Written by guest-poster, Shane Smith
An email sent out by McKinley Elementary in Norman last week, informed parents that the school has been selected to participate in an “innovative research study examining how school librarians can help students learn to detect and avoid misinformation by developing their information literacy skills”.
While participation in the study itself is voluntary, all K-5 students will be taught the misinformation program curriculum from August to April.
The program itself, entitled “Awareness and Critical Thinking (ACT) Program: How School
Librarians Can Teach Children to Detect and Avoid Misinformation”, was developed by Tara Zimmerman, assistant professor at the School of Library and Information Studies at Texas Women’s University. Her sole specialty for the past few years has centered around “misinformation”, and she’s received a $400,000 grant from the Laura Bush 21st Century
Librarian Program to fund her research.
A few of the papers she’s published on misinformation provide the trajectory of her target.
In 2020, she published a paper entitled, “COVID-19: Mask Misinformation and Social Noise”. The paper begins with this statement:
“Disinformation and misinformation are pervasive in unregulated social-media environments, which are used habitually for obtaining news.”
I think we know where this is going.
Further into the article she says:
“Facebook on July 20th, 2020 removed a group called themselves Unmasking America that had more than 9,000 members for spreading COVID19 misinformation (Lynos 2020). The group claimed that masks obstruct the flow of oxygen and have a negative psychological impact on wearers. Facebook responded to an inquiry from the Verge and stated that “We have clear policies against promoting harmful misinformation about COVID 19 and have removed this group while we review the others,” according to the Verge article. This is one of many groups on social media spreading lies and conspiracy theories about COVID19 and against wearing masks for various reasons. In the US, wearing masks has become a partisan issue and represents more of a political statement than a safety and health care guidance issue. Most social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and others are coming under pressure to encounter such negative messaging and take steps to minimize the spread of COVID19 misinformation.”
Yet another paper, published in 2022, “Misinformation and COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy”, reads just as you’d expect:
“During the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-vaccine beliefs have been at an all-time high, and vaccine hesitancy has become a major threat to public health [1]. The World Health Organization has labeled the increased virulence of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic an “infodemic” [2]. Throughout 2020, scientists, healthcare professionals, and politicians speculated about vaccine timelines, distribution, and effectiveness; and media platforms presented widely varying opinions as well as misinformation that negatively influenced people’s attitudes about COVID-19 vaccines [3]. By the end of 2020, the self-reported likelihood of getting vaccinated against COVID-19 had declined sharply from 74 % in April to 56 % in December [4]. While the availability of COVID-19 vaccines improved between the fall of 2020 and late spring 2021, indications of public distrust in vaccines continued. This public distrust contributed to waves of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the US, increasingly among those who were not vaccinated.”
There’s something archaic about Zimmerman’s papers, her attitude prevalent at the height of COVID hysteria, and later, her vaccine mandate hysteria that rings hollow today.
Masks didn’t prevent the spread of COVID. Neither did the vaccine. It’s almost common knowledge now, but both facts were branded as misinformation during the dark days of the COVID pandemic.
In fact, her continued study of “misinformation” feels like a discarded relic of the past. It might have held weight in 2020, or 2021, when any opinion not perfectly aligned with the official narrative surrounding COVID-19 was branded as misinformation, and censored. Even scientific research that failed to dovetail with the pronouncements of the public health establishment was blacklisted. We all remember it, and we’d rather not return to those dark days of censorship.
Zimmerman might, though. What else explains her passion for routing out or dismissing
altogether non-approved opinions?
“Misinformation” is not a neutral term.
It’s shown itself to be nothing more than a bludgeon used to silence right-wing criticisms of left-wing orthodoxy. During the authoritarian days of the pandemic, it was a powerful weapon used to silence critics by the thousands with one fell swoop. We remember the social media behemoths enacting a scorched earth policy of censorship at the behest of the Biden White House. But now, in the age of Elon-owned X, the term “misinformation” has lost its power. Like a T-Rex transformed into a chicken.
Professor Zimmerman clearly isn’t a neutral actor, and the ACT Program isn’t an objective
study. I fear that the goal of her program is less to teach children to think critically, and more to teach them to hold up a crucifix when confronted with unapproved opinions. “Get them while they’re young” is the new strategy among activists embedded within the public school system.
The ACT Program appears to be yet another attempt to cloak the wolf of left-wing orthodoxy in a sheep’s coat of scientific objectivity.
Watch for it in your child’s school RIGHT NOW. This is a national movement occurring BEFORE our elections. Check out: Media literacy is more than spotting fake news. How one librarian gives teens the tools to decide what to trust
