By Krista Jorgensen
Some years ago (back in the early 2000s), while working as a legal assistant at a law firm, I became friends with a young associate who was despairing over a mountain of files. She explained to me that she longed for the day when she could just put a computer chip into her mouth and instantly absorb every piece of information. I thought that was a pretty neat idea until she added a warning that gave me pause: “The problem is, I’d probably be ingesting just as much falsehood from that chip as I would truth. If I just ingest the information, then I can’t think about it critically, and I will no longer know truth from falsehood.”
Back then, it seemed like a piece of science fiction whimsy, but today, it is our lived reality. While we don’t literally swallow silicon chips, most of us carry mini-supercomputers (aka smartphones) in our pockets every second of the day. These aid us in quickly ingesting summaries of news and other information at a speed that has far outpaced our ability to digest the actual substance. However, we have now reached a point where we are expected to ingest information so quickly that there is often no time to check a fact or even pause to consider what we are absorbing. We are reaching a tipping point where the danger isn't just being wrong about a few facts—it’s that we are losing the collective ability to trust anything at all.
I felt the weight of this recently while sharing a cup of tea with a friend. She was reeling from a different kind of “falsehood”: her identity had been stolen, and fraud had been committed in her name. As she spoke, I realized her distress wasn't just about money; she helped me understand with a sudden, chilling realization that the "social floor" we walk on is being pulled out from underneath all of us. When we can no longer trust our own names on a document or the news on our screens, the very foundation of our society begins to crumble.
As a parent, retired librarian and consumer of information, all this leaves me feeling not only concerned for friends and family, but also for the next generation. For decades, my career was built on the quiet rigour of the stacks, where information was carefully vetted and sourced before being added to the collection and weeded out when it became outdated. Amongst staff and patrons, there were always opinions we could disagree on, but we could generally agree on the facts found in the reference section.
Today, it feels like those gates have been torn down and the stacks have been replaced by a chaotic, uncharted flood of information. How are we going to make good decisions when it is so difficult to filter through all the noise coming our way to find seeds of truth? If we lose our ability to discern fact from fiction, we lose our ability to trust—and when we lose trust, things fall apart.
If my career in libraries taught me anything, it’s that finding truth requires a lot of slow and careful work—you have to walk to the shelf, pull the books, and check the indices. But today, the digital landscape has been re-engineered in favour of speed and instant answers.
To understand how we can navigate this new terrain, I spoke with Joyce Grant, a veteran journalist and a leading voice in media literacy. Through her website, Teaching Kids News, and her book, Can You Believe It? How to Spot Fake News and Find the Facts, Grant helps families pull back the curtain on how information is manufactured and shared.
“The spread of news used to require more physical effort," Grant explained, but modern misinformation is far more easily produced and distributed. We have moved from a world where spreading a lie required the physical labour of printing and circulating a tabloid to one where misinformation can be shared “instantly and exponentially” through social media platforms.
Today, the engine driving this isn't just fast fibre optics; it’s our own biology. Grant points out that modern misinformation is specifically engineered to bypass our logic and head straight for our adrenal glands. "If a post makes you very emotional, that is deliberate," she warns. Whether it’s anger, anxiety, or even that satisfying sense of being "right," that spike of emotion is a signal designed to make us react
This orchestration is a calculated play for clicks and likes, trapping us in algorithmic bubbles that serve up comforting, bias-confirming content. It is this "emotional engineering" that turns a quick news check into a three-hour doom scroll—and a single, unthinking "like" into a viral wildfire.
As a librarian, I once taught patrons to "dive deep" into a source to verify its claims. However, Grant suggests the most effective strategy today is quite the opposite: leave the website and verify the facts independently. "If you stay on the same site… you're just going to get more of what they want you to think," she explains. She advocates for a "Stop and breathe" approach—suspending judgment when an article triggers a strong emotion, long enough to cross-reference the facts.
If Joyce Grant’s insights show us how digital media is constructed to capture our attention, journalist and author Gregor Craigie offers the professional shield we need to deflect it. As a veteran CBC journalist and the author of Sticking to the Facts: 10 Ways to Fight Misinformation, Craigie lives in two very different information worlds. In his "day job," he operates under strict Journalistic Standards and Practices—a world of fact-checking, second sources, and verified origins. In his role as a dad, he has watched his three children navigating a "wild west" of social media where those rules simply don't exist.
"Social media and the internet don't function by the same rules," Craigie explained, reflecting on why he wrote a guide specifically for the next generation. What Craigie discovered is that discerning fact from fiction isn't just a challenge for children; it’s a problem that spans generations. While kids are digital natives, they don’t always understand the mechanics of how information is manufactured. Conversely, many parents—who often have the life experience to spot a lie—frequently need “tutoring” on the technology itself and struggle to keep pace with the sheer volume of content their children absorb at breakneck speeds.
