By Michael Grass
Center for an Informed Public
University of Washington
More than 500 Washington high school students, teachers and librarians gathered at the University of Washington in Seattle on March 17 for MisinfoDay 2025, an annual event featuring educational workshops, gaming activities and other programming aimed to help participants navigate complex information environments and make informed decisions about what they see online.
MisinfoDay is co-organized through a statewide partnership between the UW Center for an Informed Public and Washington State University’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication.
The first MisinfoDay was organized by the UW Information School in 2019 and in the years since has reached thousands of students across Washington, led to the creation of intergenerational learning opportunities in communities like Port Townsend and Sedro-Woolley and inspired similar media literacy educational events in other states, including California and Iowa.
“It was wonderful to see students so engaged with this year’s MisinfoDay program and activities,” said Liz Crouse, the CIP’s MisinfoDay program manager who organized the first MisinfoDay at UW Seattle as part of an iSchool Master of Library and Information Science Capstone project. “It’s been great to see this program grow over the years and reach so many students and educators across Washington and beyond.”
This year’s MisinfoDay featured six workshop sessions, including an examination of data visualizations with KUOW Public Radio creative manager Teo Popescu; a discussion with Rosemary Smith, producer of Trust Me, an award winning documentary about media literacy; and “What’s Your Frame: How We Make Sense of Online Rumors,” a session presented by CIP co-founder Kate Starbird.
There were also a handful of informational learning stations, including a misinformation-themed Jeopardy!-like game and skills-focused stations designed to help students spot “deepfake” images and improve their fact-checking skills. The learning stations were staffed by volunteers from the iSchool, CIP and the MisinfoDay Youth Advisory Board, a group of 13 students representing 9 Washington high schools who helped organizers test and provide feedback on programming for this year’s event.
A centerpiece of MisinfoDay has been the Euphorigen Investigation, a misinformation-themed “escape room” style game that immerses players in a world of manipulated media, social media bots and deepfakes with the aim of educating participants about misinformation tactics and their psychological effects. The Euphorigen Investigation is one of many educational Loki’s Loop games developed in recent years by CIP researchers in collaboration with colleagues at the Information School and Seattle-based Puzzle Break.
MisinfoDay at UW Seattle had additional gaming options beyond the escape room game. UW librarians, CIP fellows and scholars offered a choice of games that explore whether truth is black and white and how to beat the algorithm.
CIP Community Fellow Shawn Lee, a teacher at Ballard High School in Seattle, said that his students found this year’s MisinfoDay program exciting, energizing and empowering. “MisinfoDay is an event I look forward to every year,” said Lee, who brought his students to MisinfoDay at UW Seattle in 2019 and in subsequent years.
Taking lessons from MisinfoDay at UW, Lee previously prototyped an intergenerational learning event at Ballard High School where students teach the adults in their lives, including their parents and grandparents, the digital literacy skills they’re learning in the classroom. Lee and colleagues at Ballard are planning a similar event for early June.
“We are living through an information revolution, but we are not educating our students on all the effects it is having on our mental health, our institutions and our society,” Lee said, noting how the lessons of MisinfoDay are valuable tools to help address these informational challenges.
‘It’s really easy to create BS online but it’s hard to clean up.’
In a MisinfoDay 2025 keynote address, CIP co-founder Jevin West (pictured above), a UW iSchool professor who co-developed the popular Calling Bullshit data reasoning course at UW Seattle with UW Department of Biology professor Carl Bergstrom, told the assembled students, teachers and librarians that it’s “really easy to create BS online but it’s hard to clean up.”
West, who serves as the iSchool’s associate dean for research, continued: “There’s no way to solve misinformation, but we try different things to address it. It’s always going to be around and that’s why we’re here today.”
