Strapline is a vlog (video blog) for people who do not want to sound like a chump who falls for questionable information surrounding our digital life.

A bunch of us from Journalism & Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong have gotten tricked by misinformation so many times in the past; and so, we decided to share what we have learned the hard way.

Here are our brief profiles to tell you who we are:

AJ Libunao: The Host

AJ stands for 1) Air Jordan, b) America Japan, c) Angelina Jolie, d) Apple Juice, e) Acid Jazz, or f) American Joke

Blood Type: LOL (and it tastes good)
Horoscope: Aquarius (yes, the sports drink from Japan)
Chinese Zodiac: Monkey King
Favorite Quote: “Sure… sure, sure, sure” originally by Masato but now AJ owns it.

Roy Ching: The Visual Magician

Roy says he doesn’t read or write… everything has to be video!

Blood Type: Square
Horoscope: Triangle
Chinese Zodiac: Normally circle sometimes cross
Favorite Quote: “Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Start.”

Ann Choy: The Whale Whisperer

In a perfect world, Ann Choy would be swimming with whales and chilling with sea turtles all day every day. Until then, she’s a master news literacy instructor in bustling Hong Kong.

Blood Type: Ann doesn’t care enough to know.
Horoscope: The Vengeful Scorpio
Chinese Zodiac: Orca
Favorite Quote: “Go with the flow.”

Samantha Stanley: Secret Agent #6

Only utilized when needed, Sam is a news literacy sleuth with her head in the books. You may never see her presence but she’s always lurking…

Blood Type: Purple+
Horoscope: Crab. And no, she doesn’t want to talk about it.
Chinese Zodiac: Dog (a younger dog than Masato for sure)
Favorite Quote: “Well, I guess it goes from God, to Jerry, to you … to the cleaners. Right, Kent?” by Real Genius

Li Chen: The Drifter

An expat by choice, Chen feels right at home being an outsider anywhere he goes. He’s an analog nerd born into the digital age; he likes to take it slow in the fast-moving world. Looking to be a storyteller, he’s passionately disinterested in socializing.

Blood Type: B (He does not have the slightest clue about what this piece of vital information means, but his doctor says it’s important)
Horoscope: Sagittarius (He had to google this. Did he spell it right?)
Chinese Zodiac: Rooster (Would it be hen if Chen were female?)
Favorite Quote: “I hate Mondays” by Garfield

Masato Kajimoto: The Mastermind

The timid leader of Strapline who is never in the office (or in Hong Kong, for that matter). Masato despises those know-it-all pundits on the media although his kids say sometimes he acts like one, too (yeah, annoying). On his spare time, he is an assistant professor at the Journalism & Media Studies Centre, the University of Hong Kong.

Blood Type: A (Just in case of an emergency)
Horoscope: Libra (No, our astrological sign doesn’t determine our personalities)
Chinese Zodiac: Dog (If you would like to guess his age, you can, although Masato says he is forever 25!)
Favorite Quote: “The spectacular rise of the ‘identity discourse’ can tell us more about the present-day state of human society than its conceptual and analytical results have told us so far” by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (yup, Masato has a Ph.D. in sociology, believe it or not).

Our Team was originally published in Strapline on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• Is your talent in social media campaign skills underused at your current job?
• Do you care about journalism and wonder why people fall for “fake news”
• Are you passionate about media education across Asia?

If so, we want you! And yes, we always make fun of each other and get paid for that. Isn’t that sweet?

Job Title: Executive Assistant (at the rank of Clerk II) in the Journalism and Media Studies Centre (Ref.: 497164) (to commence from as soon as possible, on one-year, with the possibility of renewal)

The Strapline executive assistant will take care of administrative matters and serve as a social media power user to communicate with the audience on a daily basis.

Applicants should have a degree in media studies, education, public relations, journalism, or a related discipline with at least 3 years’ relevant work experience; and proficiency in written and spoken English.

Fluency in other Asian languages, especially for those who can speak in South East Asia, is an advantage.

Those who have responded to the previous advertisement (Ref.: 493842) need not re-apply.

A highly competitive salary commensurate with qualifications and experience will be offered, in addition to annual leave and medical benefits.

