IOWA, USA — Misinformation is everywhere online, and it impacts everything from politics to the classroom.
You might have seen a viral TikTok claiming former astronaut Buzz Aldrin said the moon landing was fake: that's not true. Or, more locally, a claim about Carroll schools putting out litter boxes for students who identify as animals: that is also not true.
Stories like these are everywhere online. Dr. Michael Bugeja with the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University explains why.
"Now the problem is, we had anticipated a global village with social media, and we got a global mall instead. So everything is about selling."
Those "global malls" are big business.
Facebook's parent company Meta is worth $565 billion and has nearly three billion users. With so many people posting and sharing, how do sites like Facebook deal with false posts?
"The social networks really kind of generally do three things to avoid misinformation. So one is they remove it, they reduce it and they rebut that information," said Chris Snider, a professor at Drake University.
One of the biggest dangers around online misinformation: clicking on and sharing those sorts of stories can actually lead to seeing more of them. That phenomenon is called "an echo chamber."
"Maybe you believe something to be true that isn't true. Well now, you're going to start seeing more and more information saying that same thing ... suddenly we reach a point where, why would you not believe this is true when Facebook is showing you nonstop other people, other sources saying that this is true?" Snider added.
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So what can be done to help address this? Bugeja argues that the solution starts young: kids need to be taught how to find accurate info online.
"We have to educate from the middle school, all the way to college, media and technology literacy for the next generation. Because right now, there are no quick fixes," he told Local 5.
Snider offered a few pointers on ways that you can help make sure your information's solid. Study your sources, whether it's a website or research article. Be careful with images, since they can often lack context or otherwise be manipulated. Third, find other sources on the same topic and take a look at how they compare so you're getting all sides of an issue.
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Watch: Conspiracy Theory Casualties (FULL SHOW)