Fake News United States VS Ukraine

The dynamics of Fake News: Critical analysis of its causes, accelerators and impacts; A case of Ukraine and the US

Name

School

Senior Seminar

12/16/2019

Introduction

Fake news has been circulating for a long time in news outlets and recently, it has been pumped into the public eye like never before. Major news channels have broadcasted false stories about almost anything from war crimes and corruption to celebrity scandals to shape the public view, spread fear, and cause mayhem. I want to research fake news because their spread has made us more ignorant, sew divide between us, and have spread hate among us. As recently warned in the world economic forum (2013) about the so-called "digital wildfires," i.e. fake news going viral through digital media could be taken as the most significant threats that societies and governments face. The discourses revolving around fake news have been in existent for quite some time now- even though known by different names and definitions, only in recent years has the term drawn so much interests and public discourses.

As argued by Allcott & Gentzkow, (2017), the topic of fake news has been extensively covered in psychology, economics, computer science, and political science. For the past decade, scholars have analyzed the ways in which entertainment can affect politics. In particular, the satirical nature of talk shows. This has drawn interests on how news coated with entertainment may affect the political space. Holbert (2005) asserts that the daily shows are programs that propagate fake news. He argues that such programs revolve around political satire, therefore, passing across a message that most falsified information is majorly political. Across countries, whether with authoritative or democratic regimes, fake news has diminished the credibility of legit media sites. This has led to the polarization of the public. However, the advent of the internet has been attributed to the rise of fake news. Finneman &Thomas (2018) attributes this growth of falsified information to the fact that anyone is capable of posting anything online. The rising popularity of social media has significantly contributed to the rise of fake news. In 2016, Facebook users reached 1.8 billion with Twitter registering about 400 million users. The shift has also been attributed to the declining trust in mainstream media. The biggest factor behind the growth of misleading information is their social engagement. For example, Silverman (2016) argues that during the 2016 presidential elections in the USA, the public engaged with misleading information more on Facebook than in mainstream media. Allcot & Gentzknow (2017) assert that in the month before the 2016 elections, people spent about one hour or more engaging with social media news.

Research Question

Given the fact that the Russian government has spread lies and propaganda across news outlets and social media, how does fake news affect public perception in Ukraine and the United States?

Choosing to compare Ukraine and the US was logical since both countries have been affected by Fake News, whether it's a civil war in Ukraine or the election of Donald Trump in the United States. In this paper, I will talk about what can be considered Fake News or Disinformation, how it spreads, what is the motivations behind them, who believes them, and how it affects public perception.

Hypothesis 1: If Individuals believe a story is ideologically slanted in to affirm their belief, they will also perceive stories from that same outlet to be ideologically slanted in the same direction.

Hypothesis 2: Individuals with less than college education will be more likely to believe in fake news stories.

Definition

The pace of life in the 21st Century has created “infostorms” that overwhelm our senses.

"Fake news are false news stories, often of a sensational nature, created to be widely shared or distributed to generate revenue, promote or discrediting a public figure, political movement, company, etc…" dictionary.com. Allcott & Gentzkow (2017) define fake news as news articles that are verifiably and intentionally false and have the potential to mislead readers. The definition of fake news in this inquiry includes news articles that were deliberately fabricated, such as an article from the now inoperative site denverguardian.com that once published an article with the headline "FBI agent suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead in an apparent murder-suicide."Many other articles are also included most of which originate from satirical online sites but have the potential to be taken as factual, especially when viewed in isolation on Facebook or Twitter feeds. For instance, in 2016 July, it was reported on the now-defunct website wtoe5news.com that Pope Francis had endorsed the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. The site suggested that it is a fantasy website though this disclaimer was not included in the article. The article went viral and received more than one million shares on Facebook, with many people believing the news (Allcott & Gentzkow 2017).

This discussion's definition rules out other close articles to fake news: 1.Uninominal mistakes on media reports such as when it was said that a Bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the oval office by Donald Trump, 2. Rumors whose origin is not a particular news site,3. Conspiracy theories (by definition, these are difficult to verify as either true or false and are typically spread or originated by people who hold the belief that they could be true), 4. Satire that is not likely to be misconstrued as factual 5. False statements propagated by politicians,6. Misleading or slanted reports which are not outright false.

