Maria Fierro

MLIS 701
Garcia
The Role of Libraries and Librarians in Fighting Fake News

ABSTRACT/INTRODUCTION

The spread of misinformation and fake news has been a major concern for many years

now, first making its real rounds surrounding the 2016 presidential election. We have been told

to be wary of the information we consume and from what sources we are getting our information

from. Despite this, we have seen a rise in the spread of misinformation, fake news, and

conspiracy theories this year. This year, 2020, has seen fake news surrounding the presidential

election, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the protests against law enforcement. The

misinformation being spread and it’s baffling outlandishness should be cause for concern. As

librarians, we must be proactive against the spread of misinformation. We must take action in the

fight against the spread of misinformation because our core values include commitment to

democracy, social responsibility, and advocacy towards education and lifelong learning. I argue

that in order to be successful agents towards positive change, we must focus on equipping our

communities with information literacy. To do this, we need to keep our core values close, follow

misinformation trends closely, continuously assess our patrons’ information needs, create

community-specific resources, and remain as neutral as possible along the way. I want to

emphasize that in order to create materials/resources that are most relevant, we must first analyze

the misinformation trends, and we must continuously assess our patrons and their skills. By

keeping up with misinformation trends and our patrons’ levels of skill, we can better create

workshops, classes, curricula, and materials that will help equip library patrons with information

literacy.
CORE VALUES

When we pursue librarianship as a career, we subscribe to the ALA Core Values of

Librarianship. The values “define, inform, and guide our professional practice,” according to the

ALA website. So, in this case, the core values that pertain to the issue of misinformation and its

spread are three: democracy, social responsibility, and education and lifelong learning.

The first one is democracy. The ALA describes the core value of democracy as one that

“​presupposes an informed citizenry.​ ..The publicly supported library provides​ free and equal

access to information​ for all people of the community the library serves” (my italics). It is

essential for the survival of democracy to maintain all its citizens informed, thus the spread of

misinformation and fake news is a threat to democracy.

Another core value that is important to take into consideration is social responsibility.

The ALA website states that our social responsibilities as librarians are “defined in terms of the

contribution that librarianship can make in ​ameliorating or solving the critical problems of

society; support for efforts to help inform and educate the people of the United States on these

problems and to encourage them to examine the many views on and the facts regarding each

problem”​ (my italics). As librarians, not only must we inform and educate, but we must also

encourage that people examine both sides of all problems. This is particularly pertinent when

fighting misinformation. Consuming news right now feels very much like consuming biases. It’s

evident from watching how the presidential election turned out that the country is deeply

divided, making it seem like either an American citizen is either far left or far right, as if that is

all one can pick. The lack of nuance makes it so that it feels like there is no middle ground, and

no room for agreement. Another threat to democracy is the inability to see eye-to-eye with one

another, and the inability to see one problem/issue through multiple lenses.
 Lastly, we must promote peoples’ pursuit towards education and lifelong learning, which

essentially means that learning and education is a lifelong process. To fight misinformation we

must focus on equipping people with information literacy, but we must remember that

information changes, and the tools and technology that we use will also change, so teaching

information literacy is not going to lose its relevance. It will always be an ongoing process.

DEFINITIONS

In order to avoid confusion, I would like to provide some definitions. The reason why

these definitions are being provided, despite how seemingly simple they are, is because when I

studied the trends of fake news, I noticed that many people are increasingly challenging facts.

For this reason, I’d like to have a consensus on what these definitions mean for the sake of being

understood. All of the definitions were taken from the Oxford English Dictionary

A ​fact​ is a thing that has really occurred or is actually the case; a thing certainly known to

be a real occurrence or to represent the truth. ​Misinformation​ is false or inaccurate information,

especially that which is deliberately intended to deceive. ​Fake news​ ​conveys or incorporates

false or deliberately misleading information. It has been used in two ways: to refer to inaccurate

stories circulated on social media and/or the Internet, especially ones which serve a particular

political party or ideology; or to seek to discredit media reports regarded as partisan or

untrustworthy. ​Neutrality ​is an intermediate state or condition, not clearly one thing or another; a

neutral position, a middle ground.

CURRENT MISINFORMATION TRENDS

It is important that we understand what type of misinformation is being spread and how it

is being spread. The New York Times created a summary of what misinformation has been

spread this year in an article titled “The Year in Misinformation, So Far.” The article, published
in October 2020, explains that trending topics of misinformation have been about the following:

voting by mail; the presidential election and its candidates; tips and information on the

COVID-19 pandemic and the new vaccine; and the Black Lives Matter movement, protests,

police violence, and racial injustice.

