SPOKANE, Wash. — Election season can lead to a lot of misinformation spreading on social media disguised as news, but how can you find out what is actually true?
Since July 2023, the team at News Literacy Project has been compiling as many fake election-related posts as they could find.
A recent example is a doctored image that shows Lady Gaga endorsing Former President Donald Trump, which was not true.
These types of viral posts are organized on the News Literacy Project’s election misinformation dashboard, which senior vice president of research and design Peter Adams hopes voters can use to fact-check information and sharpen their judgement.
“We try to break it down to help folks have a sense of what might be suspicious before they see it so they know to just press pause when they see something like that in their feeds,” Adams said.
The dashboard also highlights the trends in different types of manipulation tactics found in these posts.
“I’ve seen a number of doctored t-shirts pasted onto celebrities, that’s something to watch out for,” Adams said.
The organization also promotes election literacy for younger audiences, too. It recommends talking to your children about what kind of content they’re consuming and sharing.
“If you engage with conspiratorial content, if you engage with hyper-partisan content, if you engage with content that’s misleading, you’re likely to get more of that kind of content,” Adams said.
Anyone can visit the website to view the compiled fake content and read why it’s untrue. You can go to the website here.
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