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Editors’ Choice: Truthy Lies and Surreal Truths, A Plea for Critical Digital Literacies

Misinformation abounds. This has always been the case, but the problem has become acute in the age of digital communication. As Mike Caulfield and Zeynep Tufekci have been showing in the week following the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook is particularly susceptible to this problem. Of course, Facebook is not alone. The ease with which we can share “news” on social media platforms makes it increasingly easy to contribute to the virality of falsehoods. Take this video, which reached viral status on Twitter. Those who passed it along claimed it was a video of anti-Trump protests in Los Angeles, but is really a video of an anti-Maduro protest in Venezuela.

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