Assignment task: Answer the following questions below and be sure to be detailed and thoughtful with your responses:
Q1. How many viral posts - whether articles, videos or photographs - do you click on each week?
How many on average do you share on social media?
Q2. How often do you check to make sure what you are sharing or commenting on is real?
How do you go about finding that out?
Q3. How much do you care if a story purporting to be real actually is?
Q4. How much more careful are you with online sources when you are doing work for school than when you are simply surfing the web for fun? How do you decide what is a reliable source for your schoolwork?
Q5. What sources of news do you usually trust? What sources do you rarely trust? Why?
Q6. What responsibility do journalists and news outlets who post or link these stories have to make sure they are true?
Is it their job to make sure something is not a hoax before they cover or link to it?
How do you think they go about verifying information?
Q7. Can embellished, or outright fake, stories have real-world consequences? What examples can you give?
Q8. In a world where news can be reported by anyone with a cellphone, how do you decide what is true?
What questions should you ask to find out? What personal rules might you develop to decide what news you post and when you post it? What harm might be done by not following those rules?