The consequences to this have been serious. For example, the movement known as

QAnon, a far-right movement that believes in outlandish and baffling conspiracy theories, have

been known to believe that many Democrats and some Hollywood stars are running a child

trafficking ring so that they can murder the children and drink their blood. Due to this conspiracy

theory, a pizza place known as Comet Ping Pong in Washington was visited by an armed

vigilante hoping to release the children who were being trafficked in the basement. Of course,

there were no children in the basement and the man was quickly arrested. (New York Times,

December 2016). Also, many false tips and tricks regarding COVID-19 have been making

rounds on the Internet. Some claim that microwaving your mail would kill the germs, while

others say that Bill Gates created the COVID-19 pandemic so that he could install microchips

into everyone via the new vaccine. Even president Donald Trump has suggested that perhaps

injecting disinfectant into our bodies might help kill the virus. Consequently, a man died after

taking medication he thought was hydroxychloroquine, which Trump had suggested people try to

take (PBS Newshour, April 2020).

The way in which this information is being spread is mostly through social media,

through sites such as Instagram, Facebook, Reddit and Youtube. They also found that some

right-wing news sites, such as Breitbart and The Gateway Pundit, tend to spread misinformation

at a higher rate (New York Times, October 2020). People either turn to their social media for

their news, or they stumble upon news without actively seeking it. Of course, social media could
be a great tool for spreading information, but, unfortunately, the information being spread has

been mostly inaccurate. Misinformation is being spread through click-bait links, sensationalized

posts, and popular memes. The reasons why misinformation is being spread seems largely to be

to skew the facts in order to shift support to a certain political party, ideology, or campaign.

Some misinformation spreaders seek out monetary gain, while others do it for no reason at all

other than to entertain themselves (New York Times, October 2020). Users of social media all

have varying degrees of information and technology literacy, making it so that many people are

believing information without checking whether it's true or not, many times because they do not

know how.

These trends, both the misinformation being spread and the ways in which people access

misinformation, are constantly changing. I’m sure that in a few months, the trends described

above will be dated and completely new trends will replace them. Even our tools might look

different because technology is always updating. That is why it is of the utmost importance that

librarians keep up with the trends - both the trends on what specific misinformation is making its

rounds and through what means people are accessing - because we need to use this information

when creating relevant resources.

THE PATRONS

The Pew Research Center has conducted multiple studies on misinformation trends. I

found two studies in particular to be helpful in understanding the relationship that the general

public has with misinformation. In the first one, titled “Many Americans Believe Fake News Is

Sowing Confusion,” we see that 88% of Americans identify the spread of fake news and

misinformation as a real problem (2016). The amount of misinformation circulating is sowing

confusion in the general American public. At a certain point, people do not know what to believe
or what to trust as a reliable source. When asked if they would know how to identify fake news,

only 39% said they were very confident. 45% said they were somewhat confident, 15% said they

were not very confident at all. Looking at these numbers, as librarians the initial goal would be to

have people be at least somewhat confident. We must also take into consideration that a person’s

confidence may not correlate with their actual abilities. Also, 23% of people admitted to having

spread fake news, either knowingly or not, which is an alarming number when considering that

this fake news might be getting spread to people vulnerable to believing it and less equipped to

identify it as fake..

Another Pew Research Center that I found enlightening, especially because it was

specifically about the library, was called “The Information Needs of Citizens” by Lee Raigne

(2018). In it he “argued there are new hopes (and demands) for libraries to help people navigate

an information environment filled with “fake news” and “weaponized narratives.” The study

presented that 40% of people trust the library as a reliable news source, which is higher than all

other institutions they surveyed, which included: health care providers (39%), family and friends

(24%), government sources (18%), local and national news organizations (18%), financial

institutions (14%), and social media (1%). People trust the library for their information needs the

most. We should celebrate this accomplishment and take advantage of this opportunity.

Lee Raigne also presented research that assessed the levels of information literacy of

each patron. These were their findings:

● 16% felt that they were already information confident -- they felt they had little to no

need for information literacy guidance.

● 22% were eager and willing to learn -- this demographic trusts the library with the

information they receive and are receptive to information literacy guidance.

low on their priority list because of lack of time or attention to the subject.

● 24% are doubtful -- this group has a low level of trust in most information sources,

especially local and national news, but they also have little interest in information

literacy.

● 25% are information wary -- this group has low levels of interest in information literacy,

their trust of information sources is also very low, and they do not exhibit any interest in

information literacy guidance.

This study not only sought to find what levels of information literacy the patrons had, but also

their receptivity towards information literacy guidance. This research is incredibly helpful to

librarians when creating materials for information literacy. We can create materials for the

people who recognize they have a need and they want to fulfill it. We can also create materials

for people who are confident they know how to identify false information by creating materials

that will allow them to assess the level of their skills. Also, we must not neglect the people who

have zero interest in engaging in information literacy materials. We could survey them and see

what exact barriers are keeping them away from the library or from literacy so that we can try to

dismantle those barriers.

