I still remember the exact moment the room went quiet. I was standing at the front of my classroom, holding their attention in a way that usually only happens when someone has just dropped a rumor about a favorite celebrity or announced a pop quiz they didn’t study for. I had just told them about a deadly chemical called dihydrogen monoxide. I described it as a colorless, odorless substance that could cause asphyxiation, that was found in dangerous quantities in the environment, that had been linked to corrosion and to thousands of deaths every year. Their eyes widened. Some of them started writing notes. A few of them looked genuinely scared. Then I let it sink in. I told them they were exposed to it every single day, and that we should probably do something about it before it was too late. When I asked for a show of hands to see who thought we should ban it, most of the room went up. Then I turned to the board and wrote down its chemical formula: H₂O. Water. There was that beautiful second of silence while their brains caught up. And then came the groan, the laughter, the accusations that I had tricked them. I had. But the trick was never meant to humiliate them. It was meant to teach them something that no textbook could ever convey as powerfully: that you can tell people nothing but true things, and still leave them completely misled.
That lesson is the heart of what I do as a journalism teacher, and it has never felt more urgent. We are living in what economists and media scholars like to call an attention economy. The real currency isn’t dollars anymore; it’s eyeballs, clicks, likes, shares, and the precious seconds that a human being spends looking at a screen. Platforms and influencers are extraordinarily good at competing for that attention, and the rules of that competition reward the outrageous, the alarming, and the emotionally charged. Calm, nuanced, well-contextualized information is terrible at stopping someone’s thumb from scrolling. An alarming warning about a chemical that might be in your water supply? That is excellent at stopping the scroll. So the incentive structure is set up to amplify the very content that is most likely to mislead us. Every day, my students swim through a river of content that has been filtered by algorithms designed to keep them engaged, not by editors or fact-checkers designed to keep them informed. The result is that young people are not simply exposed to misinformation; they are systematically saturated with it, and then blamed for falling for it. But falling for it isn’t a character flaw. It’s a design feature of the system we have built. The first thing I want my students to understand is that they are not stupid for being fooled. They are human beings living in an environment that has been engineered to fool them. The dihydrogen monoxide trick works on adults too. It works on smart people. It works on people who have graduate degrees. It works because it uses trust, authority, and momentum against them.
What makes the trick so effective is not that the facts are false. It’s that they are incomplete. Everything I said about water was technically true. Water can cause asphyxiation, if you inhale it. Water can dangerously dilute your blood, if you drink too much of it. Water is used in industrial applications. Water causes corrosion. None of those statements were lies. They were all just missing context, and context changes everything. That is the most important insight I want my students to walk away with: a claim doesn’t have to be fabricated to be dangerously misleading. You can cherry-pick facts, strip them of their surroundings, wrap them in scientific-sounding language, and present them with a serious face from a position of authority, and you can convince people to believe almost anything. In fact, doing that is far more effective than telling an outright lie, because the person who falls for it can’t easily point to a specific falsehood. They just feel uneasy when they learn the truth. They know they were played, but they can’t say exactly where the trick happened. The trick happened in the gaps, in the things that were left out, in the choice of words that made a common substance sound sinister. That’s a powerful lesson for young people who are constantly being asked to make snap judgments about the things they see online. I want them to develop the habit of asking not just “Is this true?” but “Is this the whole truth?” and “What is missing?” and “Who benefits from me believing this without the rest of the story?” Those questions are the beginning of real news literacy. They are also the beginning of deeper thinking about everything else in life, from politics to advertising to conversations with friends.
The most rewarding part of the lesson comes after the reveal, when my students shift from being victims of a trick to investigators of it. We go back through the claims I made, and they start to see the machinery. They practice something called lateral reading, which is a technique used by professional fact-checkers. The idea is simple: when you encounter a new source, don’t spend too much time scrolling through the source’s own website to figure out what it is. Instead, open a new tab and see what other, independent sources say about it. That single habit is surprisingly powerful, because most people do the opposite. They trust a source because it looks professional, because it has a nice logo, because it has a big following, because it says the things they already believe. But a source’s description of itself is often exactly the thing that is designed to manipulate you. Lateral reading is a way of checking the reputation of a source the way you would check the reputation of a restaurant: by reading reviews from people who have eaten there, not just by trusting the beautiful photos on the menu. The more my students practice this, the more they realize how easy it is to be fooled by a polished-looking website or a confident-sounding influencer. We also spend time learning to distinguish between different types of content: news, advertising, opinion, entertainment. That seems basic, but the data shows it’s not. A 2024 survey from the News Literacy Project found that only 18 percent of teens could correctly answer three simple questions that asked them to sort out a piece of content into categories like news, advertising, opinion, or entertainment. Eighteen percent. That means more than four out of five teenagers could not reliably tell the difference between something designed to inform them and something designed to sell them something or make them laugh. If you don’t know what a piece of content is trying to do, you have no idea how much to trust it.
After all that analysis, my students create what we call a “Stop Before You Share” corrective message. The idea is not to make them never share anything again. It’s to build a small pause into the process, a moment of reflection before they hit the button that sends something to their friends, their followers, their group chats. I teach them to ask a few quick questions: Who made this? What evidence is it based on? What might it be leaving out? Does this deserve my trust, or is it just trying to use me to spread itself further? This feels like a small thing, but in a world where misinformation travels at the speed of a single tap, that pause can be the difference between participating in the problem and stopping it. The goal is healthy skepticism, not cynicism. I often tell my students that I want them to become harder to fool, but not impossible to inform. There is a big difference between asking questions and refusing to believe anything. Cynicism looks at the world and assumes everyone is lying. Healthy skepticism looks at the world and asks, “Okay, show me the evidence.” We need citizens who still believe that facts exist and that it is possible to learn the truth. We just need them to be more careful and more curious about how they decide what counts as credible. These are taught skills. Nobody is born knowing how to sort through a fire hose of information, and being constantly immersed in information does not make you better at evaluating it. In fact, it often makes you worse, because the sheer volume makes it impossible to deeply engage with everything, so you rely on shortcuts. And shortcuts are what manipulators game.
My students always remember the day I tricked them with water. They laugh about it for the rest of the year. But I hope they remember the more important lesson, too: that facts are powerful, but facts without context can still fool you. And I hope it stays with them long after they leave my classroom, when they are scrolling through their feeds at two in the morning, when they see a headline that makes their blood boil, when someone they trust shares something that sounds just a little too perfect or a little too terrible to be the whole story. I hope they pause. I hope they remember that a trustworthy messenger can still deliver a misleading message, that true claims can still be used to lie by omission, and that the best defense against being manipulated is not intelligence or education alone, but the simple, humble habit of asking what you might be missing. That is the lesson I will carry with me to the National News Literacy Conference in Salt Lake City this October, and it is the lesson I hope more teachers will carry into classrooms everywhere. We cannot stop every lie from being told. But we can teach young people to hold every claim a little more loosely, to demand context instead of just consuming clicks, and to understand that being well-informed is not something that happens to you. It is something you have to choose, again and again, every single day.