There are seven types of misinformation that can be called “Fake News”:

1. Satire or Parody: No intention to cause harm like The Onion, Saturday Night Live, or The Moon Hoax.

2. Misleading Content: misleading use of information to frame an issue or an individual.

3. Imposter Content: when genuine sources are impersonated.

4. Fabricated Content: New content that is completely false, designed to deceive and cause harm.

5. False Connection: When headlines, visuals or captions don’t support content.

6. False Context: when genuine content is shared with false contextual information.

7. Manipulated Content: when genuine information or imagery is manipulated to deceive.

History

Fake news and close lookalikes are not new. Consider the historical example the "Great Moon Hoax," published in 1835 by the New York Sun about the discovery of the possibility of the moon to support life. In 1835 the New York Sun published a series of articles about what's on the moon, they wrote, there were batmen, goat-like creatures with blue skin; a temple made of polished sapphire. These were the astonishing sights witnessed by John Herschel, who was an eminent British astronomer when he pointed his telescope towards the Moon from an observatory in South Africa. These articles caused a stir; The newspaper more than doubled its sales to become the world's bestselling daily newspaper. Except that these articles were a complete hoax meant for satire, but the audience failed to recognize it as such, and it caused confusion among people. Later the paper retracted it. Another more recent example is the "Flemish secession Hoax" of 2006, whereby it was reported on a Belgium public television that the Flemish parliament had been accorded independence from Belgium. This report was misunderstood as true by a large number of viewers.

Many reasons hold as to why fake news is of critical significance. First, barriers to entry into the media industry have dropped a great deal-partly because it is easier than ever before to set up a website and because it is easy to monetize content published online via advertising sites. Since reputational concerns act like barriers for media outlets to knowingly publicizing false stories, higher entry barriers would translate to inaccurate reporting.

How it spreads?

Ukraine

Russian News Media influence the Russian speaking population, which consequently lead to a civil war between the Ukrainian government and separatists backed by Russia. Before analyzing the Ukrainian crisis and how Russia got involved in spreading fake news leading to war it is important to understand the origin of the crisis.

When Ukraine gained independence in 1999, it happened as a shock that Russia couldn't swallow owing to its strategic ambitions to control the space around its borders. Losing Ukraine meant that Russia would have a decreased ability to demonstrate dominance over the black sea region. All along, Ukraine has been an important player in Russia's nation-building ambitions. Ukraine had been considered important in Russia's nation-building needs since Kyiv has always been perceived as the mother of all cities in Russia, a narrative that has been held even by Vladimir Putin in his 2014 address to the federation council and the State Duma. Therefore, Ukraine is not only important in the geopolitical strategic thinking of Russia but also plays a symbolic value to Russia's civilization (Haigh, Haigh, & Matychak, 2019).

After president Yanukovich was abdicated in 2014, a pro-Russian regime came to an end, and Ukraine became more determined to the integration of the West. Moscow saw the loss of Ukraine as a grave defeat, and to keep it or at least to control part of Ukraine, Russia occupied Crimea employed a tactics of asymmetric warfare to destabilize the Eastern region occupied by Russian speaking Ukrainians. The war was mainly characterized by information activities, psychological warfare and cyber warfare (Haigh, Haigh & Matychak, 2019).

By then Russian Television was widely watched in Ukraine. Russian social media platform Vkontakte was popular among Ukrainians than Facebook. There was a massive spread of propaganda, most of which was outlandish and amateurish depicting Nazis wandering through Ukrainian towns and cities, the Ukrainian army sacrificing children and olden images from world war II presented as present. The strategy employed by Russian government functionaries involved the exploitation of the latest techniques if hybrid war and social media technologies.

By 2015, Russia had damaged the information sphere and the physical image of Ukraine through misinformation, thereby subjecting the country to a carefully choreographed frozen conflict, the same that Russia had applied in destabilizing a number of its neighboring states (Haigh, Haigh, & Matychak, 2019). Ukraine had started to advance to the East when Russian forces halted them, forcing them to accept a ceasefire, thereby leaving two of its biggest cities unmanned and out of control. Russian media emphasized on spreading exaggerated information about Ukraine to bring about the thought of Ukraine as a failed state.

