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

0:02TED: You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Here's a question. 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 with its organizer now headed to federal prison. For media literacy advocate Laura Smythe, Fyre Fest was never really a story about a concert or a scam. It was a story about trust. Humans gravitate to people that we like.

0:42When someone feels relatable, we instinctively trust them more. But relatability and credibility are two very different things.

0:51TED: In her talk, Laura argues that Fyre Festival was an early warning. Back then, celebrities and a slick campaign convinced people something fake was real. Today, with AI and algorithmic feeds, that kind of convincing fakery is everywhere, and most of us were never taught to tell what's actually true. Laura has spent her career in both legacy newsrooms and new media, and she believes that verifying facts, a basic tenet of journalism, has become one of the most urgent needs of our time. The habits journalists use to verify information shouldn't be trade secrets. They're not difficult or unattainable, but they're not taught outside of newsrooms or journalism schools.

1:34And in today's social media, AI-powered information environment, that skill gap might be the biggest civic problem we have.

1:44TED: Journalists train for years in the discipline of verifying information. and Laura makes the case that the rest of us urgently need those same tools. She showcases one country that's already doing this, Finland, where media literacy is woven through the school curriculum from grade school and on, and argues that learning to think like a journalist might be one of the most important things any of us can do. That's coming up right after a short break.

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4:53TED: And now, our TED Talk of the day. Come back with me a moment to 2017. You're having a great time because none of us know what a pandemic is. Comfy mom jeans are back in style, and the Bitcoin you bought back in 2008, it's finally taking off. You're scrolling on Instagram, and that's pretty cool because they only just started with their algorithmic feed, so you're still kind of seeing memes and photo dumps from people you actually know. Let's look with all these orange squares. Influencers and famous faces from Kendall Jenner and Hailey Baldwin, Emily Ratajkowski and Ja Rule, are posting about this high-end music festival coming to the Bahamas.

5:40White sand beaches, luxury accommodations, Migos, Major Lazer, the cultural experience of a decade. Influencer and celebrity-driven marketing sells out 95 % of tickets in 48 hours. Some folks are shelling out up to 100K for a spot, and college students are also going for spring break. Not a bad way to unwind for finals, right? Except it never took place. Fyre Festival has gone down in history as the greatest party that never happened. Ticket holders expecting five-star service showed up to bread and cheese sandwiches and FEMA tents. None of the promised artists performed, and the main organizer ended up in federal prison.

6:34While so much of this was shocking, what really resonated with me was how this was really a story about trust. A lot of people here were left disappointed. Netflix and Hulu, they got some great fodder. But hundreds, not even, thousands of smart, well-off people saw this glamorous, curated content online and collectively decided, this is real, and it's worth the cost. Humans gravitate to people that we like. When someone feels relatable, we instinctively trust them more. But relatability and credibility are two very different things. After years working in legacy newsrooms, I thought I understood how people interact with news to inform our worldviews.

7:30And it wasn't until I later started working also with new media creators that I realized just to what extent we are not all dissecting information using the same framework. Throughout my career in communications, I've had this front row seat to the ways that our evolving media landscape is shaping our democracy. And the habits journalists use to verify information shouldn't be trade secrets. They're not difficult or unattainable, but they're not taught outside of newsrooms or journalism schools. And in today's social media, AI-powered information environment, that skill gap might be the biggest civic problem we have.

8:17Journalists spend years learning a professional discipline of interrogating information in pursuit of the truth. It's a craft rooted in ethics and moral reasoning. There's so much that happens inside of a newsroom to ensure accuracy that not everybody realizes simply because we've never been in that environment. Facts don't just materialize. Reporters, editors, fact checkers, and legal teams are all working together to parse out truth. That looks like gathering information, verifying facts, vetting sources, checking for bias, and overall maintaining objectivity to ensure trustworthiness. We have more access to information than any generation in history, yet in so many cases, we're thinking less independently than ever before.

