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"For a look at the sometimes-silly, sometimes-concerning false information that circulates the Internet, The Washington Post offers a weekly roundup on The Intersect, a blog dedicated to digital and Internet culture. Its series called "What was fake on the Internet this week?" can be a resource for teaching news literacy using timely examples that are relevant to an Internet-savvy generation. The most recent blog entry addresses topics such as fake tweets, false reports of a smartphone virus and bogus rumors that the National Rifle Association is banning guns at its annual convention. The Intersect blog also offers commentary on Internet and social media trends, viral content and hoaxes. Here are a few additional websites that debunk misinformation in the news:"

the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), currently making its way through the House of Representatives, and its sister legislation in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), which are supposedly intended to combat copyright violations on the Internet. Unfortunately, these bills are written so broadly so as to not only eliminate Internet piracy but replace the innovative and democratic aspects of the Internet with a tangled bureaucratic mess regulated by the government and corporations.While holding companies accountable for their role in copyright infringement is important, this legislation threatens to turn the whole Internet on its head, disrupting innovation in business and technology and muting democratic dialogue, by allowing copyright holders to unilaterally impose sanctions on companies accused of copyright infringement without due process. Based solely on an accusation (not a conviction, mind you) of a copyright violation, the U.S. Attorney General, and sometimes the copyright holding companies themselves, will be able to block access to and business transactions with websites accused of such violations. Financial institutions will be forced to stop transferring legal funds to accused websites, search engines will be forced to block accused websites, and advertisers will be forced to stop placing ads on accused websites. Moreover, the bill is written so broadly as to override the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which allows social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to operate freely. Unfortunately, under SOPA, if a user on YouTube or Facebook were to mistakenly or unintentionally upload copyrighted material to the sites, those websites could also be shut down

"The Internet meme is a force to be reckoned with. Whether it takes the form of a dancing cat or a college protest, the Internet meme is capable of changing the world. Until now, the meme has largely been derided as a procrastination tool for slacker college kids, but those very college students are working hard to challenge such unfounded stereotypes. Internet memes can take the form of videos, pictures, hashtags, or even simple words and phrases. Memes have been a part of society for a long time, but their influence has only increased with the rise of the Internet. Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr allow users to share all kinds of content. Sometimes, a video or a picture will catch on with a small group of young Internet users. These users, often enrolled in college, recommend the content to others. Once in a while, this will spiral out of control, at which point the content officially reaches meme status. Memes range from silly to spectacular, but all share one thing in common: a remarkable impact on the culture of students in high school and college. The attitudes and behaviors of many students have been shaped by prominent Internet memes. Memes are typically humorous or satirical but there are many examples of more serious Internet memes."

"There is so much fake stuff on the Internet in any given week that we've grown of tired of debunking it all. Fake Twitter fights. Fake DHL ads. Amazing viral video? Nope - a Jimmy Kimmel stunt! In these heady Internet times, it's all too easy for a fictional story to gain traction in the span of a few hours. More perniciously, it's easy for news organizations to slap a sexy headline on a story, or pull the juiciest nugget from a study, and drop it on the Internet - forgetting that, in many cases, social-media users don't actually click through and read the whole thing. So rather than take down each and every undeservedly viral story that crosses our monitors each week, we're trying this out - a quick, once-a-week debunk of fake photos, misleading headlines and bad studies that you probably shouldn't share over the weekend. "

"Just in biology alone, many people believe that spinach is a good source of iron (sorry, Popeye), that we use less than 10 percent of our brains (no, it's too energy-guzzling to allow that), and that some people suffer hypersensitivity to electromagnetic radiation (for which there is no scientific evidence). But here's the more concerning news. Our access to information, both good and bad, has only increased as our fingertips have gotten into the act. With computer keyboards and smartphones, we now have access to an Internet containing a vast store of information much bigger than any individual brain can carry - and that's not always a good thing. Better access doesn't mean better information This access to the Internet's far reaches should permit us to be smarter and better informed. People certainly assume it. A recent Yale study showed that Internet access causes people to hold inflated, illusory impressions of just how smart and well-informed they are"

"It happened last year for the first time: bot traffic eclipsed human traffic, according to the bot-trackers at Incapsula. This year, Incapsula says 61.5 percent of traffic on the web is non-human.  Now, you might think this portends the arrival of "The Internet of Things"-that ever-promised network that will connect your fridge and car to your smartphone. But it does not. This non-human traffic is search bots, scrapers, hacking tools, and other human impersonators, little pieces of code skittering across the web. You might describe this phenomenon as The Internet of Thingies. "

"But it wasn't a fluke. That's the problem. In just the past two weeks, the Internet has been told, by sources they trust (and share on Facebook), that a New Jersey waitress was stiffed on tips by an anti-gay family and that Amazon.com was about to launch product-delivering drones. This was just two months after Jimmy Kimmel created a sort of viral ad for his TV show, a video of a "twerk fail" that was reported by multiple TV news channels as real. Or real enough. Hey, it was a video on the Internet! In all three of these cases, readers were pointed to fake stories that were basically PR for successful businesses or-in the New Jersey case-a scam by a waitress whose collegues considered her an inveterate liar. How many news outlets tried to confirm these stories before running them? You don't want to know."