In a world with no shortage of online scams, misinformation, hype and hyperbole, the “superpower of today is to discern what’s true and what’s not,” he said. That includes understanding how generative artificial intelligence, including the rise of “AI slop,” can be used to confuse and dupe people, West said. Sometimes, generative AI content designed to deceive can have major consequences, West said, pointing to an AI-generated fake image of an explosion at the Pentagon in 2023 that briefly caused a stock market sell-off.
In a separate MisinfoDay workshop session, West explored digital skills needed to understand the promises and pitfalls of generative AI, including some lessons from a recently introduced online course he co-developed with Bergstrom, Modern Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?
As we all navigate today’s online information environments and social media feeds that are incentivized to capture our attention but not always factual or trustworthy, West said during his keynote address that there’s “nothing more important than what you’re going to do individually as an information consumer.”
One practical thing information consumers can do, West said, is become familiar with the three vertical dots adjacent to Google search returns. Those three dots, developed at the urging of former CIP research scientist and media literacy expert Mike Caulfield, provide valuable contextual information about the source, something people can use to better understand the reliability of the information surfaced through a Google search.
The importance of understanding algorithms
In her MisinfoDay workshop session, “Understanding ‘The Algorithm,’” CIP senior research scientist Rachel Moran-Prestridge (pictured above) walked MisinfoDay participants through the mechanics of algorithmically curated platforms, including TikTok and Instagram.
In the session, Moran-Prestridge noted how TikTok’s personalized #ForYou feed considers a variety of factors when serving up videos, including how long you’ve watched a particular video — including whether you’ve watched it multiple times or swiped through it quickly — what you’ve commented on, various demographic information TikTok may be able to perceive from your platform activity and whether you’ve sent a video to someone else on the platform. All are indicators of the type of content TikTok believes you’re interested in seeing more of.
Moran-Prestidge shared insights about how to factcheck viral videos, using an example involving unpasteurized milk, commonly called “raw milk.” While some health and wellness influencers tout the nutritional benefits of unpasteurized milk, many medical professionals and food safety experts warn of adverse health risks, including E. coli, salmonella and listeria.
“Look for verified creators with the right expertise,” said Moran-Prestridge, who studies social media influencers and trust in information. “Are they a creator who chases trends or a professional with relevant expertise and credentials?”
Moran-Prestridge suggested that you “use the platform features to your advantage” when assessing whether the video’s creator can be trusted. That can include checking video comments to gauge viewer sentiments, clicking through the video creator’s page to see if they share expert credentials and are qualified to speak on the topic, and in the case of TikTok, clicking on the “sound” button to see if the video’s audio matches the video.
An learning exercise using UFOs
In a MisinfoDay workshop, UW Human Centered Design & Engineering professor Kate Starbird used an exercise centered on the 1947 unidentified flying object incident in Roswell, New Mexico to demonstrate how people can use the same set of facts to come to very different conclusions depending on their “frames,” or mental schema that help us make sense of facts.
“Our frames are ways as individuals we organize and interpret facts in the world around us,” Starbird said.
In the Roswell case study, perhaps the most well-known and most disputed incident involving UFOs, people have viewed the established facts through different frames to draw different conclusions of what actually happened — that it was aliens, a military conspiracy or a natural phenomena.
More broadly with frames, Starbird noted how politicians, online influencers and marketers “want us to see the world through their frames. … They push frames that give them an advantage that push people to buy certain products, vote in certain ways or not vote at all.”
Starbird’s framing exercise can be found in the MisinfoDay Resource Library, which educators can use to plan classroom and learning activities around media literacy skills.
Related
- Center for an Informed Public Video (2024) | “Fostering a more informed public in Washington through media literacy education”
- Education Week Video (2024) | “Why this teacher uses aliens to teach media literacy”
- Teen Vogue (2025) | “Media literacy in schools is on the rise as teachers grapple with misinformation and conspiracy theories”
- Post Alley (2025) | “Swimming in a sea of misinformation. It’s MisinfoDay”
- Michael Grass is the Center for an Informed Public’s assistant director for communications.
- Photos by Doug Parry / UW Information School
