, as well as parody social media accounts mimicking celebrities and other high profile people.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad
A lot of disinformation children encounter will likely be online, with studies showing it sometimes spreads more quickly than real newsA lot of disinformation children encounter will likely be online, with studies showing it sometimes spreads more quickly than real news
A lot of disinformation children encounter will likely be online, with studies showing it sometimes spreads more quickly than real news | (Photo: Adobe Stock)

Read to the end - and find a good fact checker

We’ve probably all been guilty of reading a headline fact or figure and repeating it without looking much further into it. But as First News points out, headlines are there to grab your attention and get you clicking - so they can sometimes be a little sensationalist.

It is always worth reading to the end of a story to check it does actually say what the headline claims. It’s a good habit to get into for anyone, but especially for children who are still forming their own opinions on different issues and the world.

When it comes to facts, there are quite a few different fact-checking organisations that have been set up to try to counter fake news in recent years. There aren’t any just for kids, First News says, but there are plenty you could help your child use to investigate any unusual-sounding facts or politician’s claims, for instance. It recommends Full Fact; BBC Verify; and Channel 4’ FactCheck.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

A picture isn’t always worth a thousand words

First it was picture editing software like Photoshop, but now increasingly-sophisticated generative AI can fabricate realistic images that can fool many into believing they are real. First News says it’s important to teach children that unfortunately, seeing isn’t always believing, and ‘photos’ need to be scrutinised just like anything else.

Reliable news publishers should attribute the images in their stories, and you can teach children to look out for this information too: such as the photographer’s name and who they work for, or whether the photo has come from a well-known and trusted photojournalism company like Getty Images.

There are also some helpful tools you can help young people use to investigate pictures. First News recommends Google Images (you can do a reverse image search by uploading a photo you have found, to see where else it has appeared); TinEye - another reverse image search site that lets you sort by date, to find out where a photo was first published; and Photoshop - or free alternatives like GIMP or Pixlr - which let you adjust the contrast of a high-quality to photo to see whether it might have been edited.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

This article is produced in partnership with First News, an award-winning newspaper for UK children read by 2.2 million each week. To find out more about getting First News at home or in your child’s school, or even to browse its other online offerings for young people, you can visit its website here.

Comment Guidelines

National World encourages reader discussion on our stories. User feedback, insights and back-and-forth exchanges add a rich layer of context to reporting. Please review our Community Guidelines before commenting.

News you can trust since 1845
Follow us
©National World Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.Cookie SettingsTerms and ConditionsPrivacy notice