Let’s be honest: the internet is becoming an increasingly difficult place to know what’s real. Some of the fakeness is harmless, even fun——a silly AI-generated video of cats sliding down a tube might make us smile for a few seconds, and we don’t really care whether it actually happened. But the danger creeps in when images and videos are fake in ways that matter. During Nepal’s catastrophic flash flooding, for example, false videos spread quickly, claiming to show the cause of the floods or documenting scenes that never occurred. These weren’t just annoying; they were dangerous. Visual misinformation is remarkably believable, and in an emergency it can send people in the wrong direction, keep them from official evacuation advice, or even mislead rescuers about where to search. At the same time, we’re seeing a surge in fake news pages that pretend to be legitimate outlets. In New Zealand, investigators found bogus Facebook pages posing as news organizations, sharing AI-generated images of real eventsand even triggering a warning from the National Emergency Management Agency about false pictures of severe weather, including images related to the fatal slip on Mauao/Mount Maunganui. The concern is no longer hypothetical; it’s already happening around us, and it’s only going to get harder to tell truth from fabrication as these tools become more sophisticated.
So what can we actually do about it? It might be tempting to look for a technical solution, or to believe that simply banning social media will make the problem go away. But researchers who have spent years thinking about misinformation keep coming back to a different, more human answer: teach people, especially young people, how to think. Stuart McNaughton, a professor in the Faculty of Arts and Education at the University of Auckland, co-authored a major report on this question, and he argues that the ability to spot misinformation is a skill like any other. It can be learned; it can be taught; and it needs to be practiced. McNaughton breaks this skill down into two distinct areas. The first is media and information literacy——the critical ability to understand how we might be being manipulated, to judge whether something is believable, and to ask the right questions about what we’re seeing. This isn’t some abstract academic concept; it’s the same criticality that good English teachers have always encouraged, but now it needs to be applied to an online world built on generative AI, memes, algorithms, and endless social feeds. And we know we can teach these skills; that’s the encouraging part. The second area is perhaps more surprising: empathy and communication. McNaughton calls these citizenship skills for the internet——the proactive, pro-social, positive abilities that help people interact online in ways that are thoughtful rather than harmful. This includes perspective-taking, trying to understand where the other person is coming from, and treating others with consideration even when we disagree. These too are teachable. And they matter for truth, not just for kindness, because misinformation thrives in spaces where people are defensive, hostile, and unwilling to listen. If we can’t talk to each other, we can’t reason together, and we certainly can’t correct each other gently when someone has been fooled.
The frustrating part is that, even though we know these skills can be taught, our education systems are not treating them as the urgent priorities they are. McNaughton points out, for instance, that the draft science curriculum currently out for consultation in New Zealand mentions being critical only once. That feels almost deliberately out of step with the world young people are actually living in. And if you look at the primary school curriculum, the gap becomes even more painful: there is almost no reference to critical thinking, digital resilience, or anything like that in the foundational years, even though young children are perfectly capable of being critical. Kids notice things; they ask sharp questions; they are natural skepticslong before they learn to be otherwise. To ignore that is a wasted opportunity, and a risky one at that. But the need for empathy in schools goes far beyond misinformation. McNaughton is appalled, as many of us are, by the sheer degree of hate and polarization that digital channels seem to encourage. Social media makes it easy to dehumanize the person on the other side of the screen. There is a real me, a virtual me, a virtual you, anda real you, and that distance lowers our usual inhibitions against cruelty. You can say things online that you would never dream of saying to someone’s face. Meanwhile, New Zealand has one of the highest bullying rates in the OECD, with some estimates suggesting that in every classroom, likely one child is experiencing cyberbullying on a near-daily or daily basis. These issues are not separate from misinformation; they are connected to it, because empathy is what helps us approach disagreements with humility rather than hostility. Banning social media, as Australia has attempted to do, is not really working:`kids still find ways to access it, and bans don’t make the internet a safer place, nor do they help children build the skills they will need once they inevitably gain access. We need to do a better job of teaching these skills directly, rather than pretending we can fence off the online world forever.
