Weeding Out Dishonesty: Rhetoric and Information Literacy for the Age of Disinformation

Type of Presentation

Individual paper/presentation

Conference Strand

Critical Literacy

Target Audience

Higher Education

Second Target Audience

K-12

Location

Ballroom B

Relevance

This presentation addresses the challenge of disinformation in the context of critical and information literacy. It argues that students should be taught the rhetorical strategies of dishonesty and utilize GenAI and social media as platforms for developing information literacy geared toward a post-fact world.

Proposal

We live in what some call a post-fact world where what is presented as true becomes true and circulates widely. Politicians lie because they have calculated that they gain more than they lose, and media outlets repeat those lies because they profit from them (Adair 2024). Fear and suspicion make individuals vulnerable to these lies (Young 2017). Like an invasive species, it is nearly impossible to eradicate these lies once released into the media ecosystem. While fake news is not new (think P.T. Barnum and 17th-century canards), its virulence has reached epidemic proportions, infiltrating all aspects of society. This constitutes a crisis for information literacy education. How do faculty in college composition courses help students navigate this dangerous terrain? To empower students to take on the challenge of writing, researching, and navigating in a world full of lies, this presentation brings together history, social media, generative AI, and rhetoric (particularly parody) within a framework of critical literacy pedagogy to make clear the reasons for and the rhetorical strategies of disinformation. Lies are rhetorical. Young identifies the “Five Stages of Grift:” denying, redirecting, minimizing, excusing, and “halfhearted[ly]” admitting to the hoax. Think of these as the rhetorical strategies of dishonesty that are not addressed in textbooks, but students should learn to identify. Parody, which is fake but not dishonest discourse, employs these strategies without attempting to deceive, making it an excellent vehicle for studying misleading rhetoric. Similarly, generative AI (known to misinterpret and make up information) and social media (known to amplify lies) can become vehicles for helping students develop rhetorical and information savvy. The “first step we need to take in order to eliminate disinformation,” according to Fake News is Bad News (2021), “is acknowledging that this is a systemic problem” (6). I’m adding a second step: teach students to recognize disinformation using the rhetoric of parody and the technological instruments of disinformation so they can combat it. Developing this rhetorical savvy in students is, in my view, the primary edict of rhetorical instruction and information literacy.

Short Description

While fake news is not new (think P.T. Barnum), its virulence has reached epidemic proportions in society, creating a crisis for information literacy education. Lies use rhetorical strategies that should be examined in classrooms. To empower students to take on the challenge of writing, researching, and navigating in a world full of lies, this presentation brings together history, social media, GenAI, rhetoric, and critical literacy to create a pedagogy that challenges the rhetoric of dishonesty.

Keywords

Fake News, Disinformation, Rhetoric, Parody, Generative AI, Social Media, Information Literacy, History, Research Writing

Publication Type and Release Option

Presentation (Open Access)

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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Feb 7th, 10:45 AM Feb 7th, 11:30 AM

Weeding Out Dishonesty: Rhetoric and Information Literacy for the Age of Disinformation

Ballroom B

We live in what some call a post-fact world where what is presented as true becomes true and circulates widely. Politicians lie because they have calculated that they gain more than they lose, and media outlets repeat those lies because they profit from them (Adair 2024). Fear and suspicion make individuals vulnerable to these lies (Young 2017). Like an invasive species, it is nearly impossible to eradicate these lies once released into the media ecosystem. While fake news is not new (think P.T. Barnum and 17th-century canards), its virulence has reached epidemic proportions, infiltrating all aspects of society. This constitutes a crisis for information literacy education. How do faculty in college composition courses help students navigate this dangerous terrain? To empower students to take on the challenge of writing, researching, and navigating in a world full of lies, this presentation brings together history, social media, generative AI, and rhetoric (particularly parody) within a framework of critical literacy pedagogy to make clear the reasons for and the rhetorical strategies of disinformation. Lies are rhetorical. Young identifies the “Five Stages of Grift:” denying, redirecting, minimizing, excusing, and “halfhearted[ly]” admitting to the hoax. Think of these as the rhetorical strategies of dishonesty that are not addressed in textbooks, but students should learn to identify. Parody, which is fake but not dishonest discourse, employs these strategies without attempting to deceive, making it an excellent vehicle for studying misleading rhetoric. Similarly, generative AI (known to misinterpret and make up information) and social media (known to amplify lies) can become vehicles for helping students develop rhetorical and information savvy. The “first step we need to take in order to eliminate disinformation,” according to Fake News is Bad News (2021), “is acknowledging that this is a systemic problem” (6). I’m adding a second step: teach students to recognize disinformation using the rhetoric of parody and the technological instruments of disinformation so they can combat it. Developing this rhetorical savvy in students is, in my view, the primary edict of rhetorical instruction and information literacy.