US

Social Media

So much of misinformation is passed around on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other social media outlets; this epidemic became more prominent since 2015 and the US election of 2016. People shared the news mostly unknowingly that they are fake and false. Computer bots were also used to spread disinformation about both political parties and were aiming to help DJT win, and domestic and foreign actors like Russia controlled them. Allcott & Gentzkow (2017) assert that social media has been particularly conducive to fake news because of several reasons. Firstly, social media has small fixed costs of entering the market and creating content. This makes it relatively profitable for short-term small-scale strategies that fake news producers adopt while lowering the relative significance of building a long-term reputation that seeks to ensure quality. Secondly, social media uses a format that makes it difficult to verify what is real and what is fake-the thin slice data and information that users view on feed windows and phones (Ferrara et al.,2016).

Social media has grown in popularity to the point that some people rely on it as a source of information. Asserts that about 62 percent of US adult citizens depend on social media sources for news. Of this segment, about 34 percent of the users believe that the information they receive from these sites is credible. Other than the billions of human beings that use social media platforms, billions of bots or robots help to spread fake news.

Bots are created by users with computer programming skills and use the techniques of algorithms to execute tasks repetitively. They simulate human behavior in social sites: they interact with humans and share messages and information. Bots have the ability to search and share unverified and non-curated information online and post it continuously using trending topics. However, human beings also play a significant role in propagating fake news too. The need to have popularity indicators such as "thumbs up" and "likes" makes people want to share trending topics. Such topics are also likely to garner the most shares (Ferrara et al.,2016) In highlighting the role of social media in propagating fake news, Gupta et al. (2013) found that about 10,350 fake tweets had been shared concerning the Hurricane Sundry in 2012.The Shared media containing fake URLs, counterfeit images, and unverified information. This number accounted for about 86 percent of the retweets, suggesting that only about 14 percent of the people sent original tweets.

News Channels

The mainstream media has also not been left behind in the spread of disinformation. Some News Channels like FOX NEWS has contributed to spreading confusion across the US, and according to politifact.com, %79 of the statements made on FOX are Half-truths, mostly false or outright just false. In 2013, for example, Miley Cyrus, a singer and an actress, emerged online twerking near a giant bear while dressed in a small teddy bear suit. She quickly caught the attention of the public with her performance making a record of peak tweets at 306,100 per minute. At the time, the singer became the most searched person on Google. The event was too sensationalized that CNN decided to top its website with the publication that Miley Cyrus was twerking aside a giant teddy bear. The news channel placed the Miley Cyrus article above all other national and world news. This, in turn, contributed to a fake column on the site "the Onion." The news spread to the point that the article on the satirical website "the Onion" became hyper-real than even what CNN had posted (Berkowitz, & Schwartz, 2016).

The Onion had responded to the post published on CNN's official web about with an article suggesting to explain why they chose to make the news their top story. The article was written first person by a parody writer impersonating CNN's managing editor Meredith Artley. Even though Artley denied involvement with the article published by the onion, the public had already believed that it was her. Earlier on, CNN had published an article on its website comparing Miley Cyrus to a previous outrageous performance by lady Gaga who was clad in a dress made of meat and full of fake blood. The article raised questions as to why such top-class news outlets can display such content against the backdrop of global tragedies (Berkowitz, & Schwartz, 2016).

Regarding the article by the onion, it is evident that fake news exits because they parody the characteristics of real story. They mimic not only the content but also the tone of real news found in legit media channels such as Fox and CNN. Berkowitz, & Schwartz, (2016), argue that mainstream media also propagates fake news only that in the mainstream media, certain practices such as gate keeping whereby information is filtered and analyzed make fake news to be more focused and appear as real compared to satirical sites and social media.

Mainstream media channels such as CNN and the New York times have on a number of occasions, been termed as propagating fake news, especially those that are carefully choreographed but seek to tarnish the image of Trump's presidency. As argued by Davis, J & Grynbaum (2017), Trump has been heard a number of times decrying the printing of unanimously sourced information by "fake news organization" such as CNN and New York Times.

political pundits

A pundit is a person who offers to mass media their opinion or commentary on a particular subject area. These people go on CNN, FOX, and others to spread disinformation to cause mayhem for different reasons, including money, political agenda, and creating a stir and confusing the public. Politicians have, for a long time, now had a difficult relationship with the truth. Previous scholarly works have suggested that politicians will deceive, lie, and spin information to obtain strategic political gains (Benegal & Scruggs, 2018). Before the advent of social media, political misinformation was propagated and spread via professional journalistic gatekeeping. The mainstream media controlled the propagation of political disinformation through "reporting the things that adhered to strict narratives of objectivity." Media outlets strived to screen the misleading information through gatekeeping and data filtration. Therefore, on many occasions, political pundits were accorded a censored opportunity by the mainstream media to pass their message to the public. Mena (2019) suggests that it was the Journalist's moral duty to use the power they had to filter the information disseminated to the public hence protecting the masses from consuming toxic information.

