Lesson video

Hello.

My name is Mrs. Blachford, and I'm a citizenship teacher.

And I'm going to be your citizenship teacher today as we look at the topic of misinformation and what we can do about it.

Let's get started.

In our lesson today you are going to need a pen or a pencil.

And you will also need some papers, so I suggest if you need to grab those, you would pause the video.

You also need to be in a nice, quiet place where you know you're not going to be disturbed during our lessons.

So again, if you need to pause, cause you need to move from where you are, please do so.

And just pause the video.

And then when you're ready to start again, just press play.

In our lesson today we are going to cover three key questions.

We're going to first of all look at some key definitions.

So we need to look at the difference between misinformation, disinformation and malinformation.

Our second key question is to think about why misinformation might be an issue in a democracy.

And then our final point that we are going to look at is what can we do about misinformation? So first key question that we're going to look at then is thinking about these three words and defining what we mean by them.

So what do you mean by misinformation, disinformation and malinformation? Now it's likely you've come across or perhaps even used the term fake news.

And that's a really broad term and as citizenship students we need to be developing our media literacy.

And I want to encourage you now to use these more detailed terms, which help us break down the different types of false and misleading information that you may come across.

To do that though, we need to know what each of them means.

So we have misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.

I'm going to ask you at this point just to pause the video and see if you can work out what those three words mean.

So let's see whether you were on the right lines when you paused.

So misinformation; this is information which is false but it's not created with the intention of causing harm to anyone.

Okay.

So it could be in fact when that information is published, it might actually be what people think is true.

So at the point of publishing, they might think they're publishing that in good faith and later down the line more information comes to light which changes that.

So misinformation, it is false, but it's not created with the intention of causing harm.

Bit like a mistake, I suppose.

It has the same start the word there.

Disinformation on the other hand.

So this is still false information but now it's deliberately created to harm a person or a social group or an organisation.

So this is now deliberate.

And then we have malinformation.

So this time the information here is truthful information, but it's been shared to deliberately harm a person or a group or an organisation.

So the difference there between dis and mal, dis is false and is to create harm, malinformation isn't false.

So it's truthful information, but it's being shared to deliberately cause harm.

So what I'd like you to do now is use a little pause point there.

I'm just going to ask you to pause the video and to write down those key definitions from the slide.

And then when you've done that you can press play again.

So in the next slide that you're going to see, they're going to be three different scenarios.

They're all true scenarios.

They've all happened in the last couple of months.

And what I'd like you to do is to try and work out which of the scenarios that you see is misinformation, which is showing disinformation and which is malinformation.

So remember you're deciding between those three different definitions that we've looked at.

So you should have written them down so you've got those in front of you.

So use that to help you.

And very good luck.

Here are the three different, three scenarios, sorry.

So the first one on here says, US president Donald Trump has defended repeatedly calling the coronavirus the "Chinese virus" during a news conference.

Second one here; Downing street slams Russian reports saying Boris Johnson is on a ventilator.

It attacked what it called misleading narratives about the prime minister who was admitted to hospital with COVID-19.

Our third one says, A Christchurch school has apologised after sending false information to parents claiming sunlight can kill the virus and encouraging them to gargle chemicals.

So all of these have happened during the COVID-19 crisis.

So, which do you think is disinformation, which is misinformation, which is malinformation? So pause the video now.

You can reread the scenarios if you need to and then think about which links to which of those definitions.

And then when you've done that, you can press play.

So let's see how well you did.

So the first one, the story about US President Donald Trump defending the fact that he'd called coronavirus, the China virus.

This is malinformation.

So he was deliberately spreading that.

True, in some respects, we could say it's true because it originated in China.

But it wasn't caused deliberately in China so this is malinformation.

The information is correct in that it originated in China, but it's been deliberately shared to cause harm by Donald Trump here.

Second story; Downing Street slams Russian reporters saying Boris Johnson's on a ventilator.

He was not on a ventilator at all.

He had been admitted to hospital with COVID-19 but he wasn't at any point on a ventilator.

So this was to discredit Boris Johnson to cause harm, to cause panic.

So it's disinformation.

And then the last one, this was misinformation.

So A Christchurch school had to apologise because it, it gave false information to parents.

