During our ESSENCE 'Paint The Polls Black' podcast, Tevon Blair talks about misinformation and teaching students to fact check before posting on social media.
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00:00We know that young people, they are, they get their news from different social media outlets.
00:06We conducted a survey and we asked them, where do you get your news from? And so some of them
00:10said traditional media outlets, but a large majority were speaking about different Instagram
00:16platforms, social media, Twitter, TikTok. And we really wanted to highlight and show them how to
00:22fact check. And so a lot of those students, they were getting news and they're ready to post the
00:26thing they're doing, informing their students about what's happening and what's going on.
00:30But sometimes there's a level of misinformation where there is, there is not too much of an
00:36intentional mix of trying to influence people or trying to share wrong information. But there's
00:43sometimes where they run into information that is intentionally shown to be shared,
00:47which is disinformation. The students have to know when to fact check. So I tell the students,
00:52check three before you share out, look for those big outlets that you are a trustworthy outlet
00:57that you can inform your students on before you go push this out. And I know Megan Estalian made
01:02a good video one day and said, watch out for the folks with the big font, the big font and the
01:08white background. Don't be too quick to share those. So those are some of the things, but also
01:12with voter registration, students are, they understand the truth, but there's a missing
01:17piece sometimes of the full facts of how to register to vote, understanding that we were
01:24encouraging our students to register to vote where you learn. You are a student there for four years
01:29and a lot of students were saying that they were always told to submit absentee ballots,
01:34but we're not informed what that process looks like. How do I vote by mail? And so oftentimes
01:39when students are not encouraged to register to vote where they go to school at, they can possibly
01:43miss deadlines. They cannot understand the process of how to complete an application.
01:48And so we work with these students and so we have to inform factual information. And when you inform
01:53factual information that's not telling them to vote for a specific person, you allow them to
01:57think critically. And so with this information, we really try our best to inform them of how
02:02to fact check, but also make their own decisions in this process.