Can you spot the lies in your news feed? | Laura Smythe

Host Elise Hu introduces Laura Smythe’s argument by returning to 2017, when Instagram’s newly algorithmic feed was filled with orange-square posts promoting Fyre Festival in the Bahamas. Kendall Jenner, Hailey Baldwin, Emily Ratajkowski, Ja Rule, and other influencers and celebrities advertised white-sand beaches, luxury accommodations, and performances by acts including Migos and Major Lazer. The campaign sold 95% of its tickets in 48 hours, with some buyers paying as much as $100,000 and college students treating the event as a spring-break trip. The festival never happened as promised. Ticket holders arrived to FEMA-style disaster-relief tents and bread-and-cheese sandwiches; none of the advertised artists performed, and organizer Billy McFarland ultimately went to federal prison. Smythe says the central lesson was not simply that a concert was fraudulent, but that the episode was about trust. Hundreds or thousands of smart, affluent people saw glamorous, carefully curated online content and collectively concluded that it was real and worth the cost. People instinctively trust individuals they find relatable, she argues, but relatability and credibility are different qualities. Fyre Festival therefore becomes an early warning for an environment in which attractive, familiar-looking content can make something false feel verified.

Smythe explains that her years in legacy newsrooms taught her how news is supposed to inform public worldviews, while later work with new-media creators showed her that audiences do not necessarily examine information using the same framework. In a newsroom, facts do not simply appear: reporters gather information, editors review it, fact-checkers test it, legal teams assess it, and everyone considers source quality, bias, ethics, and objectivity. Journalists spend years learning this discipline of interrogating information in pursuit of truth. Her claim is not that journalism is perfect. Journalists are human and make mistakes, and she does not argue that AI, influencers, or social media should disappear. Instead, she says traditional newsrooms and new media should learn from one another to build a faster and more accurate information infrastructure. The verification habits used by journalists—checking sources, looking for corroboration, identifying bias, examining what is missing, and asking how funding affects a message—are not especially difficult or unattainable. The problem is that they are usually taught only in newsrooms or journalism schools. Smythe argues that these tools should be available to everyone because they are now basic civic skills.

Smythe says people have access to more information than any previous generation but may be thinking less independently because social-media and AI algorithms promote trending material without guaranteeing that it is accurate or complete. In the United States, she notes, there are no national media-literacy education standards. Civic education has not kept pace with the way children and adults now encounter information: a child born today may orient around Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube rather than the New York Times, Fox News, or PBS. She cites the figure that 86% of Gen Z turns to social media for news. For Smythe, media literacy includes recognizing AI-generated images and deepfakes, checking unverified news, identifying bias in articles or influencer content, understanding how entertainment shapes broadcast news, and examining headlines, visuals, tone, and word choice. It also means asking who funded a piece of information, what may be missing, and why. She connects this gap to democracy: a strong democracy depends on both a free press and an informed, engaged public. When feeds determine what becomes visible and people share material because it produces a strong emotional reaction, citizens may lose the independent judgment needed to form informed opinions.

Smythe points to international efforts to close the media-literacy gap. Australia has banned social media for children 16 and under, with Denmark following its lead, while Germany begins media-literacy education in primary school. German classrooms may bring journalists in to teach students how to vet sources, recognize state-backed disinformation, and pause before sharing something that provokes a powerful emotional response. Finland is her main example. Questioning information and identifying propaganda have been part of Finnish civic culture since the country gained independence from Russia more than a century ago. Media literacy is now a core part of the national curriculum from kindergarten through grade 12, college, and adult learning. It is integrated into subjects rather than isolated in one class: literature students verify news and vet sources; math students study algorithms and statistics; art students examine how images can be edited; and history students consider how the same World War II air raid might be taught differently by countries on opposing sides. Some Finnish students play a computer game called “Troll Factory,” spending a week acting as internet trolls and trying to maximize visibility by spreading disinformation. One student summarizes the lesson: “You gain a lot of followers when you spread a lot of unpleasant things.” Finnish officials say the curriculum protects democracy by making people less vulnerable to deception. Finland has ranked first in the Open Society Foundation’s annual Media Literacy Index every year since the index began in 2017.

Smythe returns to Fyre Festival and asks what might have happened if the people promoting it had applied the questions Finnish elementary students ask every day. She calls on listeners to support national media-literacy standards, practice thinking journalistically, and challenge misinformation even when it comes from a friend. That might mean posting a link to a verified article to correct an inaccurate social-media claim, subscribing to local newspapers, or choosing social-media creators who follow a journalistic process. She also recommends sharing media-literacy tools with children and others in one’s life. Her final advice is to ask questions even of people one usually agrees with, remain curious, check sources, and speak up for truth when doing so is uncomfortable. The conclusion is that the ability to think independently may be the most important civic skill people have left. The episode identifies Laura Smythe’s talk as having been recorded at TED Democracy Philadelphia in 2026, then closes with production credits and Elise Hu’s sign-off.