The population of the United States is 342 million, 11 million fewer than the number of followers Kim Kardashian has on Instagram.
While chatting with a producer during a break from her reality TV show last year, Kardashian doubted whether there had been a moon landing. “I think it was a fake,” she said. The clip went viral, breathing new life into an old conspiracy thanks to the star’s extraordinary influence.
Conspiracies like a fake moon landing are the internet’s junk food, racking up millions of views on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Teenagers scroll away countless hours on these platforms, encountering deepfakes of celebrities peddling scams and medical misinformation about “mouth taping” during sleep to get a better jawline. It’s overwhelming. Not just for kids, either.
Amid this information torrent, it’s tempting to treat school as a sanctuary. Districts often do. Most block social media through filters that supposedly protect students. It makes sense, of course, to bar access to toxic, racist, and pornographic content and to try to eliminate online distractions.
But here’s the problem: School policies can’t change the fact that young people spend upward of eight hours a day online outside of school and that 8 in 10 report seeing conspiratorial content in their feeds. Instead of providing students with the skills of digital evaluation, schools leave them to their own devices—literally. If the goal is to prepare students for life, not just school, then teachers must bring false, misleading, and, yes, even conspiratorial content into the classroom.
Doing so will require a big shift in how educators think about curriculum in a digital age.
At present, many states instruct educators to use vetted content in their day-to-day teaching. A recent Illinois state board of education tool asks teachers to check that materials are free of factual errors. In California, the state board of education evaluates new curriculum to ensure accuracy.
Every educator recognizes this protectionist instinct. The premise of textbooks, for example, is to act as a trusted source: “Here’s what happened” in history or “Here’s how something works” in science. Reality is rarely so neat. Oversimplifying what students see in school leaves them vulnerable to the very harms educators are trying to avoid.
We’re seeing the same dynamic play out with the internet. Too often, well-intentioned educators shoo students away from the web entirely. Some colleges even exhort students to use library databases instead of searching the open web, noting that the latter has lots of “junk” to wade through.
The internet does have a lot of junk. Where, if not school, will students learn to sort through it?
Digital literacy requires exposing students to inaccurate content, not shielding them from it. Schools don’t have to open the floodgates by eliminating internet filters. Videos and screenshots from social media can be thoughtfully selected, downloaded, and imported into the classroom. This is precisely what we have been doing at the Digital Inquiry Group. Many of our new Reading Like a Historian lessons for middle and high school students include digital literacy exercises. Professional development for teachers provides guidance for weaving digital literacy into the fabric of subject-matter instruction.
In one of our lessons on the Civil War era, students investigate a TikTok video that claims the Union Army forced African Americans into a “concentration camp” in Natchez, Miss., resulting in 20,000 deaths. Students learn to investigate this claim through lateral reading. They discover that, yes, newly free Black people flooded Natchez after Union forces captured it in 1863. They were housed in makeshift refugee camps with abysmal sanitation, overcrowding, and rampant disease. But 2,000 people perished, not 20,000, including Union soldiers.
The “concentration camp” myth traces back to a “Mystery Monday” segment that relied on a paranormal researcher whose bio described her as skilled in voodoo. Not exactly the credentials one looks for when evaluating historical claims.
The breadth of online misinformation means that almost every topic or discipline can act as an entry point to teach digital literacy. In one activity, we ask students to evaluate another TikTok claiming that Abraham Lincoln authorized the creation of the Secret Service the same day as his assassination. The claim is true, which students confirm through a TIME magazine article.
In a different assessment, students gauge the trustworthiness of Frederick Douglass’ Wikipedia page. Successful students note that the Wikipedia page is protected, which means not just anyone can edit it, and that it’s supported by reliable references. Online reasoning can similarly be integrated in lessons about climate change, vaccines, or even the risks of investing in cryptocurrency.
Exploring claims on the internet deepens instruction by helping students understand how knowledge is created and when it can be trusted. Viral incidents, such as Kardashian’s moon landing proclamation, can help students spot the manipulated “evidence” that props up conspiracy theories.
Talking with her co-star, Kardashian quoted an article about Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon. Aldrin was asked about the “scariest moment” in Apollo 11’s mission. Kardashian, reading from her phone, quoted his response: There was no scary moment because “it didn’t happen.” An Instagram post from 2022 shrink-wraps it this way: “Buzz Aldrin yet again admitting that the moon landing ‘didn’t happen.’”
Aldrin indeed uttered the words “it didn’t happen,” except they were in response to a different question. The original talk: 64 minutes. The clip that went viral: 16 seconds.
This clip and millions like it employ a tactic called “false framing,” in which bad actors reconfigure genuine source content into disinformation. The shorter the video, the more crucial a broader context becomes. There’s a playbook for online deception. Students need to be acquainted with its rules.
Teaching students that information is manipulated is a start. But understanding a principle is not the same as knowing how to apply it. Digital savvy begins with real practice in real classrooms with real social media posts, the kind that most schools currently avoid.
The subjects that make up the school curriculum compete with fake science, pseudo-history, and fraudulent civics. For many young people, credibility gets measured by followers and likes. To Kardashian’s credit, she acknowledged that she was no expert on the moon landing and advised her fans to follow the procedures she herself uses to investigate a claim: “Go to TikTok,” she says, “and see for yourself.”
If we don’t act with urgency and teach students how to verify digital information, that’s exactly what they’ll do.
