Throughout this whole project, we kept two essential questions to guide us:
How do I find the truth in this crazy world?
How certain can I ever be about anything?
These two questions helped carry us through the project and kept us focused on what we wanted to achieve with this project. We started this project out as a hoax we were going to pull on the school. We researched different conspiracy theories and fake news articles that the world fell for and caused a big reaction. We created a presentation about these things, my focus was about the illuminati and Free Masons.
Researching about this conspiracy theory was really fun because it was something interests me a lot. As I was researching it, I was still a little suspicious about these organizations actually existing. I knew free masons existed, they aren't anything secret, but I found it hard to believe that once you got higher into their ranks, you began to worship the devil and do all these demonic rituals that everyone claims they do. I now actually think they do, because the free masons have existed for so long and the higher leaders are very secretive, but there's no way of knowing unless you yourself join the free masons to find out.
After studying and presenting our research, my teacher decided to test us on our knowledge. He secretly created a fake website about a ancient burial ground at High Tech High. We spotted that it was fake within 15 minutes, it took us a little longer to realize it was created by Dr. P. Some of the things that gave it away was the credibility of the website. It was created on a weebly, and that instantly raised some concern. Most conspiracies, even the craziest ones, have a well built website with lots of information. Another thing was that the author of the article was made up. Well not actually made up, upon further research we figured out that the "author" was an old colleague of Dr. P's and when we image searched his picture, the two people were completely different. By then, we had decided it was a fake website and it was created by our teacher, Dr. P. This was a really good experience because we started learning how to spot fake things in articles.
After we researched the more commonly known theories, we started to create our own conspiracy theories, mine involved a student at High Tech High whose family was involved in a murder cult.
We came up with this idea randomly, and we decided it could've been believable if we played our cards right. We started to make really sketchy things that didn't give a lot of information, but enough information that we could raise some eyebrows. We presented it to the class to try to get it as our main project and the story that we would hoax our school with. My story didn't get chosen, but it was still a good experience to go through.
Around halfway through our project about hoaxing the school wasn't going so well, we didn't really have anything and nothing was coming together to create a good hoax. We were doing a bunch of work that we had no idea why or how it was going to help contribute. Realizing this, Dr. P had us voice our opinion on what we think is going on and what we should do to better our project. We wrote about it in a document called, "My story so far"
When I realized that the hoax wasn't work, I was really stressed out. I was given to role of a coordinator of the project which meant that I was in charge of helping the groups get done what they needed to get done. All of the groups struggled a lot to figure out what they were going to do and when we finally got something, it was basically useless because the project wasn't working. This caused a lot of frustration, but I think it all worked out in the end for the better. It was better to end that project near the beginning than to continue it and it be a horrible project at the end of it. This allowed for something better to come.
Instead of doing conspiracy theories and hoaxing people, we decided to go into fake news. We started this by looking at crime scenes to decide what had happened to the person. Whether it was a suicide or murder, what this achieved is that we learned how to provide a warrant with evidence. We learned how to back up a statement with evidence that answers the question "So what?" Using these warrants, we created a police report to describe the incident and whether we thought if it was a suicide or murder.
After our police report, we started created fake ads to attract people. We created an ad about a pill that would help you live to 300 years. We had to make it as click-bait as possible.
We decided to go with the extreme route with our ad. We found a random picture of an elderly man and then added some information on what "doctors" were saying about it. Now that we had some experience making fake articles, we were assigned to make an actual fake new article about something that real or something that made up. I decided to go with something in between. I took something that is real and blew it out of proportion to make it fake.
This was my final draft of my fake news article. It was the article i presented during exhibition. When Trump and the republican parties released their healthcare plans, every perspective was reporting on it. A lot of people saying it was the worst, a lot were saying it was the best. I was confused on who to believe. I realized that if I was confused, other people were probably confused as well, so i decided to take that opportunity to confuse people even more by creating a fake news article. The reason we were created the fake news articles was to teach people how to spot fake news. We did this by creating a sheet of red flags. These red flags consisted of things from the title being in all caps to attract attention to the URL of the website being fake. These were all important things to figure out if the news was reliable and answer the question of "How to find the truth in this crazy world" When I was done with my news article I was ready to share it with 8th graders. We were assigned an 8th grade class to teach. We were going to give them our articles and let them decide if they were real or fake, and then based on their answer, guide them the right way and teach them so they don't make mistakes again.The 8th grader I got believed my article and I guided him through the steps of how to spot what I had planted within the article to make it fake. When i left his classroom, he learned a lot about red flags and how to spot them.
When exhibition came around, I knew enough about fake news and how to spot it that I was ready to teach anyone how to spot it. My exhibition experience consisted of supervising both of my classes, so I wasn't in one class permanently. This limited my ability to sit down and talk to parents reading our articles. But I was still able to help people with spotting fake news. What really helped me a lot in learning how to spot fake news was just looking at a lot of real articles and comparing them to fake ones. The differences are easy to spot and it becomes a habit when you see something that is sketchy.