The University only accepts online application for the above post. Applicants should apply online and upload an up-to-date C.V., and state the contact information of one referee in the online application form.

Review of applications will start as soon as possible and continue until September 30, 2019, or until the post is filled, whichever is earlier.

Applications close: Sep 30, 2019 (HK Time)

We are hiring! was originally published in Strapline on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nowadays some medial literacy awareness campaigns often focus on the accuracy and factualness of information, such as the one you see below from UNESCO.

UNESCO MILCLICKS on Twitter

To avoid the spread of disinformation with your Media and Information Literacy skills. Provide references if necessary. Verify if in doubt. Do not share information that you are not sure of. #MILCLICKS #ThinkBeforeSharing #EUMediaLiteracyWeek

They tell internet users not to share inaccurate messages… but the problem is, things are not really that clear-cut in real life.

If someone messages you and says, “Japanese food is healthier than Chinese food,” is this a fact? If you agree with the person, you might say, “yeah, that’s true. I prefer Japanese food because it’s healthy.”

If you disagree, on the other hand, you might say, “that’s not true at all. Chinese food uses a lot more vegetables.”

Such a statement is mostly just an opinion but people tend to bring in their own knowledge, past experience, and even personal likings into the mix when deciding what is true and what is not.

Not just news but all types of information and messages are a mixture of facts and opinions at the same time.

Let’s take a look at another example. What should we make of a message like below on the day our city’s daily air pollution index hit a record high?

“Worst air quality in history today. Avoid going out or risk losing five years of your life expectancy. #governmentfail”

The first part is a piece of information that can be backed up with scientific data. We can look up the record and decide whether the statement is factual or not. Yes, the document shows we have the worst air quality in history today. Easy.

But what about the second part — “avoid going out or risk losing five years of your life expectancy”? Is this an evidence-based fact? Or an opinion?

If you say it’s a fact, what sort of evidence does this claim need for everyone to agree that it is not disputable?

Or is it an opinion? If so, whose opinion is it?

It is not uncommon for medical experts to discuss statistics in this fashion for ordinary people to understand the impact of health hazards.

Smoking would be a good case in point. It does shorten one’s longevity and it is a scientifically proven fact.

Let’s suppose that there is a consensus in the medical community that today’s air pollution level is extremely serious and it could inflict some serious damage in one’s lung, making it likely for people to die younger.

Now, is the second sentence a fact or an opinion?

And the hashtag? Is air pollution really a result of our government’s inadequate measures? How can you prove it? Perhaps government supporters say it’s an opinion but people who think the government could have done more might say it is a fact.

What if we can actually compare how the government has been handling the air pollution problems with other neighboring countries’ efforts with some official records? And the data shows our government has been doing very little in comparison?

Now, is this hashtag a reflection of facts or an opinion based on facts?

Given the precarious nature of this message, which can be taken as too alarmist, or even “fake news” by the government supporters, should we refrain from hitting that share button?

But it’s true that air is bad and hazardous, right? That much is certain. So, what’s wrong with trying to alert our loved ones by sharing this social media message?

If you think the information above is complicated, how about this one?

“Hong Kong has one of the most efficient public transportation systems in the world, according to the 2018 World Transportation Index by OECD.”

Is this a fact or an opinion? Let’s see what Kelly and AJ think in the following video:

Falsely attributing information to a credible source is more common than you might think. Making stuff up and then say it’s from a reliable source is one of the common techniques false news stories adopt.

Legitimate news stories don’t do that, of course, but differentiating facts from opinions is not as easy as you might think.

In the Strapline video, AJ showed Kelly a headline that depicted the recent Trump-Kim summit in Vietnam as a “collapse.”

As Kelly said, it is a fact that the President of the United States and the Supreme Leader of North Korea didn’t reach any type of agreement after the meeting — but is it also true that the meeting was a failure, or a “collapse”?

The word surely gives a certain impression of the event beyond the fact — do you agree? Is the failure of the summit then a fact or an opinion?

Separating facts from opinions requires a nuanced understanding of what constitutes objective evidence, which is the topic of the next episode, but for now, we should realize that while there is nothing wrong with sharing opinions, people might mistake them as facts.

For Teachers

Key ideas

• Facts are something that can be proven with objective evidence.
• What we think about the facts or how we describe the facts can be considered opinions.
• News stories normally have both facts and opinions (and sometimes they also contain questionable non-facts).

Learning Outcome

Students will be able to tell facts from opinions (or bogus information) within a news story.

Suggested Activity

• Divide students into small discussion groups.
• Ask each group to pick any news article from an established media outlet.
• Tell them to highlight each piece of information in the story in different colors based on its nature. For example; “facts” in yellow, “opinion” in green, “not sure” in orange.
• Ask them to discuss their rationals for their judgment and research the “not sure” category to find out more about the information.
• As a class, discuss the nuances and difficulties of separating facts from opinions.

Originally published at strapline.org on April 1, 2019.

Fact, opinion, or B.S.? was originally published in Strapline on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In English, we have this phrase “Seeing is believing.” In Chinese, we say “眼見為實(眼见为实) — To see is to believe.” On the internet, this new expression, “有圖(图)有真相 — No photo, no proof,” is also very popular in our part of the world.

In fact, many countries have very similar, or even identical, expressions; the idea seems universal. We tend to believe what we see with our own eyes.

That’s why photos and videos are an essential part of the news.

Images show what it’s like to be at the scene. Cameras serve as our eyes and ears. We feel like we understand news better with visual information because, like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Here are some great aspects of photo and video journalism:

• It makes us feel like we are witnessing the news event.
• It grabs and brings our attention to crucial moments (sports news, for example).
• It tends to stay longer in our memory, especially some iconic images of historical news events.
• It captures and displays emotions of people in the news.

But there are a lot of issues we need to be aware of at the same time. In the age of PhotoShop, we all know that fake photos and videos are ubiquitous on social media.

Many of us have uncles and aunties who believe, and share, some outrageous “news” images that are clearly manipulated or look suspiciously unnatural.

But manipulation is not the only thing we need to be careful about. There are a lot of ways legitimate photos and videos can be misleading. On social media, some people borrow (or should we say steal?) photos and videos from old news events or other places.

Here’s another example during the recent Typhoon we had in Hong Kong, which AJ did not mention in the video:

• A fake video on the Beijing Capital Airlines Airbus A320 accident has reached 10M views on Facebook

Not all fake or misleading images are simple hoaxes, though. News photos and videos show only a glimpse of the whole action, which sometimes leads to misunderstanding. The Koi feeding incident AJ mentioned in the video is a good example:

• Donald Trump and the fish food dump: How early reports got it wrong

Photojournalists can also dramatize the scene. Years ago, photographer Ruben Salvadori documented in Jerusalem this very issue.

So, what should we do? Of course, the first thing we should learn is how to check the authenticity of images. In the following video, AJ shows you some basic techniques fact checkers around the world use: reverse image search and geolocation tools.

Key Ideas

• Image manipulation is everywhere on the internet.
• Old pictures, photos from different locations, video games, movie scenes, and other irrelevant images also circulate often as current news images.
• Photos and videos show only the glimpse of what really heppened, which can be very misleading sometimes.
• Photographers and videographers have the skills to dramatize the situation and that could potentially misrepresent the news event as well.
• There are many other photo/video techniques we should be aware of, which is the topic of next Strapline episode 🙂 🙂 🙂

For teachers

Learning Outcome

Students will be able to develop a better understanding of how news photos are being made and chosen to be shown to the audience.

Suggested Activity

• Divide the class into two groups. Protesters and photo/video journalists.
• Choose a topic that is closely related to the students — something like deteriorating quality of food in student canteens.
• “Protesters” prepare props and other materials for a march.
• “Journalists” will be divided into subgroups and each group needs to decide what sort of media organization they work for (newspapers, TVs, online magazines, etc., with different target audiences).
• Protesters march in the classroom (or outside), holding placards, shoting slogans, and demanding some actions.
• Photo/video journalists take as many photos/videos from different angles, focusing on different people, objects, and actions.
• After the march is over, journalist subgroups need to pick just one image, or 5-second video clip, that they will use to promote the story on social media.
• All students then look at the photos/videos from different news outlets together and discuss potential issues including misrepresentation and dramatization.