What does this kind of teaching actually look like in practice? One of the most memorable examples comes from Professor Dame Juliet Gerrard, who used something called the Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus website as a teaching tool. For anyone unfamiliar with it, the site describes a supposedly endangered, canopy-dwelling octopus that lives in the Pacific Northwest. It is, of course, a complete fabrication——a joke that has been around long enough to be archived by the Library of Congress, and lucky for us, it still offers a powerful lesson. Gerrard’s method was simple but effective. First, her students would learn about the concept of misinformation and something called lateral reading: if somebody tells you something, you have to go off and check your sources; don’t just take it at face value. Then, the children were given a project on the tree octopus. They would start researching, some would eagerly copy and paste information from the site, convinced they had found a fascinating fact. Others, though, would search wider, notice there was no other evidence, and begin to suspect something was off. Gradually, a ripple would move around the room as kids began to realize: actually, there’s no such thing as a tree octopus. This is fake. For them, that was a visceral experience, because they had already invested time and effort into believing something false. It might even feel a little cruel, as Gerrard acknowledged, but it works. It makes them understand deep down, not just intellectually, that not everything on the internet is true, and that even confident-looking websites can be misleading. There are also clever hoaxes that do the opposite of deceiving: they highlight absurdity in order to make us more aware. Gerrard points to the satirical campaign Birds Aren’t Real, which pretends to expose a government conspiracy that all birds in the United States have been replaced by lifelike drones for surveillance. It’s obviously absurd, but it satirizes the very nature of conspiracy theories, helping us see how they work. Gerrard finds it brilliant enough that she owns the merchandise. But as fun as these examples are, individual class activities alone won’t solve the misinformation crisis; they are fuel for a larger fire, not the whole fire themselves.
That’s why Gerrard led a report calling for something much more substantial than a few clever lessons: a national strategy against misinformation. The report recognized that misinformation doesn’t stay in one corner of society; it seeps through all layers, from classrooms to newsrooms to government agencies to everyday social media feeds. The response needs to be similarly comprehensive. As Gerrard put it, the core message was that we need a big investment in community resilience, and to really train our kids. That means making media literacy anda digital citizenship a serious, ongoing part of education from the earliest years, not a one-off workshop or a lucky teacher’s passion project. It means supporting teachers with training, resources, andespace in the curriculum. It means acknowledging that the answer cannot be left to individuals trying their best to fact-check everything themselves; we need systems that make critical thinking the default, not the exception. This push for truthfulness is also connected to how we face shared challenges, including environmental ones. In fact, this article was originally published as part of Planetary Solutions, an initiative by the University of Auckland and Newsroom exploring the environmental challenges the world is facing andand the practical ways we can all be part of the solution. That context matters: when we cannot agree on basic facts, we also cannot agree on how to protect people from floods, respond to emergencies, or tackle long-term threats. Misinformation doesn’t just confuse us individually; it erodes our collective ability to act together as communities, and that makes us more vulnerable to every other crisis that comes our way.
None of this is easy, and no single lesson, ban, or website will magically make fake news disappear. The impulse to share a shocking video is powerful; the algorithms that reward outrage are powerful too; and the distance of a screen makes it far too easy to forget that real people are behind the words we dismiss or attack. But there is real reason for hope. We know these skills can be taught, because teachers are already doing fantastic, creative things in classrooms——using tree octopuses and lateral reading, and helping children experience the moment of realizing they’ve been fooled, and in doing so, building a kind of memory in the body that stays with them. We know empathy can be nurtured, not just in the abstract, but through deliberate practice in perspective-taking and respectful conversation. And we know that children are capable of far more than we often give them credit for;;they can learn to be critical and kind at the same time. What is needed is a long-term commitment, not just from education systems, but from all of us——parents, community leaders, researchers, and platforms——to treat these skills as essential to living in a digital society. If we can do that, then perhaps when the next scary video or slick fake news page crosses our path, we’ll pause, take a breath, go check our sources, and remember what a fake tree octopus taught us: not everything online is real, but our shared reality is still worth protecting.