Tomorrow's lesson for students on the mechanics of disinformation. A smoking gun video allegedly showing ballots being wheeled to Detroit's counting center during the wee hours of the night. The video's been viewed a million times (here & elsewhere). 1/10

It gets amplified by YouTube amplifiers with an agenda to cast doubt on the integrity of the election. (at 7:12) Notice the ominous framing

Smoking gun, right? How can we tell? That's the question we'd put to students. Their response (typically): "Google it." 3/10

But Google what? Here's where the skill set often breaks down. 4/10

Let's start with keywords. Ask students what they'd choose--a good start might be "voter fraud" + Detroit. Here's what the results page (the "SERP") looks like when I did it. Scrolling through the results, I alight on a major news source, USA Today & click. 5/10

But the story's about something else. And when your kids do this, they get (understandably) frustrated. Where did we (and they) go wrong? 6/10

By lacking a few tricks of search. First, limit search to videos & next to recent (one week) time span, and then to duration of the video. Let's see if I can make this clear in a screencast. 7/10

My scroll ends up with Snopes, which is a great debunking site. However, the 2nd result, from YouTube, was posted by WXYZ, Detroit's ABC affiliate. It's terrific & worth watching all 2 minutes of it. 8/10

What if you're in, say, Oklahoma, & a student says, "How do I know if this WXYZ is real?" Here's where a quick Wikipedia check comes in handy. 9/10

The station's been around since the 40s (look at the entry's references).

So, there you have it. A "smoking gun"? No, just deceiving smoke that beclouds truth & spreads mischief. 10/10

Epilogue: For a whole curriculum on how to do this stuff, see our free resources at http://cor.stanford.edu