Too Much Information:
First Draft News

First Draft News

"Too Much Information" is both the subject of First Draft News' long-form guide and a description of the guide itself. It is immense!

Developed in 2020 and rich in videos, it covers the field of Media Literacy with all manner of resources ... and it is only a small part of what First Draft has developed, which also includes activities similar to those in the News Literacy Project's "Checkology" and a library of articles about news and media literacy.

Here are a few key resources from First Draft News, excluding all the fascinating "cookbook" guides and case studies for journalists and researcher.

1. Too Much Information: A video-rich primer.

2. Essential Verification Checklist for Students: There are lots of free tools that you can use to verify content online.

3. Avoid Getting Tricked: Think SHEEP. Source, History, Evidence, Emotion, Pictures.

4. Optimized and Advance Searching: 6 Tips for finding Newsworthy Posts on Social Media. See also: Boolean basics.

5. Verifying Online Content: The absolute essentials (2019)

6. Basic Toolkit: A dashboard of web resources for misinformation detection and fact checking, with a mobile version.

7. Web-Based Activities for Image Analysis

   1. Verifying Content

   2. Observation Challenge

8. Webinars

9. Inoculating against Misinformation: a "pre-bunking" guide for educators.

10. Questions to Consider before Joining a Social Media Platform: great set for digital footprint and digital citizenship topics.

11. How to Monitor Content on TikTok: Understanding TikTok’s language, culture and differences from other platforms will help you monitor it effectively.

12. Network Analysis: Online connections can influence how political opinions take shape, so analyzing these networks has become fundamental.

13. The Not-So-Simple Science of Social Media Bots: 'Bots' appear in news stories with alarming regularity. Also: How to Spot a Bot.

14. Twitonomy: A tool for analyzing a specific account's activity and identify signs of suspicious behavior.

15. Monitoring vs. Surveillance: the ethics of online research tools.

16. Six Type of Coronavirus Misinformation: and how to use SHEEP to detect it. Also: 5 Tips to Check Coronavirus Information.

17. OS INT and the essentials of Open Source Intelligence. (OSINT has played a crucial role in parsing Ukraine misinformation. It's on Discord!)

18. The Psychology of Misinformation

    1. Why we're vulnerable

    2. Why it's so hard to correct

    3. How to prevent spread

19. Case Studies

    1. How Misleading Maps Distort Reality: from Coronavirus to bushfires.

    2. How Fake Videos Unraveled Pakistan's War on Polio.

    3. What a Fake Food video reveals about viral misinformation.

    4. 5 lessons on information disorder from the EU elections