Marcy Burstiner explores the dangers of repetition in the spread of misinformation and why if you repeat something untrue enough times and people just might start to believe it. Use this exercise to investigate how information is created and spread, to tackle fake news and rumor and to develop research skills, critical thinking and media literacy around news consumption.

Exercise: Choose a piece of news or advertising that you know to be inflated, untrue or explore an urban myth. Look into how this news became popular belief. Why did it gain popularity? What forces might be behind the spread of this information? Who does the narrative benefit? To start, you could work through a case study from this website as a class. Students then choose their piece of news to prove true or debunk as myth.