Originally published at strapline.org on October 24, 2018.

Fake images are not the only concern was originally published in Strapline on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In many countries in Asia, people receive hundreds of social media messages a day that include misleading claims, obscure factoids, and utterly bogus information; the consequences can be dire.

Rumors of child kidnappers on WhatsApp in India, for example, have led to lynching and killing of innocent passersby across the country in recent months. A similar incident also took place in Indonesia last year.

In Sri Lanka, widely-shared rumors on Facebook about Muslim conspiracy against Buddhist majority led to a wave of violence. Similar conflicts between Buddhists and Muslims, partly fueled by unfounded hearsay and hate speech on social media, have incited riots in Myanmar, too.

The so-called “fake news,” a catch-all term that encompasses everything from fabricated content to errors in news reports to rhetorical attack on unflattering media, has been a severe issue in Asia.

Misinformation and disinformation obfuscate reality, distorts our views, and negates the foundation of our meaningful exchange of ideas in daily lives. Like France and Germany, some governments and lawmakers in countries like Singapore, Cambodia, and South Korea are mulling legislative measures to tackle the problem.

In the following video, AJ reports from the Trusted Media Summit 2018 in Singapore where many concerned journalists, academics, and other media professionals who specialize in fact-checking in the region got together to exchange ideas and explore possible collaboration in the fight against misinformation and disinformation.

And yes, he has finally found me, Strapline’s timid leader, there . . .

My presentation at the event was based on the research project I have been working on with other like-minded journalists and educators in the region. The overview paper is already out and publicly available for download.

Key Ideas

• Misinformation and disinformation have been an extremely serious issue in many Asian countries for many years.
• To understand the scale and impact of the information disorder in our region, we need to take into account the uniqueness of the misinformation ecosystem in each country because, naturally, the matters at the heart vary considerably.
• Many intertwined factors affect the situation in each country, including culture, history, politics, economy, education, digital adoption, technology trends, media law, and press systems.
• Social media and chat apps like WhatsApp and LINE have become the primary means of communication and news consumption for many. Rumors and hoaxes spreading through encrypted messaging apps are particularly hard to detect from the outside because they are shared among closed communities.

For Teachers

Learning Outcome
Students will be able to develop a better understanding of the issues related to “fake news” by exploring the misinformation ecosystem in their own countries.

Suggested Activity
Before the activity, it would be a good idea to show the students one or two case studies that demonstrate how serious consequences can be when misinformation goes viral (our research paper has a plenty of such cases from different Asian countries).

Ask students to find/collect similar cases in the country/community (perhaps as homework) and then discuss in class the following aspects:

• On which platforms do falsehoods spread?
• Who produces false information? Who spreads it? What motivates them?
• Are there any specific topics, issues, and individuals that become targets? If so, what are they?
• Why do certain topics stir more reactions from people? What explains it — culture, history, politics, religion, education, or?
• What is the scale and impact of false or misleading news reports in your country/community?

Caution: This could be a sensitive activity in some countries. Some issues to come up in the discussion are the government’s involvement in propaganda, the nature of targeted topics such as religion and race, and/or polarized political or economic divides.

Originally published at strapline.org on September 14, 2018.

Misinformation deadly serious in Asia was originally published in Strapline on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Clickbait rules! Whether you like it or not, clickbait won’t go away from the internet because it is an age-old, proven method to appeal to our curiosity and emotion.

What is a clickbait? It is a type of news headlines that are written in such a way that it is hard for you not to click.

A typical example would read like, “Shocking! The five despicable reasons Cinderella is divorcing Prince Charming; number three will make you cry!”

Clickbait is powerful, stirring, and emotive; it often works because it exploits what makes us all human. Our brain has this natural tendency to pay more attention to the language that intrigues our inner inquisitiveness.

OK, so, what’s wrong with that, you may ask? Well, if journalism’s role is to inform us of what’s going on in our society with accurate information, a clickbait does the opposite.

In the following video, AJ will explain why clickbait headlines are misleading and how everyone — including established, internationally renowned news outlets — is using this technique to grab your eyeballs and entice your finger to tap the link.

