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The Grand View Board of Trustees announced last Thursday that tuition will be going up 12 percent for the upcoming school year. This increase will be applied to all students regardless of prior tuition holds, including the GV Complete Plan.

Actually, this is false. Fake news, such as this, has been taking over social media sites over the past few years. Accessing information gets easier with each passing year, and smartphones put the ability to access the Internet at your fingertips. With the abundance of information sources available, many college aged students are struggling to find the difference between real and fake news online.

The Stanford History Education Group produced a year-and-a-half-long study that tested middle school, high school and college aged students. In these tests, the students were asked to complete numerous tasks, which tested their ability to judge the credibility of information. Some of these tasks included discerning the difference between advertisements and news articles, judging if a photo that was shown matched to the story written below and judging website reliability.

The Stanford group administered 56 tasks across 12 states to a total of 7,804 students, ranging from inner city to rural areas. The overall results of the study were “bleak”.  Even with millennials having more screen time than previous generations, all three age groups showed surprisingly low marks in the tasks.

“We sought to establish a reasonable bar, a level of performance we hoped was within reach of most middle school, high school and college students,” the author of the study states. “But in every case and at every level we were taken aback by students’ lack of preparation.”

After seeing this study and the recent news coverage surrounding controversial topics such as the election, women’s health and immigration, Grand View History Professor Kevin Gannon began to incorporate lessons on source reliability into his courses.

“I think it is harder to be well informed now than it has ever been,” Gannon said. “There is so much information available to us.”

Gannon believes in teaching the topic of information literacy so much  that he decided to use the first full week of all his beginning-level history classes to cover the issue. He used the Stanford study, along with others, to try to expose his students to the scale of this problem.

Within these lectures, Gannon tries to connect with his students by using examples of popular stories that have dominated Facebook. He also stresses to his students the importance of understanding how information is weighted on social media sites and why some stories are featured more than others. He even tested his students with an assignment to see how well they could detect false sources.

“There are so many layers that are built on top of the way we access information”Gannon said. “Facebook determines what shows up on our feed and how it shows up. Google search results have an algorithm attached to them that dictates the order that we see things. We don’t just have access to pure information, one hundred percent unfiltered.”

Following Gannon’s lead, The Grand Views went around campus and tested students.

Using screenshots of the known false news sites RedFlag, Real News Right Now, and InfoWars, as well as one credible site, The Guardian, we asked students to correctly identify which one they felt was the real news source. The Grand Views’ results varied from the Stanford study.

Thirty students who were questioned did not take more than a few moments to vote among the four options. Many of the students expressed how surprised they were by the difficulty of this task. Most based their decision on the overall look and design of the website, judging whether or not the layout and logos look professional. Those who studied the headlines still found the choice difficult. In the end, 56 percent of the students were correct, though many admitted there was a degree of guesswork involved.

Erica Urban, a freshman studio arts and English writing major, took her time comparing the different sites. She focused on the layouts of the four sites as well as the ads on each page.

“They all look super real,” Urban said. “They all look like they will give you good information, although it is not the right information.”

These false news sites are confusing for more than just the Grand View student body. For example, before the election, Buzzfeed analyzed the trending fake news articles versus the trending factual stories. The 20 top-performing false election news articles generated 8.7 million shares, reactions and likes on Facebook while the top-performing factual stories only produced 7.37 million.

These trends continued after the election. Earlier this month, Kellyanne Conway, a White House aide, used the phrase “alternative facts” on NBC’s “Meet the Press” when discussing some false articles regarding the new president.

“The phrase ‘alternative facts’ is used to describe a clearly untrue interpretation of events,” Gannon states. “Alternative facts are lies. I think we need to be honest about the information that we access and where it is coming from now more than ever.”

The New York Times took its stance against fake news one step further. On January 25, 2017 it printed an article called “In a Swirl of ‘Untruths’ and ‘Falsehood,’ Calling a Lie a Lie,” which pointed out the importance of the words the press puts out. Throughout the article, the Times stressed the damages these articles have on not only President Trump, whom they target, but also on the nation as a whole.

This is a problem that affects anyone who uses the Internet, and understanding how these sites work is just the beginning. Information literacy is the crucial skill in the pursuit of knowledge. Howard Rheingold, the author of “Crap Detection 101”, put together some helpful hints to help people check websites for reliability.

The first step is to be a skeptic. Do not go onto a site believing that every word is correct. Many authors have biases that are not made obvious upon first glance. Searching the author’s name is a quick way to find out some background on him or her and understand more clearly how he or she thinks.

Verify all your sources. This is as simple as looking up the topic on different sites. If all of the articles connect back to one blog post or tweet it cannot be considered a reliable source. Triangulate your article, meaning connect each story to three other credible sources.

Creating smarter searches will also help weed out the more weighted sites. Google Scholar and advanced searches allow the user to insert more specific information, such as article types in order to narrow down the results.

Understanding how the platforms work will also allow for an easier search. Facebook, Google and Twitter are just a few that use “likes,” “hits” and “shares” to determine their top stories. These stories are chosen based on others, opinions’ not on facts; therefore, you should research them more before taking them as fact.

“Y’all are navigating an information landscape that is even much different than it was five years ago and certainly much different than 10, 20 years ago, like when I was in college,” Gannon said.

The Internet is continuously changing. With new information being added every day, being able to distinguish truth from lies will continue to be a challenge. These tips, though helpful, are only effective when readers challenge their own biases in order to find the underlying truth.

Now, let’s go back to the subject of the tuition increases on campus…