Spotting Fake News: Students will apply the following criteria to be able to discern between real and fake news. In so doing, they will assess the following pieces in groups of two, analyze the following news stories and decide not only why it is a fake news story but also what are the clear elements that led you to believe so. By completing this task, students will be able: To improve your ability to evaluate information on the internet, and primarily to determine whether the content is fake news. To help you understand the challenges posed by fake news and incorrect information to society. To encourage you to think critically about how you marshal evidence and examples to support your argument. Criteria: Be skeptical of headlines Fake news headlines often sound too good to be true — because they are. Especially beware of exclamation points and headlines written in all caps. Look closely at the link Have you never heard of the news site in the URL? Does the link sound like an established news source you’ve heard of, but there’s a letter or two added or missing? These are telling signs that wherever that link leads, it’s not to the truth. Investigate the source Brush up on the outlets you trust, and then keep your eye out for them. The internet is a prominent place, and a lot of sites work exclusively in the business of churning out false stories. Try searching outlets you’ve never heard of to see if they’re trusted — or junk. Watch for unusual formatting Could you design a better homepage than that? See tons of spelling errors and find the layout awkward? If the site you’re on looks off, the problem likely goes deeper. Consider the photos Photos can be more convincing proof than words, but these days, they’re easily manipulated and may only show a version of the truth — or a total falsehood. To back-search, an image and find where else it has been used, drag the file into Google Images to find out if what you were looking at was edited to show something other than reality. Inspect the dates Pay close attention to the timelines given in the story. Do the dates match up with ones you can verify? If the timeline doesn’t track, it’s probably not you — it’s probably fake news. Check the evidence Are there links out to other stories, attributions, or credits in the article? Like scientists, journalists cite their sources, and while some pieces are entirely original reporting, most will at least involve statistics, photos, or quotes that can be attributed to real, verifiable humans or outlets. Don’t be fooled by the bogus coronavirus remedies being promoted. Look at other reports Is the outlet you’re reading the only one to report something extreme? It may be because that outlet made it up. Is the story a joke? To those who don’t realize publications like the Onion and ClickHole are satirical publications, the humorous pieces they produce may appear to be real news, when in fact they’re intended as parodies. Plenty of memes, too, are not actually purporting to be news, but amusing takes on it. Some stories are intentionally false Stop the spread of malicious content. Make sure what you’re reading is credible before passing it on. A lot of websites are peddling unsubstantiated claims about the Coronavirus. What do you need to do? 1) Make a full editorial check of the story using the criteria above. 2) Then examine each one of the sources used and quoted in each piece and see if they exist and if there is any indication that they said. 3) Check other elements of the story to see if there are discrepancies, wrong data quoted, or any other factor that needs further fact-checking. 4) Review which news media outlet has published this story. 5) Review the byline and authorial elements in the story. Write down at least three bullet points for each story to explain why the story is true or not and any flaws that need to be further revised. Upload your document on Canvas on the due date. News Story 1: Bride and groom arrested after going through with wedding during lockdown A married couple spent their first night as husband in wife in police cells after going ahead with their wedding despite the coronavirus lockdown. All 72 guests and the rabbi, Isaac Goldstein, were also arrested after a tipoff that the marriage was happening in Tel Aviv despite bans on public gatherings. The groom was seen on video helping his new wife into a police van in her wedding dress shortly after the mass arrest in Tel Aviv’s White City. The couple, and their guests, have not yet been named but they will all appear in court on Monday. A police spokesman said the couple would be ‘spending their honeymoon under stringent bail conditions’. Israel has the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the Middle East, at 1,845 with 18 deaths, but that figure is expected to rise as the government embarks on a mass testing drive. According to the rules, people are only allowed to leave their homes for essential tasks like buying food or seeking medical help. Police arrested more than 19,000 people during the first few days of the lockdown, many for violating the rules. For all the latest news and updates on Coronavirus, click here. Israel’s President, Reuven Rivlin, put the communications minister on ‘special leave’ for two months on Wednesday and docked a month of her pay for breaking the rules of a countrywide lockdown by having lunch with a former official. ‘The president strongly believes that no one, including a rabbi, is above the law,’ said Herbert Gantz spokesmen for President Reuven Rivlin. ‘He says none of us should undermine our national effort to save lives in this very serious situation.’ In a video posted on Twitter, Ndabeni-Abrahams apologized for going ahead with the wedding. ‘I would like to convey an apology to … society at large for breaching lockdown rules put in place to curb the spread of COVID-19,’ she said. ‘I regret the incident and am deeply sorry.’ News story No. 2 Next COVID-19 outbreak ‘predicted via satellite’ Satellite data is being used now to predict future COVID-19 outbreaks, a leading environmental microbiologist says. The new technology is allowing scientist to spot exactly where the new outbreak will occur in the next 48 hours. While satellites have been in orbit since the 1950s, it was only about 20 years ago that scientists began to harness their earth observation data to aid global public health. “We now have a mechanism for the global surveillance and prediction of potential epidemics”, said Rita R. Colwell, distinguished professor, University of Minnesota, College Park Rita R. Colwell is a distinguished professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, has developed a predictive model for SARS-CoV-2, the scientific name for the virus that causes coronavirus disease – COVID19.2007. NASA was confident that her use of data in her model can “predict and prevent infectious disease outbreaks around the world”. Epidemiologists who lead in using space technology, say that satellites could have seen this Coronavirus coming. Jimmy Harlem, an astrobiologist at MIT points out that most of this data was passed out to senior officials at the White House back on January 12, 2020. “Our task group met with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield, who was very open to our report and suggestions. However, nothing happened after that”. SARS-CoV-2 is expected to become endemic — meaning it will join the rotation of viruses that affect human populations — and will likely reoccur in the future, virologists say. The molecular microbial ecologist, Rita Colwell, also says that there is a complex matrix of information could hold the answer to predicting when and where the next flare-up of COVID-19 cases occurs. The ground-breaking research is expected to be published in GeoHealth, an American Geophysical Union journal. Colwell says her team has applied machine learning to data from China, Italy, Spain and the United States, to extract correlations with data gathered from satellites, as well as air temperatures and surface parameters of moisture, such as humidity and dew point. “We’re in the process of testing; we think we may be able to predict for specific regions when the risk is highest,” she says. Diseases and the environment In the early 2000s, Colwell identified the environmental links to outbreaks of cholera, a bacterial infectious disease caused by consuming contaminated water or food. Using data from the earth observation programme Landsat, scientists were able to show direct correlations between chlorophyll concentrations and phytoplankton blooms, and cholera. “We were the first to develop a cholera predictive system,” says Colwell, speaking of her research partners “Satellites are really a very valuable public health tool. With the very sophisticated satellites up there now, we can draw on data from half a dozen satellites — that measure population movement, construction on the ground, to satellites that measure sea surface temperature, sea surface height, chlorophyll. “We now have a mechanism for the global surveillance and prediction of potential epidemics. Anticipating the next COVID-19 flare-up During the deadly 2015 Ebola outbreak, Farhan M. Asrar, from the University of Toronto and France’s International Space University, found that people were increasingly understanding the benefits that outer space could provide disease management. “Space assets are readily available and being used to benefit global health, including Ebola virus disease and other infectious diseases,” Asrar co-wrote in the Lancet. “This benefit could be further enhanced by greater cooperation, investment, and partnership between the space sector and public health and humanitarian organisations.” Timothy E. Ford, chair of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says that while it is difficult to foresee outbreaks of new viruses that are thought to transmit through wild meat or animal trading, “for pathogens transmitted through environmental routes or that have an environmental connection, satellites are powerful”. “We’ll hopefully have retrospective data that could be linked with satellite imagery of major transport routes to see how the [SARS-CoV-2] virus spread. “We may not have predicted it happening at the beginning, but we can map how to help in that process [of recovery].” Future of satellites and outbreaks While technology may as yet be unable to predict outbreaks of unknown diseases, analysts are keeping a watchful eye from space: “I guess I would call what we do computational epidemiology,” says Colwell. “Satellites are not the be-all and end-all, but they can be a powerful predicter of potential future outbreaks,” Ford says. He says satellites help direct mitigation, such as issuing warnings in areas where outbreaks are expected or diverting medical resources. Colwell and her team created a sari cloth filtration method, rolled out in Bangladesh, to remove large amounts of cholera bacteria. Simply folding a sari — a long piece of material wrapped around the body to form a dress — multiple times creates a water filter that can catch many contaminants. It led to a 50 per cent reduction in cholera cases, a feat Ford calls “an incredible success story”. And in 2018 and 2019, Colwell and co-researchers Antar Jutla, an engineering professor, and Anwar Huq, a cell biology and molecular genetics professor, made predictions that enabled medical and mitigation teams to plan ahead of Yemen’s cholera outbreaks. The forecasting tool was able to predict with 92 per cent accuracy the high-risk geographic areas for outbreaks in Yemen. The everyday use of space technology has ceased to be the stuff of science fiction. “It’s not hypothetical any longer: it’s actual and it’s useful,” Colwell says. News Story No. 3: News Story No. 4 Leonardo DiCaprio donates $10 mn in aid to Ukraine; Angelina Jolie, Miley Cyrus, Jared Leto express solidarity The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has caught the attention of the world. Millions have been turned into refugees in less than two weeks and the economic impact of the war is being felt the world over. The conflict has also resulted in a collective voice against war. Unique solidarity from across the world is seen with many nations extending aid to Ukraine. Hollywood too has come forward to help the citizens of Ukraine who have been devastated by the war. Leonardo DiCaprio Donates USD 10 Million DiCaprio has donated USD 10 million to aid Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s aggression. According to Latestly.com the actor reportedly has a personal connection with the country. The 47-year-old actor’s maternal grandmother was born in the Ukrainian town of Odesa as Jelena Stepanovna Smirnova. She and her parents later emigrated to Germany in 1917 where the actor’s mother was born. Mila Kunis Raises USD 18 Million The actress had raised over USD 18 million to help Ukrainian refugees after the Russian invasion. Kunis was born in Chernivtsi, Ukraine and relocated to the United States when she was seven years old. Mila Kunis and her husband Ashton Kutcher surpassed the halfway mark of their goal to raise USD 30 million in donations. The couple had launched a GoFundMe page to aid local charities.
