The Urgent Need for Online Civic Reasoning

I remember the first time I fell for a deep fake video. Or rather, that I was aware I fell for a deep fake video. It was during the run up to the 2020 presidential election and?two days after President Biden and President Trump had debated each other. Two days exactly, which you will see, is an important part of the story.??

My twelve-year-old son and I were hanging out on our couch visiting a friend. At one point, our friend started scrolling through social media and complaining about how many political videos were filling up her feed. “Like this one,” she said and showed me a video clip from the debate where President Biden was apologizing for separating children from their parents as they came across the US-Mexico border. The video had Spanish subtitles at the bottom because our friend is a Spanish speaker, but the audio was clear. I stared at the video feeling very confused. Why was President Biden apologizing for President Trump’s zero tolerance immigration policy? Did the Obama-Biden Administration have some hand in it, and I just didn’t realize it? What is going on????

President Trump’s zero tolerance immigration policy in 2017 and 2018 ended up separating 5,000 children from their parents and caregivers without a tracking process to reunite them. It was hard to forget. Yet here I was, momentarily confused as to who exactly had been responsible for this inhumane treatment of children.??

My son jumped in: “Mom, don’t you think its suspicious that they posted this video two days after the debate. Why did it take so long? Were they doctoring it or something?” The clouds parted, sunlight emerged, and my confusion disappeared. “You’re right! It is probably a very convincing fake video,” I responded.???

It turns out my son’s school had been teaching students how to spot deep fakes.??

Four years ago, it might have taken two days to develop a deep fake video, but I doubt that is true today in the wonderous age of generative AI where videos can be doctored in no time at all. While we wait for either tech companies themselves or governments around the world to develop a system that helps people parse truth from fiction, the burden falls upon us. As happens so often, students, educators, and families are on the ground floor for addressing society’s ills.?

Digital citizenship programs should be in every school in the county. Be not fooled by the term “digital native” that describes today’s children who have grown up in the presence of digital technology and can swipe, post, comment and vlog all while doing homework or brushing their teeth. Young people’s facility with navigating technology platforms is not the same as understanding what is real and what isn’t.?

One important component of digital citizenship is what Stanford Emeritus professor Sam Wineburg calls civic online reasoning.? Namely, “the ability to effectively search for, evaluate, and verify social and political information online.”? The problem is, most kids don’t have this ability. In a survey Wineburg and colleagues did with thousands of students in the U.S., 82% “mistook advertisements for news.” Globally, the OECD found only one in ten 15-year-old students can distinguish fact from opinion in their multi-country PISA 2018 survey.? ?

The “infodemic”, the UN’s terms for the epidemic of misinformation swirling around the world, means we must put civic online reasoning at the heart of what it means to be literate. In the U.S., there is a growing movement to address this problem with 19 state legislatures having taken action to support digital citizenship and media literacy.??

Digital citizenship usually refers to a suite of competencies that help students contribute constructively through life online. I like ISTE ’s Digital Citizenship competencies that include engaging in online life with respect, harnessing life online to actively solve problems, and of course parsing fact from fiction. Luckily, there are multiple programs that work with teachers, students, and schools to support these skills. So even without state action, educators can integrate principles of digital citizenship into their daily teaching.??

One way to do this is through the free Civic Online Reasoning curriculum that has been inspired by the work of Sam Wineburg and his colleagues at Stanford. The curriculum borrows tools from professional fact checkers and trains students to ask three main questions: Who is behind the information? What is the evidence? What do other sources say???

Some of you joined us earlier this year for an event on civic education, Back to School in an Election Year.?We debated questions around how to foster civic dialogue and create brave spaces in school and on college campuses. But several audience questions challenged us to think about the ability to have a debate in an era when the fact is often indistinguishable from fiction. This is why, for me, civic online reasoning needs to be at the core of what it means to become educated in the 21st century. It is the very foundation of being able to have constructive dialogue in the first place.??

Whatever happens in the current U.S. Presidential election, I hope the other 31 states take up the challenge of helping our young people develop the civic online reasoning and digital citizenship skills they need (and, while they are at it, teach their parents a thing or two about navigating fake news online).??