9:13Social media and AI algorithms push trending content to the top, but that doesn't guarantee accuracy or that we're getting all of the relevant facts that we need to make our own informed opinions. That disconnect is affecting our media literacy, and it's happening right when democracy needs that the most. The backbone of a strong democracy is in equal parts a free press and an informed, engaged public. But in the U.S. right now, there are no national media literacy education standards. It's almost like our media ecosystem has evolved faster than our civic education system. A kid that's born today won't default to thinking in terms of the New York Times, Fox News, or PBS, but they're thinking in terms of Instagram and TikTok and YouTube.

10:1586 % of Gen Z are turning to social media to get their news. So when we're living with information bombarding us from the moment we open our eyeballs in the morning, we all deserve access to the knowledge and techniques journalists use to interpret the world. Media literacy is what enables us to identify AI, deep fakes, and unverified news. It's also recognizing bias in articles or influencer content that could affect story framing. It's understanding the role that entertainment plays in broadcast news, and it's unpacking the reasoning behind headlines and visuals. It's thinking critically about tone and word choice and asking, how does funding influence this information?

11:07As well as, what's missing from this story and why? I'm not saying that journalism is perfect. Journalists, like all humans, make mistakes. And I'm not saying that AI and social media and influencers should all be left in the dust. I actually think that traditional newsrooms and new media should learn from one another to ultimately build a faster, more accurate news infrastructure that better meets the needs of today's audience. The good news is, people all over the world are working on solutions to all of this. Australia banned social media for kids 16 and under, and Denmark is following their lead.

11:56Germany begins media literacy education in primary school. Some classrooms will even invite journalists into the class to help teach students how to vet sources, recognize state-backed disinformation, and also just to pause and take a beat whenever news stokes an emotional reaction before sharing it out. Finland is another incredible example of standardized media literacy education. Identifying propaganda and questioning information have been part of Finnish culture ever since the country gained independence from Russia, more than a century ago. So today, media literacy is a core pillar of the national curriculum, beginning K-12 and carrying through college and adult learning.

12:46Educators in Helsinki have been on CBS and Al Jazeera describing how media literacy is integrated across all subjects. So in literature classes, students will learn the basics of verifying news, vetting sources, and critiquing media. Then in math, they'll focus more on algorithms and statistics. In art, they'll take a look at images and learn how they can be edited. And then in history, it might be taking a look at an air raid that happened during World War II and considering how it could be taught differently depending which side of the war a country fought on. Some Finnish students have even played this computer game, Troll Factory, where they spend a week on this platform intentionally acting as an internet troll to spread as much disinformation as they can with the goal of gaining as much visibility for the account as possible.

13:47One student summed this up as, you gain a lot of followers when you spread a lot of unpleasant things.

13:56Finnish education officials say that the curriculum helps protect democracy, that if we can't tell what's true from what isn't, then we can be deceived and we're left vulnerable. It roots back to this popular saying, you have the right to your own opinion, but you do not have the right to your own facts.

14:22Data shows this standardized approach works. Finland has ranked at the top of Open Society Foundation's annual media literacy index every year since it started in 2017, which we all can now recognize as the Orange Square era here in the US. I can't help thinking a little bit more about Fyre Festival and wondering how things could have been different if the folks on those social media teams were asking the same questions that Finnish elementary schoolers ask every day. And that's where we come in. We have the power to ask our elected officials to enact national media literacy education standards.

15:08We can practice thinking journalistically in our day-to-day and call out misinformation when we see it, whether that's pushing back on something that our friend said or posting the link to a verified news article on a social media post that isn't accurate. We can subscribe to our local newspapers, and when we do get our information from social media, we can make sure it's coming from creators who are trained in a journalistic process. We can share this toolkit with our children and the others in our lives. So when we leave here today, let's remember to ask questions. Even of people we tend to agree with, let's stay curious, check our sources, and speak up in the name of truth, even when it's hard.

16:00because that ability to think for ourselves might just be the most important civic skill we have left. Thank you.

16:16TED: That was Laura Smythe at TED Democracy Philadelphia in 2026. If you're curious about TED's curation, visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tansika Sungmarnivong. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Christopher Faze-Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey Lott. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet.

16:58TED: Thanks for listening.

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