Helping Children Learn What’s Real On the Internet

Hurricane season is a good time to consider the many photographs of storms that are highlighted on social media, but are actually fake, from movies, or shared out of context. Photos circulate with each new (and real) hurricane of photoshopped sharks swimming through city downtown areas or of waves pounding the Statue of Liberty and it’s not always easy to figure out what’s real and what isn’t.

We’re now living in our own perfect storm of misinformation: More of us are seeking information online, but there are more and more examples of deliberately misleading information being posted and shared. So how will your children know what’s real? As a parent, you have the exciting, but challenging, task of showing them how to decide what’s real online and what isn’t.

That’s not as easy as it sounds! So let’s warm up with a quick True or False quiz. Which of these statements do you think are true?

• It’s easy to spot photos that have been faked.
• Children are pretty smart these days, especially around technology.
• The best way to tell if a website is accurate is to look for clues up and down the whole page.

If you said any of these were true, then you may find the rest of this article helpful because none of those was true — really!

• It can be tough to spot photos that have been faked. For example, the photos of people on this site were created with the latest artificial intelligence.
• Children are smart, but still need help to understand how to use technology safely, just like they need help with road safety or learning to read.
• The best way to tell if a website is accurate is to look for clues from other websites to see if the same information shows up in lots of different places.

The Internet is complicated, with lots of people — or even software call bots — trying to fool us. So what can you do to help find what’s true online? Here are 10 tips to help you and your child search together:

1. Watch the video Searching It Up with your child. Like all the videos in GBH’s new series, Search It Up, you can see real kids talking about what’s real and what isn’t online.
2. Take a look at Searching and You from our Ruff Ruffman: Humble Media Genius series. Ruff and Blossom look at how some websites might have a bias and Ruff’s friend Chet explains how search engines work.
3. Use Safe Search so that your children don’t accidentally find inappropriate images. Each search engine has options in the Settings section where you can decide what you see or don’t see.
4. Learn about the kinds of conversations to have with your children about information online, advertising, and social media.
5. Search for things together with your children. As you search, try to find the same answers in different sites — don’t trust the first site you find.
6. Ask questions when you’re with your children that make them think about where information comes from. Ask questions like “How do you know that?” or “Can we prove this?”
7. Explain the difference between fact and opinion. Pick some foods your children think are yummy or yucky and explain that this is an opinion, but what color the food is or how much it costs is a fact.
8. Learn how professional fact checkers evaluate online content, like at the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG): "The fact checkers' approach revealed a paradox: To understand a website, you must first leave it. When fact checkers came across an unfamiliar site, they left it, opened a new tab in their browser, and searched the broader web for information about the original site," explains SHEG's director Joel Breakstone.
9. Look at Snopes.com to see if something surprising in social media is real or not. Snopes has a great reputation for investigating false stories.
10. Take your time! Often we share things quickly before even thinking about whether something may be true or false.