An image appears to show President Donald Trump asking Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to pardon Tiger Woods for a DUI charge. It’s a fake post.
Posts by Peter Adams
Google query: When did the US first invade iraq? AI answer: March 19, 2003 Following a failed attempt to appeal to the United Nations for a mandate to invade Iraq, the United States, along with forces from Australia, Denmark, Netherlands, Poland, and Great Britain launched Operation Iraqi Freedom on March 19, 2003. (The 1991 invasion is conveniently forgotten.)
How quickly we forget.
We must never allow LLMs to serve as epistemic grounding for society.
⚠️ From AI-generated content to coordinated disinformation campaigns, the Iran war is driving A LOT of falsehoods online.
In this week's newsletter, we provide:
- tips to separate fact from fiction
- discussion question ideas
- Daily Do Now slides + more
🔗 go.newslit.org/Sift16March2...
“It opened my mind about how much is fake. I’m going to use caution with what I see on the internet — look deeper at what I see on my phone." - Jacob Hadley
Hadley & other HS students in the Pittsburgh area took part in the Student Journalism Summit, learning from NLP's @peteradams.bsky.social
A video shared on X claims to show a recent Iranian attack on a U.S. air base in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The video is from 2024 and shows a bombing in Yemen.
📢 We're hiring a Prospect Research Manager!
ℹ️ The person in this role will be responsible for building out a robust prospect research program & supporting the operational infrastructure that is foundational to our fundraising work.
🔗 Learn more / apply: go.newslit.org/ResearchMgr
#Jobs #Hiring
Educators: Can your students separate news from content about news? It's a distinction that matters, as NLP's @hannahcov.bsky.social explains in today's special edition of The Sift!
Check out the newsletter for classroom slides on this topic + our new infographic 👇🏽
"Trying to spot AI-generated content with the naked eye is basically a guessing game, even for seasoned reporters. It’s necessary to look at the source, evidence & surrounding context to identify these fabrications." - Dan Evon on takeaways from presenting #2TruthsAndAI at the Knight Media Forum
📰 What's a day in the life like for a journalist working for a community newspaper? In a new edition of "Spill the Ink," La Jolla Light reporter Noah Lyons takes us behind the scenes of writing, editing & laying out the weekly print publication that's part of the @sandiegouniontribune.com family ⤵️
“Almost all of the most viral posts reviewed by WIRED on Saturday came from accounts with blue check marks, meaning they…could be eligible to earn money based on how much engagement their posts generate, even if the content is false.”
From @davidgilbert.bsky.social
Heads up folks: @thetnholler.bsky.social posted an AI-generated video this morning that was a deepfake of the captain of the U.S. women’s hockey team, and they seem to be promoting it as if it’s a real video. So watch out for that and don’t spread fakes.
A social media post reads, “Many of you may have missed this, but the little boy who Bad Bunny handed his Grammy to at the Super Bowl was Liam Ramos! Amazing!” and includes two images, one showing a young child holding a Grammy Award and the other showing a child wearing a blue hat. The News Literacy Project has added a label that says “FALSE.”
❌ NO: Bad Bunny did not give a Grammy statuette to Liam Conejo Ramos during the Super Bowl halftime show.
✔️ He handed the award to a young actor named Lincoln Fox.
🔗 When a claim deals with a controversial subject & plays into confirmation bias, it often spreads quickly: go.newslit.org/SBhalftime
Teen girl smiling at phone, promoting critical thinking in students with a free activity planner from National News Literacy Week, Feb 2-6, 2026.
1/ Teach a different standard of news literacy each day of National #NewsLiteracyWeek with our activity planner!
📚 From zoning information all the way to civic participation, use our free, downloadable resource as a guide throughout the week.
🔗 Download it at NewsLiteracyWeek.org
A post reads, “Man isn’t happy after minor earthquake in Toronto yesterday spills his fries at McDonald’s!” and includes an image that appears to show a man eating at a McDonald’s restaurant during an earthquake. The News Literacy Project has added a label that says “AI-GENERATED.”
❌ NOPE: This is not from a genuine video of an earthquake spilling a man’s McDonald’s fries in Toronto.
✔️ It's AI-generated.
🤔 Some AI fakes look incredibly real. This is not one of those cases, with odd visuals + jumbled text.
🔗 RumorGuard post: go.newslit.org/AIQuake
#NewsLiteracyWeek
It's hard to recognize AI-generated content because it’s increasingly realistic "and because we’re all vulnerable to the influence of our own biases, which can cause us to under-scrutinize things we want to believe.” - NLP's @peteradams.bsky.social in this @startribune.com story ⤵️
Same.
I didn’t try to discount OP, I took issue with some of the replies.
You didn’t provide an example of anything.
And your impression from reading this is that Politico is reporting Vance’s opinion as a fact rather than his opinion?
If you feel like you have examples of hard news coverage that reports falsehoods or subjective opinions as facts, then be specific and link to it to support your assertions.
Social media research has a conflict of interest problem:
“these findings suggest industry influence in social media research is extensive, impactful, and often opaque”
A real concern is that this may incentivize scholars to minimize the harms of social media platforms
arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11507
The fact is that opinions are not enough. Opinions aren’t possible without the underlying reporting. You can’t have a meaningful, sound opinion on something without a fair, accurate and impartial accounting of it.
This kind of proves my point. When people stop distinguishing between news and opinion — when they posit that there’s opinion in everything in equal measure — then they give themselves permission to dismiss reporting they don’t like, and to substitute opinions they do like for actual news coverage.
Re: SOP — generally, opinion editors in quality newsrooms are supposed to seek thoughtful, fair opinions that are based on facts and strong evidence — and which prompt fruitful, good-faith discussion and debate. One could easily make the case that the specific piece in question didn’t meet that mark
Now there’s a strawman! Of course news organizations are responsible for the quality of the opinions they publish.
But you can’t use the word choice of an opinion headline in outlet A, and then contrast it with the word choice in a hard news headline from outlet B to allege systematic bias.
Others chimed in to say that news media intentionally disguise opinion as news, or make the distinction too subtle for the average person to recognize. So I pointed out how prominently it was labeled as “opinion.”
I wasn’t merely repeating that it was an opinion as an academic exercise. People in the replies were trying to hold news organizations to account for using the word “lie” in a headline … as though it were a fact-based statement. It was not. It was one opinionator’s take.
I am replying to the people in OP‘s replies, a number of whom have used this screenshot as an occasion to cynically unload on the entirety of the press — to dismiss all US news organizations as evil, bought and paid for, worthless, etc.
OK, then people should direct their criticism at the columnist. But calling our entire fourth estate “evil “is incredibly irresponsible and harmful.
Whose coverage are you talking about? Just because you can find the word “misstep” used in connection with Trump in one piece, from one outlet, and can find another reference to “lie” in connection with Harris in another doesn’t mean there is some conspiracy to cover those two candidates differently
How would you suggest holding columnists and pundits who offer their opinions and takes accountable for when their opinions, in hindsight, are off … or when their opinion-based predictions are wrong?