Peter Adams

Viral video shows strikes on Yemen, not a U.S. air base atta A video shared on X claims to show a recent Iranian attack on a U.S. air base in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The video is from 2024 and shows a bombing in Yemen.

A video shared on X claims to show a recent Iranian attack on a U.S. air base in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The video is from 2024 and shows a bombing in Yemen.

📢 We're hiring a Prospect Research Manager!

ℹ️ The person in this role will be responsible for building out a robust prospect research program & supporting the operational infrastructure that is foundational to our fundraising work.

🔗 Learn more / apply: go.newslit.org/ResearchMgr

#Jobs #Hiring

The Sift: Special issue: Information ecosystem - The News Literacy Project Special issue of The Sift on the role news plays in the information landscape — including slides for students to practice separating news from content about news.

Educators: Can your students separate news from content about news? It's a distinction that matters, as NLP's @hannahcov.bsky.social explains in today's special edition of The Sift!

Check out the newsletter for classroom slides on this topic + our new infographic 👇🏽

Stumping a savvy audience with 2 Truths and AI #Stumping a savvy audience with 2 Truths and AI - The News Literacy Project At the Knight Media Forum 2026, the News Literacy Project asked the audience to play a game that challenged: Can you tell if something is AI generated?

"Trying to spot AI-generated content with the naked eye is basically a guessing game, even for seasoned reporters. It’s necessary to look at the source, evidence & surrounding context to identify these fabrications." - Dan Evon on takeaways from presenting #2TruthsAndAI at the Knight Media Forum

YouTube video by News Literacy Project Spill the Ink: Noah Lyons, La Jolla Light newspaper

📰 What's a day in the life like for a journalist working for a community newspaper? In a new edition of "Spill the Ink," La Jolla Light reporter Noah Lyons takes us behind the scenes of writing, editing & laying out the weekly print publication that's part of the @sandiegouniontribune.com family ⤵️

X Is Drowning in Disinformation Following US and Israel’s Attack on Iran WIRED has reviewed hundreds of posts on X that promote misleading claims about the locations and scale of the attack.

“Almost all of the most viral posts reviewed by WIRED on Saturday came from accounts with blue check marks, meaning they…could be eligible to earn money based on how much engagement their posts generate, even if the content is false.”

From @davidgilbert.bsky.social

Heads up folks: @thetnholler.bsky.social posted an AI-generated video this morning that was a deepfake of the captain of the U.S. women’s hockey team, and they seem to be promoting it as if it’s a real video. So watch out for that and don’t spread fakes.

A social media post reads, “Many of you may have missed this, but the little boy who Bad Bunny handed his Grammy to at the Super Bowl was Liam Ramos! Amazing!” and includes two images, one showing a young child holding a Grammy Award and the other showing a child wearing a blue hat. The News Literacy Project has added a label that says “FALSE.”

❌ NO: Bad Bunny did not give a Grammy statuette to Liam Conejo Ramos during the Super Bowl halftime show.

✔️ He handed the award to a young actor named Lincoln Fox.

🔗 When a claim deals with a controversial subject & plays into confirmation bias, it often spreads quickly: go.newslit.org/SBhalftime

Teen girl smiling at phone, promoting critical thinking in students with a free activity planner from National News Literacy Week, Feb 2-6, 2026.

1/ Teach a different standard of news literacy each day of National #NewsLiteracyWeek with our activity planner!

📚 From zoning information all the way to civic participation, use our free, downloadable resource as a guide throughout the week.

🔗 Download it at NewsLiteracyWeek.org

A post reads, “Man isn’t happy after minor earthquake in Toronto yesterday spills his fries at McDonald’s!” and includes an image that appears to show a man eating at a McDonald’s restaurant during an earthquake. The News Literacy Project has added a label that says “AI-GENERATED.”

❌ NOPE: This is not from a genuine video of an earthquake spilling a man’s McDonald’s fries in Toronto.