There you have it. Put simply, clickbait headlines are deceptive and misleading because more often than not the articles don’t deliver what they have promised. Tricking the audience to make more money is . . . well, not cool, right?

If you would like to learn about the impact of this practice on the news industry, we can recommend the following two articles.

• Clickbait: The changing face of online journalism (BBC)
• Clickbait and metrics (Online News Association)

Key Ideas

• Clickbait headlines appeal to our curiosity and emotion. They work because we are all human.
• But such headlines are deliberately created mostly for financial gains. Informing the public — which should be the primary goal of journalism — is not the purpose. We should be wary of such a practice.
• Clickbait headlines are inherently misleading and deceptive; we need to learn how to spot them and understand the techniques being used to trick us.

And yes, definitely there are many ways to write clickbait headlines. Like AJ said in the video, some typical ones:

1. include overly sensational or exaggerated words;
2. sound like listicles (list + articles);
3. omit crucial facts or details.

But surely there are more, and we would like to know what type of language tricks you can identify.

When you come across an interesting clickbait type or two, please let us know by e-mail (contact@strapline.org), message us on Twitter (@StraplineNews), or leave a comment on Facebook.

For Teachers

Learning Outcome
Students will be able to 1) spot misleading news headlines by recognizing different language tricks, and 2) understand the potential dangers and social impact of misleading headlines.

Suggested Activity

Before the activity, it would be a good idea to remind the students that we often react to news stories (like, share, comment) after just reading the headlines (which is why clickbait is powerful).

1. Find a few straightforward news articles with plain headlines. Topics that are not political or controversial would work better — such as health issues (in Hong Kong, I use articles like this report, for instance, and they work well).
2. Divide the students into a group of 3–4. Assign each group a different news article.
3. Have each group read the article, and ask them to come up with 2–3 different types of headlines for the story that would immediately attract their friends — i.e. have them create clickbait headlines.
4. Have each group present their headlines (in my experience students have a lot of fun here). Hopefully, there will be a lot of scaremongering, exaggeration, superlatives, lists, exclamation marks, second-person pronouns, hyperbole, and so on and so forth (even made-up facts) — typical tricks and languages used in clickbait.
5. Now ask the whole class how they have understood the news story from each group’s clickbait headlines. There will be a lot of misunderstanding and missing crucial information (unless your students are all masterful headline writers).
6. Discuss the potential impact and dangers of getting information and news from clickbait headlines as a class.

Originally published at strapline.org on September 11, 2018.

This video is gonna change your life! was originally published in Strapline on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Nowadays, we are increasingly frustrated by this notion that news literacy is about identifying online mis/disinformation. Ever since “fake news” became a buzzword all over the world, many people equate news literacy to hoax debunking — but that is only a small part of what news literacy is about.

Understanding what is false and learning how to spot it are, of course, a great first step to become “more news literate,” but such educational instructions could only raise awareness for easily detectable fake or manipulation.

Our information space is much messier than a simple true-or-false dichotomy or hero-vs-villain narratives. Journalists do not present news to the audience as a simple list of facts. If we see the newsmakers (or people in the news) as characters, and the quotes from the sources as dialogues, what we have is a narrative that is a lot like any other storytelling.

“Facts” in news reports can be deceptive. They are often wrapped with observations, descriptions, comments, opinions, analyses, speculations, inferences, sentiments, and other types of information that cannot be checked or vetted. Besides, journalists face a wide range of limitations from time constraints to governmental threats when they deliver news, especially in our part of the world, Asia.

We all need to learn how to make sense of the news beyond mis/disinformation with critical eyes. But unless taught cautiously, critical thinking potentially fosters grave doubts about the media and encourages a mindset that naturally makes people prone to apathy, disengagement, and even cynicism (“hey, if everyone has an agenda and frames the message in a self-serving manner, no information or news is trustworthy, right?”).

It could also encourage people to cherry-pick facts and believe conspiracy theories (“well, nobody tells or knows the truth; so, the “real” truth must be hidden in the dark, yeah?”). Research has shown that poorly-taught critical thinking skills could make people overconfident as well (“Now I know the truth but everyone else doesn’t see it. I am smarter!”)

For us, news literacy should be about how to identify and understand quality information. Spotting false and doubting questionable news reports is one thing, but deciding what’s trustworthy and why is the real challenge.

