>>I thought it was weird that people would create fake news Story time... The very first class I took in college was called Information Fluency, back in 2002.

>>I thought it was weird that people would create fake news Story time... The very first class I took in college was called Information Fluency, back in 2002. Among other things, it taught HTML and CSS (which I already knew) and then the professor did something really interesting for the capstone project, which was to have everyone create a fake website containing some big news and host it on its own domain (which weren't so easy to get back then). The more real-looking you made it, the higher your score. So you quickly learned to pay attention to little things such as copyright notices in footers, professional-looking logos, professional-sounding domain names, static pages for stuff like "organization history" and whatnot. The best part though? As extra credit, the teacher sent everyone a list of ten links, which were either the fake websites created by other students, or real websites. If you were able to correctly distinguish the fake ones from the real ones, you earned the extra credit! So your overall score was a function of how well you fooled others, and how likely you yourself were to be fooled. :) I got the highest score in that class. Mine was a website belonging to some fake space agency called Interstellar Space Sciences, and it was reporting on its front page that scientists had found trace of alien life on Mars. The story had fake citations from real people working at real organizations, as well as high-quality photos of what looked like the Martian landscape (actually Death Valley in California that I applied a reddish color filter to) and diagrams of organic molecules. I also had a "Contact Us" page where I listed my phone number, which several people actually called! For a period of three weeks I just answered all calls with, "Good afternoon, Interstellar Space Sciences, how may I direct your call?" and everyone fell for it, including some of my actual friends... Anyway, I think my experiences in that class turned me into a super skeptic, and from then on I started to take all incoming information with a grain of salt, especially if it is reported in the news.