“Save the Pacific Northwest tree octopus”: a hoax revisited. Or

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to propose a new literacies approach to get insight into young people’s capability to detect fake news. Design/methodology/approach This study is a replication of a US empirical study in The Netherlands to examine whether schoolchildren were able to identify the spoof website “Save The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus” as fake. Findings In The Netherlands, only 2 out of 27 school children (7 per cent) recognized the website as being a hoax; results that are worse, even, than those of the 2007 US study, where the website was recognized as being unreliable by slightly more than 6 out of 53 school children (11 per cent). Research limitations/implications A similar but large-scale quantitative empirical study should be conducted in several countries to see if the trends in the US and The Netherlands are indeed significant. Practical implications It is important to start teaching children at an early age how to critically evaluate online information. Social implications The perceived reliability of digital information is a hot issue, given the frequency with which fake news is circulated. Being able to critically evaluate digital information will help to have access to trustworthy information. Originality/value Instead of using technological fact checking by Google, Facebook and Twitter, this paper suggests the adoption of a new literacies approach, focusing on young people’s capability to detect fake news.

Testing Children and Adolescents’ Ability to Identify Fake News: A Combined Design of Quasi-Experiment and Group Discussions

“…The study conducted by Leu et al [4] in the US was the first to propose the use of the hoax website http: //zapatopi.net/treeoctopus in fake news research. This has then been used as inspiration by other studies [2,3] in The Netherlands and in the US. Both the results (Table 1) and the studies' designs (Table 2) were different, whilst all of them show low results in school children's ability to identify hoax sources.…”

“…Loos et al [2] conducted an empirical study on 27 children aged 11 and 12 from the Netherlands-"Safe the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus": a hoax revisited. Or: How vulnerable are school children to Fake News?…”

“…This study aims to assess Romanian children and adolescents' ability to distinguish truthful information from fake news and test the theory based on other studies' [2,4,6,7,28] findings, claiming that digital natives cannot recognize fake news. In this study, two research questions are answered: Similarly to the previous study, the first part of this research is based on exploratory research, using one-group post-test only quasi-experimental design, mixed with qualitative debriefing sessions on a sample of N = 54 Romanian children and teenagers (26 girls and 28 boys) from two age categories: 10-11 years old and 18-19 years old.…”

“…The research was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of SNSPA (National University of Political Studies and Public Administration) 1 . The research conducted in Romania was based on the study conducted by Loos et al [2], following the same structure, but using a different online source-http://salvamjacalopul.wordpress.com, a website presenting information on an animal that does not exist. The choice not to use the tree octopus website was made based on two reasons: its aspect is considerably different from the way most websites look today, as it was built more than twenty years ago; also, the content presented by the site could be a limit for the research, because it could not be possible for an octopus to be part of the Romanian fauna, which could have corrupted the way subjects perceived the site.…”

“…Even though multiple studies have been conducted on schoolchildren around the world [2][3][4][5][6][7], fake news has only recently been approached [8,9] from a Romanian children (especially high school students) perspective. This study seeks to add to the academic examination of the fake news phenomenon and to the study of children's ability to identify fake news.…”