Critical thinking also needs to be reflectively applied to examine ourselves to comprehend how we form our thoughts and behaviors from news reports.

News literacy is about recognizing our own cognitive limitations, biases, and logical flaws. Developing an ability to identify reliable, actionable information — not just in democracy but also under authoritarian systems — helps us navigate through the abundance of misinformation and disinformation in the long run.

Strapline is our renewed effort to promote a healthy dose of skepticism coupled with self-reflective, critical thinking mindset — with practical digital proficiency.

Fact-checking techniques and sufficient knowledge of computer algorithms, social media bots, online trolls, censorship mechanism, digital economy, and other related fields are all part of our target topics.

Our goal is not just discussing how to avoid getting misled or tricked by bogus claims and manipulated content, but also exploring the methods to discern actionable information in news reports.

Our focus is primarily on news literacy in Asia but we believe our content could resonate in many other countries that are having similar issues.

Originally published at strapline.org on August 21, 2018.

We are Strapline! A video series all about news literacy was originally published in Strapline on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s hard to decide what constitutes “fake news.” The term is a catch-all expression that encompasses everything — therefore, confusing.

For instance, all of the following could be called “fake” in our daily conversation.

1. fabricated content including manipulated images
   (surprise, surprise, people make stuff up for a variety of reasons)
2. unflattering media to your belief/opinions
   (reports can be fact-based, but naturally, we all don’t like to be criticized)
3. errors in news reports
   (yup, journalists make mistakes — more often than you might think)
4. ads disguised as news reports
   (those ‘native ads’ are everywhere these days)
5. commentaries on current affairs including satire
   (nope, opinions are not facts but many people don’t know the difference)
6. sensational, emotional, and/or overly dramatic news headlines
   (they can be very misleading as they lack important details and nuances)

You may think it is easy to distinguish one type of misinformation from another because categorizations like the above are rather clear-cut, but in reality, news reports often consist of a combination of many different information types.

A legit news report, for example, can be quoting a politician who has lied to the journalist. A fabricated story about a news event or a conspiracy theory could also contain full of verifiable facts in it. Sponsored content does not mean it is all misleading or exaggeration.

So, today, let’s play a little game with AJ:

There is nothing new about fraudulent news stories, bogus claims, made-up “facts,” malicious disinformation, political propaganda, attacks on journalists, and other efforts to manipulate the information space to influence people’s beliefs and opinions. Human history is full of such efforts all over the world.

Grouping them all under the name of “fake news” muddles the issues and confuses us. In non-English speaking countries, it could be even more problematic because people interpret the English expression in their own languages in their own cultural and political context, which further obfuscates the nuances.

What we should do, instead, is try to identify the specific types and highlight the associated problems when we come across questionable information.

Key Ideas

• Calling some news “fake” won’t help our conversation because people mean different things with that expression. “You’re fake news” simply means “I don’t like you” nowadays 🙂
• Spotting questionable information in news reports, on the other hand, is an important skill we all should learn. After all, who wants to look like a chump who gets tricked all the time?
• Knowing different “types” of misleading content let us quickly identify the issues and prevent our mom and dad from spreading it (yeah, it’s often the old folks who do that).

For Teachers

Learning Outcome

Students will be able to 1) spot problematic news stories by recognizing different types of misinformation, and 2) envisage associated issues surrounding the misinformation ecosystem from motivations to social impacts.

Suggested Activity

Information and misinformation are becoming more and more difficult to tell apart as many types of misinformation are masquerading as journalism.

In this lesson, we would like our students to get into the complexities of the different types of misinformation.

1. After discussing the above video and key ideas, have your students find and collect questionable information on the internet they encounter every day.
2. Have them go through the following articles:
   - Fake News. It’s Complicated. (Claire Wardle | FirstDraft News)
   - Beyond Fake News — 10 Types of Misleading News
   (The European Association for Viewers Interests)
3. With the examples they have collected, ask them to create their own table like the one made by EAVI such as the one below. Then have them compare and discuss their own tables.

This article was originally posted on the Strapline website.

Would you call this “fake news”? was originally published in Strapline on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.