There's a mild-mannered warrior in the front lines of the propaganda wars.
Kylie Peters, a librarian in the Chicago area, has been concerned about the rise of so-called "fake news": deliberately false stories made to appear factual, designed to sway public opinion.
"Librarians are the original search engine," said Peters, who works at Geneva Public Library in suburban Chicago. A recent analysis showed that fake or hoax stories got more reader engagement on Facebook than real news stories during the last three months of the election.
"People think they don't need libraries because of Google. In fact, they need us more than ever to help them combat information overload, and sort and evaluate the current glut of information," Peters wrote in a recent Facebook post. She shared strategies for identifying false information and biases, noting that biases are not always bad -- as long as you know what they are.
Here are her tips for helping your children learn how to distinguish facts from fiction or propaganda online:
"Your first stop when you visit an unfamiliar website should be the 'about' page. Is the information there neutral? Why does this website exist? Who funds the site? Who owns it? Who runs it? What are that person or people's goals? Are contributors paid? What is the submission process for content? All of these can be clues about both accuracy and biases.
"Scroll to the very bottom of the page and look at who owns the copyright. Is it an individual? A business? A smaller division of a large business? What makes this site qualified to provide accurate information on the topic the site covers?
"Does the website cite its sources? Are the sources reliable? Does it link to reliable sites?"
Peters encourages readers to get context clues from a site's domain name -- "sites that end in .gov are from the U.S. government, while .edu is an educational institution" -- and reminds them to trust their guts. If a site looks unprofessional, it probably is.
"Look at graphic design. Your instincts are right on this one: Poor graphic design may be an indicator of low-quality material. The same goes for material with lots of grammar and spelling errors, exclamation points and capital letters."
It gets trickier when it comes time to evaluate the content itself. Keep an eye out for this kind of language, Peters says:
"Watch for 'bias words' that indicate emotion, opinion or slant, or linguistic tricks to make things sound a certain way. Unbiased words will be neutral, and will make sense when used in both a positive and a negative sentence. For example:
'She was applauded for advocating a new immigration policy.'
'She was criticized for advocating a new immigration policy.'
"These both make sense, so in this case, 'advocating' is a neutral description."
One of Peters' most critical tips?
"Don't use Google search rankings as an indicator of accuracy!" To drive the point home, she shared this example: "I just Googled 'Martin Luther King Jr.' and the fourth result was a white supremacist site. We don't know Google's algorithm for search results," she says, and even if someone figured it out, the algorithm is constantly changing.
"The more a site is linked to by other sites and shared on social media, the more likely it is to be high on the results page. Your results may be affected by your location and by your previous searches. Sites portraying a subject positively tend to appear at the top of the page, and negatively, at the bottom." Business considerations are at play, too: "Google owns a lot of products, and it pushes its own properties to the top of the search results.
"Website owners know you're most likely to click one of the top five search results. There are a lot of tricks people will use to make their Google search rankings go up. For example, by artificially increasing the number of links to their site or by showing search engines different data from what they show human visitors. Google tries to catch spam and stop manipulation of its system, but it's an ongoing war."
Think you and your child are ready to spot the fake news from the real? Try this test: Google the phrase "Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus" and click on the site that comes up first.
"Can you identify the clues that this is not a reliable website?" Peters asks. "Even better, show the site to someone who doesn't know about it and see if they believe it. This site was specifically designed to teach students digital literacy, and has some built-in clues to help you identify it as false information."
Identifying reliable websites and sources "may sound like a lot of work, but it becomes quick and easy once you've had some practice," says Peters.
Other librarians added their own tips to her suggestions. One mentioned "triangulation," meaning "visiting at least three sites to verify the facts."
If you do get overwhelmed, Peters reminds you that librarians are there to help.
"If you haven't been to your local library lately, you should go," she says. "It's probably a lot cooler than you think."