And that was because at the time it released that information, it believed that information to be correct.

So, as more information came to light about coronavirus or COVID-19, then it was realised that this information was actually not true and therefore they made an apology.

So they hadn't deliberately set out to harm anyone.

Just have a look at this picture for a second.

Then you can see at the bottom left hand side that it's from a New York newspaper called "The Sun," and it was published on August the 25th, 1835.

Now the reason I've included this picture is because I just want us to pause and think about the fact that it's actually nothing new.

This false information is nothing new.

The need to evaluate what you're reading to recognise misleading or false information is not new.

This picture is from the great moon hoax.

And it refers to a series of six articles that were published in "The Sun," which as we said is a New York newspaper and they began on August the 25th, 1835.

And their stories were about the supposed discovery of life and even civilization on the moon.

Discoveries were also falsely attributed to Sir John Herschel and he was one of the best known astronomers of that time.

And that actually then added to the credibility that people gave to the story and they believed it was true at the time.

So just reminds us that actually this is not a new phenomenon at all.

So just want you to have a think about these two questions.

And you're going to write your response in a moment to these.

So the two questions are, why might someone create disinformation? What disinformation is; false information deliberately causing harm.

And who might malinformation be targeted towards and why? Remember malinformation, true information, but it's been shared to cause harm.

You should have those definitions written down.

So you'll be able to refer back to those when you complete this task.

So, just to remind you then these are your two questions you're going to respond to.

Why might someone create disinformation and who might malinformation be targeted towards and why? So pause the video now.

Have a go at those two questions and then when you are ready, you can press play.

So the first of those two questions was why might someone create disinformation? So it might be out of hatred or spite or jealousy towards somebody else or another group.

It might be to get revenge against someone to try and teach them a lesson.

Could be for political reasons.

So perhaps during an election, for example, to try and discredit an opponent.

It might be that you want to harm a business competitor.

It might be to try and promote products.

Or the very fact that it pays.

The reason it pays is because the more clicks on a page, the more the advertising on a page is seen.

The more it's seen, the more revenue for the page's administrators.

It isn't even necessary to click on any adverts.

The idea is you create a buzz around a publication or a news story and then the interactions with that story, maybe it's likes or shares, comments, that will be seen by new people who might visit the story, particularly we're talking there about online publication of information.

The second part of that story was who might malinformation be targeted towards and why? Remember this is information that's true, but is being used to create harm against somebody.

So, generally we might think that malinformation, certainly in the media or through social media, for example, is perhaps aimed at three different groups.

There's celebrities, politicians and maybe governments themselves.

And the reason that it's aimed at them is maybe to discredit them, maybe to deliberately cause them harm.

Sometimes might people might use the spread of malinformation as a, or an excuse for doing this, is being in the public interest.

Okay.

But there is just that relief.

It's malinformation, it's going to cause them harm.

It's really not in the public interest quite often.

So that's something just to bear in mind as well.

So we're going to look now at why misinformation can be an issue in a democracy.

So in a healthy democracy, it's really important as we know that we have a free press.

Free from political interference, so that citizens can have access to accurate information and the opportunity to engage in political debate and take action on issues that are important to them.

Freedom to speak empowers citizens, either individually or collectively to advance their interests and shape the institutions whose decisions are going to have an impact on their lives.

Misinformation however, can be seen by many as threatening these key values that we have in a democracy.

Democracy is much less likely perhaps to survive if we have a poor information and environment where the citizens aren't able to perhaps distinguish between genuine and fake information, false information, and aren't given that accurate information to help them make decisions.

So that information if it's misinformation, so if it's not information that's accurate and truthful, it can actually alter political debates.

So you end up with bias or focusing on the wrong issues.

It can influence voters decisions.

So people choose who or what to vote for based on false information.

Unreliable information can shape the choices those voters make.

Misinformation lowers the trust in the media and government and politicians and institutions.

And in fact, misinformation on social media played quite a troubling role in boosting the far right congressmen, Bolsonaro into the Brazilian presidency in 2018.

Bolsonaro benefited from a powerful and coordinated misinformation campaign because it was intended to credit, his discredit, sorry, his rivals, according to the Brazilian press.

