As a resource for both our annual STEM-writing contest and our news literacy series, we asked Davey Alba, a technology reporter covering online disinformation and its global harms, to contribute to our Annotated by the Author series.
In her commentary below, she takes you through her article, originally published on Jan. 10, 2022, about how the added demand for Covid testing and the higher prevalence of breakthrough cases created an “opportune moment” for misinformation. She explains how she crafted the opening to both get readers’ attention and emphasize what a “huge problem” the spread of this kind of false information can be. Then she explains how using data and evidence from experts helps buttress the article with facts to debunk these lies.
We hope this is “news you can use” on many levels — as a citizen trying to make informed health choices, as a news consumer learning how to sort reliable reporting from rumor, and, perhaps, as a writer yourself who wants to learn some tips for how to make a piece like this work. To help, we also have a related lesson plan.
Below, the paragraphs from Ms. Alba’s article are in bold, reproduced exactly as she wrote them, with the images intact. Her comments begin the piece and follow each bolded section.
First, just a quick note on how I found this story: Over the holidays, scrolling through social media, it disturbed me to see how almost everyone I knew had been exposed to Covid — the Omicron variant, specifically. That was Phase 1....
A man in his 30s has been referred to prosecutors for claiming on his social media account that the 1980 Gwangju Democratic Uprising was a riot instigated by spies. The Daegu Dalseo Police Station...