ABOUT COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS: Community Connections is a lesson collection designed for adult learners and community colleges, with the goal of inspiring student civic action. This might be respectful debate or conversation about a local issue, planning a community event, or a creative project that helps connect local, national and global issues.
To use this lesson: First, watch the video and answer the questions below as a warm up. Next, choose one or more of the activities under "Take Action" that best fits your classroom. Or, use the segment above to inspire your own original classroom activities — the spirit of these lessons is to connect current events to actions that make your community a better place for everyone!
SUMMARY
Half of U.S. adults say they sometimes get their news from social media. However, almost two-thirds of adults say they view social media as a bad thing for democracy. This raises the question of what responsibility social media companies bear for our increasingly divided political climate. Judy Woodruff explores that more for her ongoing series, America at a Crossroads.
View the transcript of the story.
WARM-UP QUESTIONS
- What percentage of people in the U.S. say they get their news from social media?
- How many Americans (what fraction of Americans) believe that social media is "bad for democracy"?
- Who is Katie McHugh, and how was she changed by social media, according to this interview?
- Why does content on social media give viewers a distorted sense of politics, according to Chris Bail?
- Where was AI used to suggest less divisive language to users?
FOCUS QUESTIONS
If you were designing a social media platform with the goal of limiting misinformation and intentionally divisive posts, what strategy would you use? Do you think limiting false or inflammatory posts should be a goal of social media companies?
Media literacy: Where do you get your news about current events? Does most of your news come from social media, or some other source?
TAKE ACTION
If you discussed the focus question above, you might already have written down some details about where you get the news. But how accurate is your list, and what might you be leaving out? As a class, use this activity to track your social media and news habits for a day, or even a week. Be sure to write in your log every time you hear or read some piece of news — whether it's from social media, web searches, text chats with friends or word of mouth. Then as a class, discuss — what surprised you most about your news diet? Do you think you'd make any changes in the future?
You might also use this activity to design an app that can help combat misinformation.
Your class might also want to watch the following video from MediaWise on how to get out of your news "echo chamber."
This project was funded under the 2024 Leonore Annenberg Civic Mission of the Nation Initiative, sponsored by the Leonore Annenberg Institute for Civics. LAIC is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.
Fill out this form to share your thoughts on Classroom’s resources.