To bridge this gap, Craigie advocates for families to read together, merging a child’s technical savvy with a parent’s seasoned perspective. To fight back, he suggests we adopt a journalist’s rigour by moving beyond the headlines. In Sticking to the Facts, he encourages readers to pause and ask three vital questions: 1. Who wrote this? 2. What is their expertise? 3. Is this a reputable author or organization?
He also strongly encourages readers to read the full text. Catchy headlines are designed to grab our attention, but they often hide or distort the true meaning of a story. By the time we’ve finished the article, "clickbait" usually loses its power and truth has the space to be truly discovered.
By combining Grant’s psychological awareness with Craigie’s journalistic tools, we can begin to move away from the "doom and gloom" that so often paralyzes us. It is easy to fall into a state of corrosive cynicism—a defensive crouch where we decide to believe nothing because it feels like everything is a lie. But total cynicism is dangerous, as it allows us to stop thinking.
To pull us back from this brink, Craigie uses history as a grounding force. In Sticking to the Facts, he points to "Famous Fakes" throughout history, reminding us that the battle for truth didn’t start with the smartphone. One of the most telling examples he shares is a 1904 story from West Virginia involving two rival newspapers: the Clarksburg Telegram and the Clarksburg Daily.
The Telegram suspected their competitor was reprinting their stories without verification, so they decided to lay a trap. They planted a report about a man named Mejk Swenekafew who had supposedly been shot at a local coal mine. In reality, every word of the report was fiction. When the Daily News took the bait and printed the story as their own the very next day, they unknowingly provided the proof of their own corner-cutting.
In fact, if anyone had indeed doubted the story, all they needed to do was realize that: "S-w-e-n-e-k-a-f-e-w" is simply “we fake news" spelled backward. The next day, the Telegram exposed the ruse. It was a risky trick to play, but it perfectly illustrates how easily misinformation can spread when people are too rushed or too eager to "scoop" a story without doing the work of verification.
Understanding this historical context is incredibly empowering. It reveals that we aren't facing a new, invincible monster; we are facing an old one that has simply found a faster way to travel. When we realize that misinformation is a human problem rather than just a technological one, it becomes something we can outsmart today as we have done in the past, with critical thinking skills.
These anecdotes remind us that, while technology has made the spread of misinformation much faster, the human impulse to manipulate is as old as time itself. The goal isn't to teach our children—or ourselves—to believe nothing; it’s to foster healthy skepticism. It’s about teaching readers to think critically, ask questions and digest information a little slower—reclaiming the very discernment my lawyer friend once feared she would lose to her hypothetical computer chip.
Ultimately, combating fake news is no longer about memorizing a list of "good" and "bad" sources; it’s about cultivating a habit of mind. It is a continuous process of questioning, verifying, and having an ongoing awareness of our own biases. Whether I’m helping my children navigate a research project or sitting with a cup of tea reading the news, the goal remains the same: to navigate the digital world with confidence and to sharpen our judgment in the process. In doing so, we can move from being passive consumers to active, intentional readers.
The truth is out there, but we have to put in the hard work to find it. It requires us to slow down, ask the hard questions, and look past the "clickbait" to the substance beneath. When we take the time to do this, we can begin to patch the breach and rebuild the floor of trust beneath our feet—one story at a time.
Once we’ve sharpened our own discernment, we face a trickier challenge: How do we help a child, a friend, or an aging parent see that the "news" they are sharing isn’t true? When we encounter misinformation in our own circles, our instinct is often to lead with a sharp correction, but Grant and Craigie’s insights remind us that because misinformation is tied to our emotions, a direct attack on the "facts" often feels like an attack on the person.
Helpful Tips For Having Conversations About Fake News and Misinformation:
- Lead with Curiosity, Not Judgment: Instead of saying "That’s fake," try asking questions with curiosity and interest, such as, ”I’m curious who wrote this. Did you see an author's name?" This moves the focus from their judgment to the source’s credibility.
- Acknowledge the Emotion/Feelings: If someone shares a scary headline, acknowledge their feelings first: "I can see why that’s worrying/infuriating." Validating the emotion lowers their "adrenal" defence, making them more open to a logical conversation.
- Read and Research Together: Especially with children or students, suggest doing some research together. "Let’s see if we can find another news outlet reporting this same thing." It turns the correction into a shared detective project rather than a lecture.
- Share Your Own "Fails": Humility is a powerful tool. Admitting, "I almost fell for a similar headline last week until I realized it was a 'Mejk Swenekafew' situation," makes the other person feel less defensive and more like part of a team.
Krista Jorgensen is a former public librarian and homeschooling mom living in Calgary, Alberta.