On August 15, 2024 Microsoft published a lesson plan for teachers on “Information literacy fundamentals” as part of its Search Coach program, which involved NewsGuard as a partner.
On this particular lesson plan, Microsoft worked with the Digital Inquiry Group, a NGO whose other partners include the Council on Foreign Relations, the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for Humanities, and Google. It purports to “empower educators to teach students the historical thinking and digital literacy skills needed to thrive in today’s information landscape.”
As FFO investigations have previously shown, the fields of “media literacy,” “digital literacy,” and “information literacy” are post-2016 inventions of the censorship industry aimed at re-establishing establishment authority over what information sources are deemed acceptable and unacceptable, particularly in schools. Microsoft has been particularly active in pushing these fields into the education system.
The August 2024 lesson plan was developed under the aegis of Search Coach, Microsoft’s guide for students to navigate “a world that is increasingly dependent on online resources, and continually threatened by false and misleading information.”
While Microsoft, following public and political pressure, has promised to end its media literacy work with NewsGuard, its pages for Search Coach and its associated lesson plan remain live on the company’s web servers. The lesson plan directly recommends that students utilize NewsGuard:
“Project your screen so that the class can see the search engine results page (SERP) using the above search terms. Direct students’ attention to results with high NewsGuard ratings without clicking on any one of them—the strategy known as click restraint.”
It then uses top-tier NewsGuard ratings for The Guardian, widely regarded as the most liberal mainstream newspaper in the United Kingdom, to cite the highly biased publisher as a reputable source: “direct students’ attention to the low NewsGuard rating.”. . .“As you scan results, you should look for sources that are reputable. (In this particular case, The Guardian, a British newspaper has a 100% rating from NewsGuard.)”
In addition to Newsguard, the plans encourage students to add plugins for other ideologically biased fact checking services: Snopes, Poynter Institute, and Factcheck.org.
Each plan has the students evaluate real social media posts, articles, and websites. Every single one which pushes an establishment-leftist point of view is validated by the lesson plan and everyone which has a conservative point of view is portrayed as biased or a purveyor of “disinformation.”
It also asks children to search for news on Climate Change and Gun Control, which suggests that Wikipedia should be trusted, while the NRA should not:
- The Wikipedia entry is well documented with over 200 references, many of them to trustworthy sources.
- The duke.edu page was created by a political advocacy group (the NRA, the National Rifle Association) that has a vested interest in the issue of gun control and is not likely to be a strong starting place for research about gun control.
It then instructs students to be skeptical of reports on climate change from the Heritage Foundation because “Lateral reading will reveal that the Heritage Foundation is a conservative organization that rejects the scientific consensus on climate change and has received funding from fossil fuel corporations that have a financial interest in downplaying the role that humans play in climate change.”
Students are advised to be more accepting of the liberal National Resource Defense Council, which may have an agenda, but “The organization links to credible sources of information to support its claims about climate change.”
The final lesson plan asks students to either confirm or debunk a news stories or social media posts, instructing students to confirm social media posts from Democrat party partisan Robert Reich, while “debunking” a social media claim about then-president Joe Biden’s mental decline — which was later widely accepted to be a genuine health concern following the former president’s poor performance in his debate with Donald Trump.