However, the advent of social media has broken the hurdles of censorship and gatekeeping. Politicians and their opinion masters now use social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to bypass the press and pass information to the public. The unfettered access to platforms that can easily reach out to the public has provided greater leeway that politicians can use to pass across disinformation. For instance, ss argued by Benegal & Scruggs (2018), since ascending to power, Donald Trump has posted more than 6,400 misleading and false claims, most of which have been posted on twitter. Technology has been popular in misleading the masses not only across liberal and democratic states but also in populist and authoritarian regimes. For instance, authoritarian governments with powers to control the media have spread propaganda, rumors, and misinformation as a political strategy and now utilize social networks and sites to further mislead the masses (King, Pan, & Roberts, 2017). In this regard, Tucker et al. (2018) suggest that there is a need to research the extent to which elite endorsement of misleading information in social media sites can affect its exposure and reach. For instance, with a single tweet, Trump is capable of spreading misleading information to millions of followers, not just in the USA but across the world.

There is also a need to study the credibility of misleading information passed across by political elites. For example, Trump has used Twitter to suggest that the mainstream media is fake; however, it is not now the extent to which these tweets affect public perceptions about media credibility. Again, there is the need to find out whether the public trust such kind of information. Inconsiderate of whether people believe these claims, do the masses respond with more incivility by tending to be engaged more or by getting more polarized (Weeks, & Gil de Zúñiga, 2019).

Government Officials

From the president and his supporters in congress and the white house staff, they create and disseminate Fake News. Since 2016, elections in the US have been the subject of increasing attention concerning how both the US government and foreign government functionaries have had an interest in manipulating the masses through the media about election outcomes. False information is believed to contribute greatly to the outcomes of the recent elections or at least has affected democratic outcomes in past elections. For example, in a post published in the Washington Post in 2018, it was suggested that fake news might have played a significant role in depressing the support base of Hillary Clinton on the election day. The research revealed that close to 4 percent of Obamas supporters became dissuaded from voting for Clinton due to the influence of fake news (Blake,2018).

Allcott and Gentzkow (2017), asserts that fake news tends to favor populist parties. He further asserts that the spread of fake news has been made possible by the fact that public institutions and government officials have lost trust due to their questionable intent in spreading false information. Here are connections between false information and anti-established rhetoric. As argued by Allcott and Gentzkow (2017), in the 2016 elections, Trump's supports were highly likely to be exposed to misleading information.

Who’s behind it?

· Political Leaders

· Activist groups

· “Journalists”

· Forging actors

· Russia

· The Public

· Political fanatics

Fake news and articles originate from various sources, some of which exist predominantly to spread misleading information. Such sites will have their names crafted to appear as legit sites. Other satirical platforms may contain information that can be perceived as factual when viewed out of context, yet other sites publish a mix of genuine and false information.

Anecdotal reports from the revelations of the 2016 presidential elections bring to light a picture of the faces behind such sites. Separate investigations conducted by the Guardian and Buzz feed revealed that close to 100 fake news sites were run by youths in Macedonia (Subramanian 2017). For instance, a site called Endingthefed.com which had published more than four fake news articles on Facebook belonged to a 24-year-old man from Romania (Townsend 2016). A US-based company called Disinfomedia was found to own more than a dozen fake news platforms, including WashingtonPost.com.co. with about 25 employed writers and content creators. Another US producer called Paul Horner owned a fake news site called National report, which posted a lot of misleading information and propaganda before the 2016 elections (Dewey 2014). Horner was responsible for a number of pro-Trump articles meant to sway voters (Dewey 2016).

