Can you spot the lies in your news feed? | Laura Smythe
TED Talks Daily

Can you spot the lies in your news feed? | Laura Smythe

B2Upper-intermediateOctober 23, 202614 min

Laura Smythe spent years in legacy newsrooms, and she thinks the habits journalists use to vet information should belong to all of us. Using Fyre Festival as a cautionary tale, she explains why media literacy is a vital skill in our age of deepfakes and algorithmic feeds — and describes the country that’s already found a way to start teaching it in elementary school. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sentence 10 of 12 · 0:31

with its organizer now headed to federal prison.

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Fire Fest was never really a story about a concert or a scam.

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B2

B2 · Upper-intermediate

Comfortable if you already follow TV news

A1 20%A2 41%B1 24%B2 10%C1 5%
  • 85% of the words are B1 or easier.
  • 140 words a minute: a natural pace.
  • 86 harder words (B2 and up) in the whole episode.

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0:00

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Here's a question.

0:11

Why did hundreds of smart, well-off people pay up to $100,000 for a music festival that didn't exist? I'm talking about the Fyre Festival, the infamous luxury getaway in 2017 that collapsed into disaster relief tents and cheese sandwiches,

0:29

with its organizer now headed to federal prison. For media literacy advocate Laura Smythe, Fire Fest was never really a story about a concert or a scam. It was a story about trust.

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