Paragraph 1 Imagine waking up in the morning, reaching for your phone, and scrolling through a stream of messages, alerts, and headlines. Some of these are from friends and family, but many are from strangers, bots, or cleverly disguised fraudsters. You see a story about a new government policy that makes your heart race, only to discover later that it was completely fabricated. Then you get a text message that looks like it is from your bank, warning you about suspicious activity and asking you to click a link. Your finger hovers over the screen. It feels urgent. It feels…

We are living through a moment when reality itself feels fragile. A pandemic, natural disasters, and nationwide protests have upended daily life, and alongside those visible crises runs another one: an epidemic of misinformation that feeds on fear and deepens divisions. Kim Bisheff, a Cal Poly journalism lecturer who studies how falsehoods travel online, says the term misinformation gets thrown around loosely, but at its core it means false information deliberately pushed out with the intent to deceive. It works because it targets our emotional wiring. Human beings are wired to react powerfully to fear and anger, and when a…