The skills kids need to avoid getting fooled by fake news

Welcome to Small Humans, an ongoing series at Mashable that looks at how to take care of – and deal with – the kids in your life. Because Dr. Spock is nice and all, but it’s 2018 and we have the entire internet to contend with.

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One day your kids are learning to walk and the next they’re on their own sharing Russian propaganda on Youtube and Facebook.

You might think your great-uncle using an old desk top to “surf the internets” is the person at risk of accidentally spreading “fake news” on social networks, but kids these days aren’t always faring so much better. 

A large-scale study by the Stanford Graduate School of Education found that young people at every stage from middle school to college were consistently unable to differentiate news from advertising, or false information from the truth, a state of affairs the researchers described as “bleak.”  Read more…

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