Ela Borowiec English Homework

Our English teacher did a very interesting experiment in our class last week. She showed us an exciting headlineheadlineheadline in one of the posts on her social media. It said “ShockingshockingShocking! Astronauts have found living creatures on Mars.” We were all very excited. She asked us to investigateinvestigateinvestigate this topic as our homework. Aliens! Can you believe it? We all decided that it was going to be the best homework ever! Homework about aliens!

At home I told my parents, but they weren’t excited at all. Mum looked at me seriouslyseriouslyseriously and asked about the sourcesourcesource I got this information from. How weird! It was my English teacher, so she couldn’t be wrong. She usually gives us very informativeinformativeinformative texts to read. My mum just smiled and asked me to verify the informationverify the informationverify the information. So I went to my bedroom and started the researchresearchresearch. At the very moment the news of aliens on Mars was everywhere on social media. It went viralwent viral [go viral]went viral and everybody was excited. But my parents' reaction made me think.

First I checked the URLURLURL of the original article. I found it didn’t end typically with dot com but it was dotdotdot con. That was the first sign that there was something not really ok. Then, I looked at the article closelycloselyclosely. The publishing datepublishing datepublishing date was the 13th March, 1876! What’s more, the picture of an alien was taken from a website with free pictures. At that moment, I really saw red flagsred flags [red flag]red flags. There were no editorseditors [editor]editors mentioned on the site and no authors. I started looking for alien news on popular news websites and I couldn’t find anything.

Then I read an article about clickbaitclickbaitclickbait and how it works. Do you know that many headlines are simply made up to grab our attentiongrab our attentiongrab our attention and make us click to read the article? People click and the webpage makes money. I thought of the celebrity gossipcelebrity gossipcelebrity gossip columns I read. One catchycatchycatchy headline, many clicks and lots of money.

The next day at school, everybody was talking only about aliens. When the English teacher asked us if we still believe in aliens on Mars I was the only person who said no. It was a shockshockshock. I stood up and presented my homework results. The teacher congratulated me on my findingsfindings [finding]findings and explained that she gave us a fake news storyfake news storyfake news story to grab our attention and make us think of what we read. She also wanted to show us that fake news can spread easily.spread easilyspread easily. Then, our English teacher started explaining to us how fake news can influence our opinions by presenting really biasedbiasedbiased facts. The next interesting homework we got was: Fake news, biasbiasbias, and influence. I’m really excited!

1 Źródło: Ela Borowiec, [na podstawie:] www.derby.ac.uk/magazine/issue‑12/influence‑of‑fake‑news/ [dostęp 17.02.2022], www.commonsensemedia.org/research [dostęp 17.02.2022], licencja: CC BY-SA 3.0.