Teach Your Teen to Identify Fake News
This is how you should teach your teenagers to know how to identify fake news and not to believe it.
We adults easily recognize when we read something on the Internet that it is not true, but teenagers are much more gullible about this. Teens have trouble distinguishing between which advertisements are real and which are entertainment. Just because today’s kids and teens are digital natives doesn’t mean they understand the basics of media.
Many of them do not understand how to think critically or how to think about the content in front of them. Parents are in charge of teaching children to be able to differentiate what is real from what is not, promoting critical thinking. Only in this way will they be able to identify the news that is really credible from those that should be forgotten.
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HOW TO TEACH TEENS THE BASICS OF THE INTERNET
It is important to talk with teens about how necessary it is to understand the news and how the media works. Studies show that children and adolescents experience fewer harmful effects when they have been taught basic media literacy skills. Here’s how you can teach your child to evaluate the content he’s watching … So you won’t have to worry as much about what he can see on the Internet if there are times when you can’t be supervising.
- Encourage critical thinking. Encourage your teenager to question the information he is reading or viewing on the Internet or on television. Ask them to consider who is writing the story and why that person is saying or telling what they are telling.
- Talk about the different media advertising techniques. Talk to your teenager about the tactics companies use to convince people to buy their products. Promising a product that will help you look beautiful or be more popular, for example , is often part of the message … not the real thing.
- Talk about people’s motives for creating different content. Your teenager should know that there are many writers in a magazine and all of them are asked to get traffic. That they write messages that can attract their readers. Sometimes this is far from important, which is to provide quality information. Explain how many writers try to sell products rather than actually report on something .
- Teach your teenager to look at information with a magnifying glass. He talks about the importance of consulting the page in the ‘about us’ part of a website to find out who is behind the page. If that part does not exist then it is better to distrust. It is also important that your teenager understands that even if images appear, it does not mean that they are real because they may have been manipulated in some way.
- There is always to compare the sources . Talk about ways to verify the stories you see online. Are there other media outlets talking about the same story? Where does the original story come from? How is the same story different in different media?
- Monitor your teen’s use of social media . Learn which social media sites your teen uses and monitor your child’s Internet activity. Pay close attention to the movies you watch and the music you listen to. The more you know about what you are consuming online, the better informed you will be to have conversations about how the media is likely to impact you.
- Look at websites together. Sit down with your teen and check out popular news sites and talk about how to differentiate between news and sponsored content. Read articles together and talk about the messages you are seeing together. Encourage their critical thinking in this way too.
It is important for your child to learn how to understand what he sees on the Internet. You can use real life examples and news stories whenever you can, and plan to make media literacy an ongoing conversation.
Dr. Tabriella Perivolaris, Sara's mother and fan of fashion, beauty, motherhood, among others, about the female universe. Since 2018 she has been working as a copywriter, always bringing to her articles a little of her experience and experience as a mother and woman.