DEAR EDITOR:

Did you see that CNN lightened the skin tone of Memphis police officers accused of killing Tyre Nichols? Did you hear that earth actually is cooling, not warming?

Well, you shouldn’t have, because these headlines are fake.

In a world with a 24-hour news cycle and information overload, it can be hard to identify what headlines are true and which are false. As readers, it is within our power to fact-check news we read. It’s important to care about fighting the battle against misinformation. A recent study from the University of Southern California found misinformation spreads on social media due to reward-based algorithms.

When misinformation is shared, users gain resharing habits. Once the algorithm learns the habits, misinformation will pop up under recommended feeds for companies to prioritize engagement.

“I think that journalism is the only thing that is really ensuring that we continue to have a thriving democracy,” said Ashton Marra, a journalism professor at West Virginia University. Caring about news literacy impacts everyone, so join the movement. What is news literacy?

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Connie Schultz said news literacy is informed consumption of news, reporting and journalism, and ability to distinguish between rumor and outright misinformation versus something that can be confirmed as factual.

The News Literacy Project is a nonpartisan nonprofit organization striving to create national educational movement to see news literacy become an integral part of American life, and people of all ages and backgrounds know how to identify credible news. NLP’s mission is to create better informed, more engaged and empowered individuals, fostering a stronger democracy.

News Literacy Project provides free tools to help fight misinformation — an app, newsletter and fact-checking databases.

The two weekly newsletters are The Sift and Get Smart About News. RumorGuard is a fact-check platform for viral information. It runs through five factors of viral information: source, evidence, context, reasoning and authenticity to verify credibility. Checkology is an online resource prompting users to choose what type of source you need to verify. It will ask questions leading to understanding credibility.

The Informable app has a series of games to learn to spot advertisements, evidence, news and opinion.

We are part of a team of Kent State PR, journalism and advertising students hoping to defeat deception by raising awareness about misinformation and News Literacy Project. The goal is to educate northeast Ohioians on news literacy and resources.

Individuals can join the movement against misinformation by signing an online pledge to fact-check social media posts, look for opinion in articles before reposting on social media.

KATIE MASKO

Kent State University