Fake news creator for one day (IMS-M2-02-EN)

• To support students’ learning about information disorder and fake news by letting them be the creators of a fake news article for once.

• First-liners

1. Divide the students in pairs. The task for each pair of students is to write a short news article that is fake news. The aim is to produce a news article that is fake news, but as convincing as possible.
2. The students should use the computer to do this. They should come up with a title for the article, an introduction, the body text of the article. Additionally, they should find good copyright-free images to add into their articles (using sites such as Freepik, Pexels, or Unsplash). The students can use any tool available to make the fake news article look as real as possible, for instance by using an AI generator to create images for the article or to serve as eyewitnesses to an event that never truly occurred. Make sure that they also pay attention to the lay-out of the website on which the information is published (name, logo, etc.).
3. By letting their creativity and use of digital tools to create the article run free, students can learn about the different strategies that can be used to fabricate fake news and they learn about the workings of various tools that may aid real-life fake news producers in making their misleading information look more credible.
4. Once all student pairs have finished, the articles are printed out and exchanged between the student pairs. The challenge is now for each pair to identify the elements that other teams used that give away that this as a false article.

Computer with internet access for each pair of students.

Document editing software such as Microsoft Word or Canva.

Simulation

Before the students start working on the task, make sure they have a good understanding of the different elements of online information that could reveal it is false (e.g. the website, the language of the text, the image, the author of the information, etc.).

None.

Institute for Media Studies