Using WhatsApp, a Facebook owned messaging service, Bolsonaro supporters delivered an onslaught of daily misinformation, straight to millions of Brazilians' phones.

The misinformation strategy was really effective because WhatsApp is an essential communication tool in Brazil.

It's used by 120 million of its 210 million citizens.

And since WhatsApp's text messages are forwarded and re-forwarded by friends and family, the information seems more credible.

So misinformation as I say lowers people's trust in not only the media, but government, politicians and institutions within a democracy.

It can aggravate already existing tensions in a country.

That could tensions between different political groups, for example.

And that ultimately could lead to violence.

It can also generate support for groups who perhaps are antidemocratic, so don't want people to have democratic freedoms upheld in a country.

So it was just to stop here and pause and think about this question.

So which of these is a reason why many are concerned about the impact of misinformation? You've got four options here to choose from.

So is it option one? It helps to hold those in power to account.

Is it option two? It builds trust in the media and politicians.

Is it option three? It provides accurate information to citizens.

Or is it option four? It can lower people's trust in the media and politicians.

And hopefully you chose option four.

So, the impact of misinformation is that it can lower people's trust in the media and politicians.

So we're going to look at who might spread that misinformation and why they might spread it now.

So, I have got for you nine different groups or people who might spread misinformation.

We're going to think about why that might be.

So we've got YouTubers.

These are people in the public eye, they've got lots of followers.

Perhaps they spread misinformation to get more of those followers.

We've got a prankster, someone who's doing it for fun.

They want to entertain people.

They want to make people laugh.

It might be a family member.

So it could be a relative, it could be a parent, brother, sister, they're spreading misinformation and they're spreading it to other family members.

It might be that they're trying to inform their other family members not realising that it's misinformation that they're spreading.

We might have a journalist.

Now their role obviously is to provide accurate information, but it might be that the information changes.

So what they report might actually not turn out to be truthful in the long run.

But at the time they present that information, it could be they think it is genuinely accurate.

We've then got conspiracy theorists.

Now these are people who believe that events are the result of secret plans of those in power.

We have experts.

So these are people who are an authority on a particular subject, expert in a particular area.

It might be they're an expert in a particular area of medicine, for example, or finance.

They might be a teacher so they're an expert on education.

We have got a politician next.

So these are the people we have elected to represent our views.

We might have a fraudster, so someone who's trying to commit fraud or someone who wants to con people out of money.

And then we've got an insider.

So someone maybe who works within an industry, works in a company and they have access to maybe top secret information.

It could be a civil servant, for example, someone who works as an advisor to the government.

So what I'd like you to do now, I'd like you to pause the video, there's a little pause point there.

And making notes of the nine different people who might spread information.

See if you can think about why that might be as well.

Just add a little bit of information to each one, to say why they might spread misinformation.

Okay.

Now we're going to consider those nine different people.

And here we say, may spread misinformation.

We're going to try and rank them.

And we're going to rank them from those you think would have the most impact if they were to spread misinformation, down to the least impact if they were to spread misinformation.

And then what I'd like you to do, I'd like you to justify the person you put at the top of your diamond 9, and then think about why have you put the person at the bottom of your diamond 9? So you're going to have your nine different people are going to end up written out in little shape, looking like this.

So it is called a diamond 9 because of the shape it ends up in.

It's on the worksheet too so you can pop to the worksheet if you want to.

If you've not downloaded that already you might want to do that now.

And you're going to rank those in the order from the most impact if they spread misinformation to the least impact if they spread misinformation.

Okay, so now is the point where you can pause the video and then resume the video, once you have finished your task.

Okay, so this is my diamond 9.

So I've put the expert at the top of my diamond 9.

I believe an expert has the most impact if they are spreading misinformation as we trust experts, we trust what they're saying.

It's going to be accurate.

And actually government may listen to the expert as well.

I've put the prankster as having the least impact if they spread misinformation.

This is because they're trying to entertain, they're not trying to cause harm to others.

So I wonder if you agreed, I wonder what you've got, where you've put, perhaps for you guys, YouTubers may have more influence over you than they do over me.

Because it might be that you engage more with YouTube than I do.

So your diamond 9 would perhaps think about your situation.

And also maybe, depending on what the information is, what the misinformation is, that might vary where we would put them in our diamond 9 as well.

