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Workshops against disinformation: "In every class, at least one child falls on Fake News"

2019-10-15T16:44:24.115Z


"An Indian marries his snake", "Refugees get cell phones for free": Young people are constantly confronted with false reports, says journalist Juliane von Reppert-Bismarck - and explains how she counters them.



"Lie detectors" - lie detectors who detect false messages on the Internet, recognize and distinguish from true messages. Journalist Juliane von Reppert-Bismarck wants to train as many pupils as possible in such Lie Detectors in Europe. That's why she founded an organization of the same name two years ago.

Meanwhile, "Lie Detectors" is active in three countries: Germany, Austria and Belgium. The concept: Journalists go to schools and offer workshops for 10- to 15-year-olds to teach appropriate strategies in dealing with fake news and to protect against disinformation.

SPIEGEL: Mrs. von Reppert-Bismarck, the Shell youth study shows that many young people in Germany are very receptive to populist slogans. Are you surprised?

Juliane von Reppert-Bismarck: No, not at all. We learn in our work in schools that specific news in the form of very one-sided reporting or even plain lies, fake news, from right-wing populist circles targeted to children and adolescents are addressed. This happens through different social networks. My godchild told me a while ago that it got a message from the online magazine "Breitbart", which is considered extreme right, in which it was said that refugees had set fire to the oldest church in Germany in Dortmund. A lie, but the medium has never corrected that. Such false reports, which do not necessarily have to be political, circulate daily. They should unsettle and undermine trust.

SPIEGEL: Can children and adolescents uncover such lies on their own?

Reppert-Bismarck: Some are skeptical, others are not. No school is 100 percent against the fact that their students fall for opinion or false reports. In every class, there is at least one child who happens to do that - whether it's an upper middle-school, a village or a focal school. However, many parents and teachers do not suspect on which platforms the students are traveling and what they encounter there.

SPIEGEL: How did you find out about it yourself?

Reppert-Bismarck: In 2016, just before Donald Trump was elected US President, I had a very strong eye-opening experience. I talked with my 13-year-old goddaughter, who grows up in a healthy world in Lower Saxony. She told me, "If we were allowed to vote, half of my class would vote for Trump." I asked why, and then she sent me what was circulating around the schoolyard in the WhatsApp groups: a screenshot of a text on Instagram spreading wild rumors about Trump's rival Hilary Clinton.

SPIEGEL: What was it about?

Reppert-Bismarck: The text alleged that Clinton had CIA agents murdered and asked the children of these dead agents what they thought of this woman. By contrast, when Trump trashed a few women, that would be a harmless offense by comparison. The text sounded conspiratorial, railing against mass media whose credibility was dubious anyway, and was clearly geared to children as a target audience.

SPIEGEL: How did you react?

Reppert-Bismarck: I asked the child: "What is the source?" And it answered: "Insta". It did not understand that Instagram is not a source. That's when I realized that if we want to enlighten here, we need to understand where children and adolescents get their news and information from, how that shapes their world view, and talk about it with them.

SPIEGEL: And so the idea for founding the "Lie Detectors" came into being?

Reppert-Bismarck: In 2016 there were still some aha experiences that particularly touched me as a journalist. I worked in London during the Brexit referendum and, like many of my colleagues, was upset that we did not know how it would turn out. Then I had a chat with a dear family member who wrote to me: "Why should I believe you, after all you are a journalist?" So I thought, how can journalists work to restore their credibility?

SPIEGEL: At "Lie Detectors", journalists, including SPIEGEL editors like myself, were sent to class in schools. What is behind it?

Reppert-Bismarck: The journalists will be trained in a one-day workshop to show selected examples of how to distinguish true from falsehoods - and why this is important - in the sense of "lie detectors". This is about the famous photo of a shark that supposedly floats on a highway. We want to convey that critical thinking is worthwhile, whereby we ourselves always remain politically neutral.

SPIEGEL: Could not teachers do that too?

Reppert-Bismarck: That's the goal. That's why we expect the teachers to be in classroom visits. I have experienced that some take over or follow our concept afterwards. But we have evaluated feedback sheets from 408 school visits, which shows that fewer than half of the teachers have dealt with the subject so far in class - for lack of time or insecurity. As long as that is so, we journalists are asked. We need to move out of the comfort zone and try to re-establish our credibility.

SPIEGEL: What exactly does that look like?

Reppert-Bismarck: The first part of the class visit is about black and white, about lies and truth, in the second part, the journalists make it clear: While we try to depict reality as well as possible in our work, we do not make the claim to the absolute truth. An essential element is that the journalist exposes himself to the children and tells them when he or she has worked unsatisfactorily despite all efforts.

From the experiences of Lie Detectors

Which media do students and teachers use?

There is a digital divide in the use of media by students and teachers. While 49.6 percent of teachers use Facbook, this is the least used platform for students, at 11.9 percent. Visually influenced platforms such as Instagram (60.4 percent) and Snapchat (48.6 percent) thus dominate among young people.

How many students come in on Fake News?

Ninety-five percent of the journalists interviewed for "Lie Detectors" in schools said: There was at least one kid in the class who fell for Fake News, regardless of the school's social background.

Does the topic really need to be taught in class?

Eighty percent of the surveyed teachers said they found it important to educate children and adolescents on social media fraud. But less than half said they had already addressed the subject with their class in class.

How do the students react?

Almost all of the surveyed students said they enjoyed the workshops with the journalists. Nine out of ten said they would now better understand journalism and the pitfalls of disinformation.

SPIEGEL: Which example do you tell yourself?

Reppert-Bismarck: I was in Ivory Coast for a few days for the "Wall Street" journal, where I interviewed a tribal elder who had provided an investor with large tracts of land for banana plantations. The man spoke in his African language, an interpreter translated that into French and I quickly wrote that in English in my notebook. Whether in my article in the end I have grasped the meaning of the statements correctly and whether there are not also interests of the interpreter, for example, I do not know until today.

SPIEGEL: How do the students react to such a confession?

Reppert-Bismarck: They become very quiet and listen carefully. We can not tell from the feedback sheets whether class visits measurably increase trust in journalism. But it is obvious that the students perceive the journalists as people who, as part of their job, strive daily to depict the highly complex reality. They do not always succeed, they can only be a fragment, but they are credible because they are aware of it and they make it transparent. This image is to arm the children when they meet the term lying press, so they can at least then say: "But I met a journalist who was not like that."

SPIEGEL: However, it is only a one-off, short encounter. The class visits last 90 minutes.

Reppert-Bismarck: Yes, time is short. But we can at least arouse interest and show that it is fun and worthwhile to distinguish a truth from a lie and to be able to recognize the gray areas in between, for example to be able to distinguish a fact and an opinion. The children learn that there is a difference between a deliberately posted lie and an incomplete journalistic coverage. We want to convey that the middle, the imprecise, can also be very interesting, without always having to immediately retreat to opposing poles. Ultimately, it's about democracy - and against radicalization.

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2019-10-15

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