Several reasons were cited as fueling the drive to produce fake news: pecuniary reasons whereby the articles that garner the most traffic can draw huge advertising revenue when visitors click to view the posted content. For most of the producers, this appeared to be the biggest motivation. As argued by Subramanian (2017), fake news owners in Veles raked in thousands of dollars by creating stories favoring both Clinton and Trump. Despite claiming to be personally opposed to Trump, Paul Horner produced many pro Trump stories for profit. The second reason is ideological motivation. Some fake news creators seek to advance political figures they like and favor. For example, the Romanian man who owned endingthefed.com suggested that he set up the site mainly to steer Trump's campaign. Other right-wing fake new creators said that they identify as a left-wing but create right-wing content to embarrass right Wing candidates and their supporters (Dewey 2016; Sydell 2016).

Across many countries like the USA, the polarization of the public sphere by political forces has been dramatically exploited by individuals and firms that want to make a profit through sensationalizing content, serving to propagate both ideological and factual fake news (Lee, 2019). This has been made successful by the fact that there is a burgeoning audience base that wants to utilize fake news not because of the objective reality but because of the desired subjectivity they have. The media does exactly what it was meant to do, to sensationalize content through a business model. Mullainathan & Sheifer argue that large media firms are just capitalist enterprises that are out to make profit. And because profit is majorly made through advertisement revenue, which goes up with ratings, the content of the news gets dictated by what rakes in the highest revenue.

Who believes them?

Ukraine

Eastern Side of Russian speaking population. The crisis in Ukraine was fueled by Russian propaganda with the Russian speaking Ukrainians in the South Eastern region believing them. Russia presented itself as a savior wanting to protect the rights of the Russians living in the Southeastern part and in Crimea. Pro-Russian separatists in Luhansk and Donetks regions of Eastern Ukraine feel for the propaganda and aged a war against the government of Ukraine.

US

· Democrats.

· Republicans.

· Independents.

Both conservatives and liberals are susceptible to fake news for varied reasons. Human beings are motivated reasoners. If something shows up confirming another thing believed to be true or something that one wants, individuals will quickly like it and want to share it on social media sites. For example, meet a story suggesting that cheese can protect one from all cancer types. Most cheese lovers will probably not go into details as to why the article claims what it does but will quickly share the article vehemently in social media sites. The same is true not just for scientific articles but also for political misinformation. People on both sides of the political divide are likely to fall victims of fake news. If they come across political news that aligns with their ideologies, they quickly believe it. Harper & Baguley (2019) argue that people tend to infer legitimacy in ways that are driven by their ideological positioning. The implications are that there are asymmetries in the manner in which both conservatives and liberals approach their motivated reasoning. For instance, conservatives and liberals get similarly motivated to avoid being exposed to each other’s opinions and tend to be similarly driven to deny scientific outcomes that are not consistent with their thoughts.

They also assert that most people have some capacity to identify fake news. People differ in the way they think. While some tend to think with their head and get driven to process, find out and process information, others think with their guts and are driven by their intuitions and instincts to process information. However regardless of party affiliation, found that when individuals who have a high need for cognition are presented with misleading information that seems to be aligned with their ideologies, they tend to be more probable to judge that such stories are true but judge them as untrue if they are inconsistent with their ideologies. The reason is that highly rational and logical people not only to discredit misleading information along tribal lines but are more probable to be in the lookout for further probable information therefore exaggerating their disbelief in stories that are not politically consistent. This also confirms the fact that high need cognition people tend to have information-rich social bases. But this may turn out to be dangerous if the people within those social circles operate in an echo chamber. However, conservatives with great faith intuitions (the ones who think with their guts) appeared to have higher perceptions of fake news legitimacy even though this variable never had much impact on the judgments that liberals made. The researchers argue that on average conservatives may be more susceptible to fall victims of fake news due to the act that they are the group most likely to encounter such material online, they also happen to be the group with the highest faith intuition levels.

Flynn, Nyhan & Feilfer (2017) argue that education is also an important factor in determining who believes or who rejects false information. They argue that education should increase people's capacity to discern opinions from facts. Again, education empowers the educated with better tools for making counterarguments against unverified information. Therefore, the general argument is that education equips the masses with the ability to make informed decisions.

