“What the professor never realized as he focused on the page’s superficial features is that the group in question is a socially conservative splinter faction”
The first quote from the article I chose points out a really common issue with news and pages. People don’t consider who is posting the news. It is very easy for organizations to publish studies that fit their narrative and tell the story they want to tell. This is something especially prevalent with science based news. I think this was a huge issue at the height of the pandemic. Any group could publish their own research, and make it seem real which just added to the hysteria and panic. Knowing the bare minimum about who is posting the news or publishing the web page can go a long way.
“Trust was the issue at hand.”
Trust is a huge variable when it comes to the internet. Fake news is such an easy thing to create and spread on mass. Knowing what sources you can trust and which you can’t is such an important skill to have when it comes to digital literacy. If you don’t know who or what to trust or you don’t know how to figure that out, it will make your time on online so much worse.
“Our ability to vet information matters every time a mother asks Google whether her child should be vaccinated and every time a kid encounters a Holocaust denial on Twitter.”
Lastly, I chose the above quote because to me it really sums up the importance. Tying back to the pandemic, it is so easy to find false science articles preaching about the dangers of vaccines. If you don’t have a lot of digital literacy skills then this could fool you easily. Everyone online should known how to vet information quickly and effectively so they do not fall for these kinds of traps. I hope when I am a teacher I will be able to teach my students these skills so they can figure out what is good and what isn’t on their own.
