Farhad Manjoo | OK, but What Should We Actually Do About Facebook? I Asked the Experts. – The New York Times

“. . . . Improve digital literacy

Renée DiResta, the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and a longtime scholar of the anti-vaccine movement’s digital presence, described one idea as “unsexy but important”: Educating the public to resist believing everything they see online.

This is not just a thing for schools; some of the most egregious amplifiers of online mendacity are older people.

What we need, then, is something like a society-wide effort to teach people how to process digital information. For instance, Mike Caulfield, an expert on digital literacy at the University of Washington, has developed a four-step process called SIFT to assess the veracity of information. After Caufield’s process becomes ingrained in his students, he has said, “we’re seeing students come to better judgments about sources and claims in 90 seconds than they used to in 20 minutes.”