In an increasingly online world, where creating a professional-looking website can be done in a few clicks and AI algorithms will tell you exactly what you want to hear, more and more people are finding it difficult to ascertain what's real and what's not. What's more, there can be significant political, financial, and power advantages to deliberately leading people astray.

While the phenomenon of "fake news" is a relatively recent development, it can actually be seen as simply a new facet of topics like the legend, the rumor, and the conspiracy theory - topics that folklorists have studied for decades. Join folklorists Dr. Sara Cleto and Dr. Brittany Warman to discuss the framework folklorists have developed for talking about the transmission of information on the internet from the affordances of community to the cyclical history of "fake news" to why actual belief matters less than you might think. In this talk, you'll learn to read the news like a folklorist.  

Once you can conceptualize "fake news" through the lens of folklore, you can shift the focus from outrage or fear or horror over the news item itself (and/or whether or not something is true at all) to questions like why is this particular story being amplified and "going viral," who benefits from said virality, and how identity and folk groups can power narratives. In this way, we can use the tools of folkloristics to not only become better consumers of Internet culture, but better able to use our skills to help others not fall victim to the ploys of the powerful.