✔️ It's AI-generated.

🤔 Some AI fakes look incredibly real. This is not one of those cases, with odd visuals + jumbled text.

🔗 RumorGuard post: go.newslit.org/AIQuake

#NewsLiteracyWeek

AI image of Alex Pretti’s killing is the latest altered photo amid ICE surge in Minneapolis Look closely, slow down, think critically before believing what you see on the internet, experts caution.

It's hard to recognize AI-generated content because it’s increasingly realistic "and because we’re all vulnerable to the influence of our own biases, which can cause us to under-scrutinize things we want to believe.” - NLP's @peteradams.bsky.social in this @startribune.com story ⤵️

Same.

I didn’t try to discount OP, I took issue with some of the replies.

You didn’t provide an example of anything.

And your impression from reading this is that Politico is reporting Vance’s opinion as a fact rather than his opinion?

If you feel like you have examples of hard news coverage that reports falsehoods or subjective opinions as facts, then be specific and link to it to support your assertions.

Social media research has a conflict of interest problem:

“these findings suggest industry influence in social media research is extensive, impactful, and often opaque”

A real concern is that this may incentivize scholars to minimize the harms of social media platforms
arxiv.org/pdf/2601.11507

The fact is that opinions are not enough. Opinions aren’t possible without the underlying reporting. You can’t have a meaningful, sound opinion on something without a fair, accurate and impartial accounting of it.

This kind of proves my point. When people stop distinguishing between news and opinion — when they posit that there’s opinion in everything in equal measure — then they give themselves permission to dismiss reporting they don’t like, and to substitute opinions they do like for actual news coverage.

Re: SOP — generally, opinion editors in quality newsrooms are supposed to seek thoughtful, fair opinions that are based on facts and strong evidence — and which prompt fruitful, good-faith discussion and debate. One could easily make the case that the specific piece in question didn’t meet that mark

Now there’s a strawman! Of course news organizations are responsible for the quality of the opinions they publish.

But you can’t use the word choice of an opinion headline in outlet A, and then contrast it with the word choice in a hard news headline from outlet B to allege systematic bias.

Others chimed in to say that news media intentionally disguise opinion as news, or make the distinction too subtle for the average person to recognize. So I pointed out how prominently it was labeled as “opinion.”

I wasn’t merely repeating that it was an opinion as an academic exercise. People in the replies were trying to hold news organizations to account for using the word “lie” in a headline … as though it were a fact-based statement. It was not. It was one opinionator’s take.

I am replying to the people in OP‘s replies, a number of whom have used this screenshot as an occasion to cynically unload on the entirety of the press — to dismiss all US news organizations as evil, bought and paid for, worthless, etc.

OK, then people should direct their criticism at the columnist. But calling our entire fourth estate “evil “is incredibly irresponsible and harmful.

Whose coverage are you talking about? Just because you can find the word “misstep” used in connection with Trump in one piece, from one outlet, and can find another reference to “lie” in connection with Harris in another doesn’t mean there is some conspiracy to cover those two candidates differently

How would you suggest holding columnists and pundits who offer their opinions and takes accountable for when their opinions, in hindsight, are off … or when their opinion-based predictions are wrong?

And still, what? What are you arguing? That opinion journalism shouldn’t exist, because … people are incapable of distinguishing between hard news reporting and things like op-eds and editorials? Make your case.

The word “opinion” appears three times, including in large font, in that one screenshot.

This is the headline for an opinion column. It is not comparable to headlines on news reports.

‘Digital desecrations’: when deepfakes are used to mock tragic deaths and what platforms should do about it Synthetic videos of Renée Good are the latest form of technology-facilitated dehumanization

New: I found more than 20 deepfake videos re-enacting or re-imagining the final moments of Renée Good's life.

These videos mocking a tragic death, which I'm calling "digital desecrations," are the most extreme version of a pervasive trend within generative AI of 'resurrecting' the dead.