Effects On people

· Public perception

· Ukraine

· Led to War

· The Impact of War

A psychological war is easy to win inconsiderate of the ideology used. For instance, a democratically elected president is just as eager to take a photo-shoot inside a fighter jet as would an authoritarian one. Patterns and methods remain the same, just like conventional warfare, regardless of how benevolent and novel the enemy is destroyed. One fact that is worth noting about propaganda wars is that political elites who have the ability to differentiate between slogans and facts or the reconstructed information base, tend to lose their interests in reality because slogans enhance gaining popularity more effectively. The resulting impact is that the common man in the streets might easily believe that the information they are receiving is legit; this is especially true when there are barriers and limits to the access of information. A reconstructed reality is not dangerous to the general masses as long as the news is credible and positive to a given extent. If there is hot water in the bathroom and bread on the table the tendency to challenge the political elite or the news is low. Back to the discussion, it is true that during the last decade, Russia has relied on disinformation to fuel instability within and across the borders.

The media sources of Russia labeled Ukrainian government as criminals and fascists. This ended up discrediting the government of Ukraine while convincing the Russian speaking Ukrainians that the acts of the Russian government were just. This disinformation led to the creation of two opposing sides (pro-Russian Ukrainians and the Ukrainian government), thus creating a political crisis in Crimea. Initially, the crisis manifested as demonstrations against the newly formed Ukrainian government. However, internal separatist mainly pro-Russian revolutionists, had already started to form militias to protect Sevastopol city from extremism. This led to clashes between the separatist and the Ukrainian security forces that wanted to restore the territorial integrity of Ukraine. The confrontation led to shelling marked with violence and destruction of property. The annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine's eastern territories have had a devastating impact on economic and political life in Ukraine. According to UNICEF, 10,000 people had been killed and 1.5 million displaced by 2017.

· US

· Led to DJT

· Partisanship

· Confusion.

Who was America's first president? The question is a simple one with a straightforward answer. However, things get a little fuzzy when you type the query inside Google's search engine. The first results that pop up suggest something about John Hanson being America's first black president in 1781. The revelations also indicate that apparently, the USA has had about seven black presidents, including Dwight Eisenhower and Thomas Jefferson. Top results in Bing and Yahoo lead the searcher to articles about Hanson too. This reveals the seriousness of hoaxes and the impact they can have in passing across facts. The search engine has been said to be the environment where fake news originates. The social and psychological impacts of fake news to society are enormous. Take for example, during the 2016 elections; rumors were circulating that there was a pedophile ring made up of high-powered profiles from the democratic party were operating inside the basement of a pizza outlet in Washington. Later on, an angry man walked into the pizza outlet and fired a gun. While no one was hurt in the incidence, the impression created was that misleading information can cost lives.

It has also been warned that fake news has an adverse impact on democracy itself. Democracy is based on informing people about issues so that they can debate about them and make decisions. However, when the general masses are in possession of toxic misleading information it can be difficult to make informed decisions. Other than causing embarrassment and offense, distorted information compromises the media organization's reputation. A study conducted by PEW research in 2016 suggested that 88% of American adults believe that fake news that appears as breaking news across mainstream and social media is causing some or a great deal of confusion when it comes to people's understanding of trending issues. The research further revealed that this feeling is bipartisan. About 64 % of democrats against 57% of republicans agreed that false news causes confusion.

Conclusion

This discussion covers the persuasive impacts of fake news. The discussion finds that a number of factors have made it possible for fake news to become so popular in the current age. The role of social media cannot be underestimated in fueling the success of the growth of misleading information. The relationship between fake news and social media is important, considering political partisanship and identity partisanship, which guide most of the interactions that people have on these social networks. The Ukrainian case has revealed that fake news has the potential of information superiority, which is important in achieving victory than real war would have on physical ground. The resulting social, economic, and psychological impacts are enormous. The discussion also finds that education is also an essential aspect in judging who accepts and who denies misleading information. In general terms, highly educated people are more likely to discern unverified information compared to their less-educated counterparts. Having analyzed the American and the Ukrainian case, this research reveals that information warfare can have devastating effects when no controlled or when misused. At least, as found in the discussion, people have some capacity of discerning between true and false information. There is a need to educate the masses on how best they can overturn mythical beliefs that are disseminated by different entities with the malicious intent of manipulating the society and creating panic. Creating awareness is essential in ensuring that people will be able to possess the skills of analyzing facts so that they can be less susceptible to malicious information attacks.

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