A new generation of young adults will (hopefully) be voting en masse this November—but before they do, we need to make sure they (and we!) are equipped to find credible sources of information about candidates in the weeks leading up to Election Day. A good place to start: Common Sense Media’s new Young Voter’s Guide to Social Media and the News.
The guide includes tools for finding credible sources of information about candidates, voting, and the election, as well as suggestions for how voters can help make an impact leading up to the election, tools for teachers, and additional resources for parents.
The guide relies on expert input on how much we can trust breaking news we see online, what to check before you share political news, and how different social media platforms handle the influx of political information, videos, and memes. In one video about deepfakes and democracy, Hany Farid, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, describes deepfakes as “Photoshop on steroids”:
“There’s a lot of information out there, and your responsibility is to consume as much as possible to make an informed decision,” Farid says in the video. “It may never be perfect, but you’ve got to at least make the effort. Resist the temptation to think that you actually know what’s going on. Understand what you do not know—that’s at least as important as understanding what you do know.”
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To gear up for the onslaught of total nonsense ahead of us, read through the full guide and then share it with all the young voters in your life.
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