A recent troubling study showed that "fake news" spread significantly faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth, and the effect is even more remarkable when regarding news as opposed to reporting on natural disasters, finance or science. So how can we encourage individuals to seek {#blank#}1{#/blank#} online content? Leading scholars are trying hard to deal with this question.

    Processing new information requires a considerable mental effort, especially when that information seems to conflict with your {#blank#}2{#/blank#} worldview. It takes the {#blank#}3{#/blank#} to admit you may be wrong. But with a great amount of conflicting information available, who's to say what's actually true and what's false? If you can't tell, why not just make life easy and go with what supports your current beliefs?

    So what {#blank#}4{#/blank#} do we have? Many suggest that we can {#blank#}5{#/blank#} the issue by reforming adult behavior, but this is aiming too far from source. An alternative solution is using early education to help individuals recognize these problems and {#blank#}6{#/blank#} critical thinking to the information they deal with. Currently, there is a push in the US to include Internet information classes into primary and secondary school curriculums. The movement, which has received some support, aims to make fact-checking seem like second {#blank#}7{#/blank#} to individuals at an early age.

    Primary and secondary school are {#blank#}8{#/blank#} to be supplying students with the skills they need to develop into productive and informed members of our society. As our society develops, the curriculum we are teaching our students needs to develop as well.

    The Internet is an amazing tool, but to use it most effectively we have to accept its benefits while also understanding the ways in which it makes us dangerously {#blank#}9{#/blank#}. If students are still learning the practices such as writing in school, shouldn't they be learning how to {#blank#}10{#/blank#} the Internet responsibly as well?

    Today, the events {#blank#}1{#/blank#} in realistic-looking or-sounding video and audio recordings need never have happened. They can instead be {#blank#}2{#/blank#} automatically, by powerful computers and machine-learning software. The catch-all term for these computational productions is "deepfakes".

    The term first appeared on Reddit, a messaging board, as the username for an account which was producing {#blank#}3{#/blank#} videos. An entire community {#blank#}4{#/blank#} up around the creation of these videos, writing software tools that let anyone automatically {#blank#}5{#/blank#} one person's face onto the body of another. Reddit shut the community down, but the technology was out there. Soon it was being applied to political {#blank#}6{#/blank#} and actors.

    Tools for editing media {#blank#}7{#/blank#} have existed for decades—think Photoshop. The power and peril of deepfakes is that they make fakery cheaper than ever before. Before deepfakes, a powerful computer and a good chunk of a university degree were needed to produce a realistic fake video of someone. Now some photos and an Internet connection are all that is required.

    The consequences of cheap, widespread fakery are likely to be {#blank#}8{#/blank#}, albeit slow to unfold. Plenty worry about the possible impact that believable, fake footage of politicians might have on civil society—from a further loss of trust in media to the {#blank#}9{#/blank#} for electoral distortions. These technologies could also be deployed against softer targets: it might be used, for instance, to bully classmates by creating imagery of them in embarrassing situations. In a world that was already saturated with {#blank#}10{#/blank#} imagery, deepfakes make it plausible to push that even further.