"Last week, I looked around the room and noticed an interesting thing. Maybe you're seeing this at your home as well. We were watching the NBA playoffs on TV. My wife was on her I-pad and so was I. My son was on his laptop. I'm sure if my grandson was there, he'd be staring at a device as well. My wife was checking email. I was tweeting snarky comments about the game. My son was looking at stats from the game. Let's face it. We're all multi-taskers now. Why should TV time be any different? This year, 182 million folks in the US will use the internet while watching TV at least once a month, according to an eMarketer survey. That's 80% of all internet users. So I'm not alone. Or maybe I am because only 25% of those surveyed were using their device to consumer content related to TV. The rest were doing something else, like my wife. Still, 25% were so engaged in the TV programming that they were finding additional information about what they were watching. That's still a big chunk of engaged folks. "

"The Internet is a gullible place. Before you know it, you buy into a YouTube video, and you're sharing Facebook posts and tweets with misinformation. If you haven't done so yourself, you likely know someone who has. Some of the most viral stories of the year have turned out to be fakes. Remember when Will and Monifa Sims captured our hearts in May while singing karaoke at a gas station? They were actors. And who could forget the hilarious twerking girl on fire? Simply a stunt orchestrated by Jimmy Kimmel. Not all hoaxes were videos, though. The Internet followed along with Elan Gale, a producer for The Bachelor, who live-tweeted a fake situation he claimed to experience on an airplane; an adorable kid's letter to Santa was actually the brainchild of a comedian. For a full look at the top social media hoaxes you fell for this year, check out the gallery above."

"Global mobile traffic now accounts for 15 percent of all internet visits, and 91 percent of mobile internet access is used for social activities. By investing heavily in this space Twitter can essentially guarantee a richer future… and a significant audience uptick. This infographic from Super Monitoring takes a closer look at the state of mobile 2013."

"Phones have saturated teenage life: Ninety-five percent of Americans ages 13 to 17 have a smartphone or access to one, and nearly half report using the internet "almost constantly." But as recent survey data and interviews have suggested, many teens find much of that time to be unsatisfyingly spent. Constant usage shouldn't be mistaken for constant enjoyment, as any citizen of the internet can attest. A new nationally representative survey about "screen time and device distractions" from the Pew Research Center indicates that it's not just parents who think teenagers are worryingly inseparable from their phones-many teens themselves do, too. Fifty-four percent of the roughly 750 13-to-17-year-olds surveyed said they spend too much time absorbed in their phones, and 65 percent of parents said the same of their kids' device usage more generally."

"These fast, fun and engaging activities provide teens and adults with the opportunity to test their skills and learn new authentication techniques. On the internet, it can be hard to tell what's true and what's false-but we have to make a lot of decisions based on how reliable we think things are. In Reality Check, you'll learn how to find clues like finding where a story originally came from and comparing it to other sources, as well as how to use tools like fact-checking sites and reverse image searches. In each mission, you'll be presented with a story on your social network feed that might be entirely true, entirely false, or somewhere in between. To find out, click on the different parts of the page where you see a magnifying glass. Once you've seen all the clues, you can decide how reliable you think it is and how to respond to it. Because fact-checking shouldn't be a chore, each scenario is designed to be played in 15 minutes or less. The game can be played in any internet browser on computers or mobile devices."

"Tinder may well have helped save marriage as an institution, simply by bringing us more of them. Not to mention faster. Again contrary to conventional wisdom, researchers say online meeting-based marriages happen more quickly after the first date. The jury is still out on whether online-based marriages are more or less likely to end in divorce; there are studies that point in both directions. Call it a wash.  Either way, this is our new romantic landscape. At least one third of all marriages in the U.S. are now between partners who met online. That's more than 600,000 couples every year who would, in any other era, have remained total strangers.  The influence of these internet-minted couples on the dating world isn't over when they marry; it is just getting started. Internet marrieds get to play yentas. They can set up friends on dates with each other - still a thing, even in this day and age.  Who knows how far out the ripple effects go, how many people who would never dream of being on Tinder and Bumble have the course of their lives changed by swipes and matches regardless.  "

"In the 2 1/2 years she spent researching her book, Sales interviewed more than 200 teenage girls around the country about their social media and Internet usage. She says girls face enormous pressures to post "hot" or sexualized photos of themselves online, and she adds that this pressure can make the Internet an unwelcoming environment. "I think a lot of people are not aware of how the atmosphere has really changed in social situations ... in terms of how the girls are treated and how the boys behave," Sales says. "This is a kind of sexism and misogyny being played out in real time in this really extreme way.""

"Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level. Much of what I am going to describe next has been covered elsewhere, although none of the mainstream coverage I've seen has really grasped the implications of what seems to be occurring."

"How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was "bots masquerading as people," a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube's systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event "the Inversion.""

" In part two of a three-part series based on a Q&A with former Post Register Managing Editor Dean Miller, we look at how the Internet can be used intelligently. Miller is the director of the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York."

Free Press works to ensure people have a seat at the table for important policy debates and decisions in Washington, D.C., and beyond.  Want proof that our media needs changing? Look no further than Free Press' thorough analysis of the state of Internet freedom, journalism, public media, election coverage and media ownership."

"Because most of the time, we don't need somebody else to debunk these stories for us -- not if we know what to look for. For instance, it should always raise red flags if ..."

"Nike's web site allows visitors to create custom shoes bearing a word or slogan -- a service Nike trumpets as being about freedom to choose and freedom to express who you are. Confronted with Nike's celebration of freedom, I could not help but think of the people in crowded factories who actually build Nike shoes. As a challenge to Nike, I ordered a pair of shoes customized with the word "sweatshop." Nike refused my order. A contentious email exchange ensued which was subsequently distributed widely on the Internet as an email forward. Eventually, news of the dispute was reported in major newspapers, magazines, and on television. You can read a detailed account of "My Nike Media Adventure" in the April 9th issue of The Nation."