So we're going to look now at what can be done about the spread of misinformation.

If we're saying it's a really important issue in a democracy, what can we actually do about the spread of that misinformation? So these are some bullet points thinking about what we could do about the spread of misinformation.

So, we've looked at major regulation in another lesson.

So we looked at different organised, different parts of media regulation.

So that self regulation of the press, things like IPSO and the National Union of Journalists Code.

So, maybe we could introduce more laws, more regulations led by the government that could greater regulate what is in the press.

Journalists have to make sure that what they publish is accurate.

They need to be as sure as they can be that they have done all they can to ensure the information they publish is accurate.

The media have to take responsibility for any mistakes.

So if they do publish something which later turns out to be inaccurate they need to make sure they get that message out to the public as well.

Now are a lot of people might get their information from social media and that's not perhaps as regulated as our newspapers and perhaps broadcast media like TV and radio.

So social media companies have a responsibility we could say to remove false information.

Maybe highlight clearly where information shared is false, or maybe they could even turn off the share function to prevent citizens from re-sharing information that is actually misinformation, misleading, or false information.

We can ensure that we use reliable sources for our information.

So, think about do we know who has published that information? Do we know where they've got their information? Are they a creditable new source? Have we got it from something that perhaps the BBC, ITV news sources, Sky news sources, where we would expect that those journalists have spent time going through to check that that information is accurate.

So we could check the facts in stories or information ourselves.

So we could go to other sources and see is the same story being printed in more than one place.

And do the stories kind of match up, is the information similar.

Call this lateral reading where we look for more than one article sharing the same story.

And that last one, really important.

We can stop ourselves being part of the problem by not sharing misinformation ourselves.

What I'd like you to do now then is a task to look at misinformation.

And I'd like you to write a short news item on how we can tackle misinformation.

You're going to do two things in that article.

You're going to explain what is meant by misinformation.

And you're going to explain some ways that we can tackle misinformation as well.

What I have here are some ideas about what to include in your news items structure that you might use.

So I would start with a headline for your news item.

Think about the words that might get the main parts of your story across your audience.

Then I would have a leader.

This is one or two sentences that give the basic facts of the story.

Then the story itself.

So these are one or two short paragraphs, and they describe the issues, in this case of misinformation.

You might like to include a quote or an example of misinformation and then think about how it could be tackled.

And then your ending as a final sentence with a summary or a statement that gives your sense of the story.

So you can use that structure to help you.

Pause the video now and then when you've written your news item just start the video again, I'll give you some feedback.

So what I've got here is some ideas about the sorts of things I might expect to see in your news item.

So, things you might have included, misinformation is information which is false or misleading but not created with the intention of causing harm.

So we set out really clearly for people what misinformation is.

You might covered some of these then, misinformation is seen by many as threatening the key values in a democracy.

It's really important therefore, that we try to tackle this issue.

Some believe that one way to tackle misinformation is to introduce greater regulation of the media.

Other ways to tackle misinformation, that you might have included, citizens ensuring they check the facts of stories.

Citizens should look at a range of sources for information about a story.

Citizens should make sure they don't spread misinformation themselves.

So hopefully you've included some of those ideas in your news item that you wrote.

So I hope you've enjoyed the lesson, found the tasks interesting and you've learned a lot about these key words.

If you've completed all the tasks you now should hopefully be able to do these things.

So have a think, can you do these things now? Can you now define misinformation, disinformation and malinformation? Can you explain why misinformation can be an issue in a democracy? And can you explain what can be done about misinformation.

Really, really encourage you to use these three key terms. So misinformation, disinformation, malinformation.

When you're looking at news articles, news stories, think about, can you spot any of these as you go through perhaps looking at those articles? So if you're able to, could you please take a picture of your work and ask your parent or carer to share it with your teacher.

So they can see all the fantastic things that you've been learning about today.

And if you'd like to, ask your parent or carer to send a picture of your work, to @OakNational on Twitter, and then I'll be able to see your lovely work too.

Really well done for our lesson today.

Don't forget that you need to complete the exit quiz now and just check your learning, really good luck with that.

And then all that's left for me to say is thank you for joining me in the lesson today.

Take care and enjoy the rest of your learning today.