It’s hard to escape the fake stuff. Sure, some of it seems harmless and fun: so what if a cute video of cats sliding down tubes is AI-generated?
But the proliferation of fake videos about real events – such as Nepal’s flash flooding – is cause for concern. Visual misinformation is highly believable, and can cause real problems in emergency situations: it could stop people from finding official evacuation advice, or mislead rescuers about where to search. Some false videos of the Nepal tragedy claim to show what caused the floods in the first place, sparking multiple conspiracy theories.
Online, some of the most deceptive content is pretending to be news. Earlier this year, an investigation by AAP Factcheck found that a bogus Facebook page claiming to be a New Zealand news outlet was sharing false AI-generated images of real events. Around the same time, a 1News investigation found at least 10 similar fake news pages sharing false New Zealand content.
This surge in AI-generated images and videos even prompted the National Emergency Management Agency to warn that false pictures of severe weather events were being shared online – including of the fatal slip on Mauao/Mount Maunganui.
So what’s the solution to telling truth from fabrication in a world that increasingly runs on videos and images?
We can teach people to spot misinformation
Assessing information for truthfulness is a skill like any other – and one that’s possible to teach in the classroom, says Stuart McNaughton, a professor in the Faculty of Arts and Education at the University of Auckland.
He’s a co-author on a major report looking at how to develop young people’s ability to spot misinformation.
Teaching kids to deal with fake news involves two separate skill areas, he says.
The first: media and information literacy. “These are the skills of being critical, understanding how you’re being manipulated, judging whether what you’re getting is believable or not,” says McNaughton. “You know, the criticality skills that a good English teacher would tell you about, but a little bit more now in the context of generative AI and social media. We know we can teach them.”
The second: empathy and communication. McNaughton calls these “citizenship skills” for the internet: “the proactive, pro-social, positive skills for interacting online”. These make it possible for people to engage in fruitful conversation. “And these are teachable as well: empathy, perspective-taking, consideration of others, trying to put yourself in the other person’s position. We know how to teach them.”
Yet these skills are hard to find in the new curriculum proposed for New Zealand schools, says McNaughton. “Being critical is only mentioned once in the draft science curriculum that is currently out for consultation.”
And they remain missing from the foundational years of schooling. “You won’t see any reference to the sort of critical skills, digital resilience, anything like that in the primary school curriculum, which is really sad, because kids are quite able to be critical.”
There are many reasons to teach empathy in schools
It’s not just about spotting or discussing misinformation – teaching empathy would have multiple other benefits, says McNaughton. “I’m appalled by the degree of hate – the degree to which the digital channels are used to ferment and polarise. But I know that to overcome that, to prevent that, you need to build positive skills. And that’s certainly a medium to long-term commitment on the part of the education system.”
There’s good reason to do this: New Zealand has one of the highest bullying rates in the OECD. “One estimate I’ve made is probably one child in a classroom is getting either near to or daily cyberbullying in one form or another,” says McNaughton.
Comment sections and social media make it easy for people to dehumanise those they’re talking to.
“Social media particularly creates this situation where the usual inhibitions on our civility are reduced,” says McNaughton. “So, there’s a real me, a virtual me, a virtual you and a real you. And that distancing creates the sense that you can say things that you wouldn’t ever say face to face.”
Is the solution banning social media? “That’s a very simplistic solution to a complex problem.”
So far, Australia’s ban hasn’t been effective – kids still access social media. Bans don’t make the internet a safer place, say researchers, or help children develop the skills they need to navigate the online world once they gain access. “We need to do a better job of teaching those skills directly to our kids,” says McNaughton.
How do we teach people about false information?
If you’ve been on the internet for long enough, you might remember a website called Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. It describes a canopy-dwelling cephalopod at risk of extinction – and the whole thing is a joke.
The original website is no longer online, but it was infamous enough that it’s been archived for posterity by the Library of Congress, and teachers still use it as an educational tool – as Professor Dame Juliet Gerrard did while in office as the Prime Minister’s chief science adviser.
“There are fantastic teachers doing some cool things in classrooms,” she says.
First, teachers give a lesson on the concept of misinformation and lateral reading: “If somebody tells you something, you have to go off and check your sources,” says Gerrard.
Later, children are given a project on the tree octopus. They end up on the website, and some start copying and pasting information. Others search online more widely and find the truth.
“And then there’s a gradual ripple around the room as they clock, ‘Actually, there’s no such thing as a tree octopus – this is a fake’,” says Gerrard. “And so that gives them a really visceral experience because they’ve invested this effort. It seems quite cruel to me –but it’s a way of making them really understand at a deep experiential level that not everything on the internet is true.”
Gerrard, from the Faculty of Science at the University of Auckland, led the report on misinformation and young people. It considers the social role of the clever hoax: the kind of joke designed less to trick and more to get people looking at the world afresh.
Another example, says Gerrard, is Birds Aren’t Real, a fake online awareness campaign which satirises conspiracy theories. Its website claims that all birds in the United States have been replaced by extremely lifelike drones operated by the government as surveillance tools. (Tagline: ‘If it flies, it spies’.) Gerrard thinks it’s a brilliant satire; she has the merch.
But movements like Birds Aren’t Real can only do so much. Gerrard’s report calls for a national strategy against misinformation that takes into account how it seeps through all layers of society. “The punchline was that we need a big investment in community resilience,” she says, “and to really train our kids”.
The world is facing unprecedented environmental challenges. Planetary Solutions, an initiative of the Sustainability Hub at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland, and Newsroom, explores these issues – and the practical ways we can all be part of the solution.