NEUTRALITY & OTHER FACTORS

Neutrality has traditionally been a hallmark in libraries, but it has been a topic of

controversy in recent years. The idea behind neutrality is that libraries must stay as unbiased as

possible in order to better assist patrons. I feel that it is particularly important to remain neutral

when teaching information literacy. The political climate right now is too tense and too

polarized. It feels like people are either far-left or far-right, and it seems like there is no room for
agreement. As libraries, picking a side in a polarized country only ostracizes people on the “other

side.”

Kathleen de la Peña McCook spoke about her own personal relationship with neutrality

in the 2018 Midwinter Meeting & Exhibits in Denver hosted by the ALA. McCook shares an

anecdote where a man came to fix something that broke in her home, but before he entered he

felt that he had to first share that he didn’t agree with her political views (she had a political

poster outside.) He shared because he felt that people who held her political views didn’t like

people like him very much and she might not be comfortable letting him into her home. As she

continued to speak with him, she found out that he also did not feel welcomed in the library. She

concludes with the realization that there are many factors that keep people away from certain

places and we should consider them more. She went on to say, “We need to realize that people

will self-select outside of the library if we don’t make them comfortable. ​We can’t show them

both sides if they don’t come in​” (my italics).

Alongside neutrality, we must continue to assess what other factors keep potential

patrons away. Dawn Wacek argues that we should get rid of book fines to make people feel more

welcomed in her TED talk titled “A librarians’ case against overdue book fines” (2018). Wacek

presents studies that suggest that book fines do not actually incentivize people to bring their

books (and other library-borrowed materials) back on time. Instead, it makes people feel

unwelcomed and anxious about using the library. Libraries don’t make a lucrative amount of

money from fines alone, so these fines are serving no one. Perhaps something that we’ve given

little consideration to, like book fines, could be the source of a real problem. As librarians, we

should make it an ongoing task to try and identify the factors, both big and small, that keep

people away in order to make efforts to dismantle them.

Before we can even begin to design materials, we must first analyze the trends and assess

the level of need of each patron. So, with that done, and keeping that knowledge in mind, we can

move forward into action. In “Teaching Users: Information and Technology Instruction: by April

D Cunnigham and Sarah Rosenblatt bring up this basic framework for thinking about planning a

learning experience:

Basic Instructional Design Principles When Planning Learning Experience​

● Identify the audience/students that will be taught​

● Determine their information needs​

● Decide what will be taught​

● Decide how to assess what they've learned (whether formally or informally)​

● Design the instructional experience​

● Reflect on the teaching

Their first two bullet points also argue for analyzing your audience and assessing their

level of need, which we have done. Next, we should decide what will be taught. As mentioned

above, different students will have different levels of skills towards information literacy, so

having one general program or set of materials will not suffice. We should plan to create

materials that will be relevant to people at whichever level of skill they have. For people who

have low technology skills, creating workshops on how to better use their tablet, smartphone, or

computer is a helpful first step. For people who are most information literate, creating a self test

or “Did you know…” list on misinformation trends and how to identify misinformation could

help a demographic with a better grasp on information literacy.

consume the materials or programs that we created, we must assess how successful our materials

and programs were, while also assessing how much the patron learned. Cunningham and

Rosenblatt argue that assessment should be an ongoing process. We must realize that teaching

information literacy will be an ongoing process, and that patrons will continue to have

information and technology needs as the state of information and technology continue to evolve,

as they always have.

Every library caters to different communities and their particular needs. If you’re in a

library with an older demographic of patrons, you will most likely be creating different materials

versus whether you are serving in a library with a younger demographic. If your library has

patrons that are not English-speaking, the materials will have to be translated. Maybe the library

is in a politically conservative area, and the materials will have to be neutral enough to appeal to

them. Creating community-specific resources is important, but I’ve created some suggested first

steps for the general audience:

Potential First Steps Towards Action:​

● Create formal learning environments, like a class or workshop that requires enrollment​

● Create informal learning opportunities, like instructional YouTube videos and online

resources​ that people can access at their leisure

● Have printed materials/resources available on bulletin boards and pamphlet tables for

people too afraid to ask for help​ -- distribute these materials to community partners as

well

● Foster partnerships with local organizations in the community who have the same goals

in mind, such as local schools, non-profit organizations, social services, etc. -- local
 schools are equipping children with information literacy, so it is a particularly important

that we partner with schools to focus on the needs that are not being met in schools so

that libraries can bridge these needs

As mentioned above, these suggestions are for all libraries, regardless of their

communities. These are only the initial steps. Again, every library and its community are

different, and librarians should be creating community-specific and skill-specific resources.

CONCLUSION

As librarians, it is our responsibility to remain abreast of current misinformation trends in

order to assess how to better serve our patrons. The ways in which we serve patrons during the

Information Age is via a concentration on information literacy. It is evident that the general

public largely trusts the library, and we should use this to our advantage. In a rapidly changing

technology-driven world, we must not downgrade the urgency in which information literacy and

technology skills need to be taught. ​

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Cunningham, April D. and Rosenblatt, Sarah. (2018). Teaching Users: Information and

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