ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the phenomenon of fake news and offers ways to teach students about its definition, its forms, its functions, and its effects. It discusses competing definitions of fake news contextualized within the history of tabloid media. The chapter describes the Sophists and formulates neo-sophistic criticism as a lens for analyzing fake news. It demonstrates how students can apply neo-sophistic criticism to online texts as a means for understanding the forms and effects of fake news and the digital Sophists that produce them. The chapter considers scholarship in the social sciences, where scholars are charting the ecosystems that produce fake news and examines how peoples’ subconscious biases play a role in internalizing fake news as legitimate reporting. Working in tandem, social media and open-source websites combined are the two major aspects of the ecosystems of fake news, and charting the means and media empowers students and instructors to name and to map these aspects.
