Introduction

IDS 101: Clickbait, Bias, and Propaganda in Information Networks is a seven-week discussion-based course that explores how information is created and shared online. This book, based in part on Mike Caulfield’s open access book, Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, provides students in the course with practical ways to quickly evaluate claims made in social media, journalism, and the public sphere. In addition to how-to information, we plan to include student-authored profiles and critiques of popular information networks.

In the course we’ll be reading about the nature of emerging information systems, contemporary problems in information ethics, and issues of diversity and social justice in the context of networked media systems. Though for copyright reasons, the course readings will be made separately  available only as links or as readings on our campus course management system, we have also reproduced here selected material that is available under a Creative Commons license.

We’re grateful to the Minnesota Library Publishing Project for funding the Pressbooks publishing platform used to publish this book. The cover image is drawn from an illustration by Frederick Burr Opper for Punch magazine, March 7, 1894, depicting a “fin de siècle newspaper proprietor,” most likely lampooning Joseph Pulitzer, depicted profiting from fake news and sensationalism. It is in the public domain and was digitized by the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress.