# Can you spot the lies in your news feed? | Laura Smythe - Show: TED Talks Daily - Published: 2026-10-24 - Canonical: https://podc.club/en/episode/160904630_b2be9f58bd37.html - Audio: https://sphinx.acast.com/p/open/s/67587e77c705e441797aff96/e/6adb749627504523efb891e6/media.mp3 - Source: Edited from a machine transcript of the first 30 minutes of the episode. Not an official summary. In 2017, thousands of wealthy people paid up to $100,000 each for a luxury Bahamas music festival that turned out to be a fraud — convinced by posts from Kendall Jenner and other top influencers. Media literacy activist Laura Smythe reads the Fyre Festival disaster as a story about trust, arguing that spreading the information-verification skills journalists use daily to ordinary citizens is now essential to democracy. Her TED Talk draws on Finland's national curriculum — built from kindergarten through university — to lay out concrete steps for individuals, governments, and schools. ## What this episode answers ### Why did thousands of smart people fall for the Fyre Festival fraud? The root cause was an instinctive tendency to trust people we like. Influencers and celebrities posted glamorous content, and audiences conflated 'likable' with 'trustworthy' — two entirely different things that social media algorithms actively push together. ### What information-verification methods do journalists routinely use? Journalists follow a five-step process — gathering information, confirming facts, vetting sources, checking for bias, and maintaining objectivity — carried out collaboratively by reporters, editors, fact-checkers, and legal teams; this is a product of professional training that is almost never taught outside newsrooms. ### What is the current state of media literacy education in the United States? The U.S. has no national media literacy education standards; 86 percent of Gen Z gets its news from social media, and algorithms rank content by trending-ness rather than accuracy, meaning the media environment has outpaced the civic education system. ### How does Finland approach media literacy education? Finland has embedded cultural vigilance against propaganda since winning independence from Russia more than a century ago, and today integrates media literacy across every subject from K-12 through adult learning — covering source vetting in literature, algorithms in math, image editing in art, and multi-perspective fact analysis in history, plus a 'Troll Factory' game that lets students experience disinformation firsthand; Finland has ranked first in the Open Society Foundation's Media Literacy Index every year since it launched in 2017. ### What media literacy actions can we start taking today? Smythe calls for contacting elected representatives to demand national standards, calling out misinformation in daily life, subscribing to local newspapers, following journalism-trained creators on social media, and sharing these habits with children. ## Article ## Fyre Festival: The Con That Sold Trust In 2017, Instagram feeds flooded with a single orange square. Kendall Jenner, Hailey Baldwin, Emily Ratajkowski, Ja Rule, and other high-profile influencers and celebrities promoted Fyre Festival — a luxury music event set in the Bahamas, featuring Migos and Major Lazer, billed as "a cultural experience of a decade." Ninety-five percent of tickets sold within 48 hours. Some buyers paid as much as $100,000 for a single spot; college students booked it as their spring-break destination. What greeted them on arrival was a cheese sandwich and a FEMA tent. Not one promised artist performed. The organizers went to federal prison. Media literacy activist Laura Smythe frames the episode not as a simple fraud but as a story about trust. Human beings instinctively trust the people they like — but "likable" and "trustworthy" are entirely different things. Curated social media content systematically blurs that line. ## The Newsroom's Trade Secrets Have Never Reached the Public Smythe has worked across both legacy media outlets and newer digital ones. What she noticed was a vast gap in the frameworks people bring to information. Journalists verify information under a professional discipline oriented toward truth. Inside a newsroom, reporters, editors, fact-checkers, and legal teams collaborate on five distinct tasks: (1) gathering information, (2) confirming facts, (3) vetting sources, (4) checking for bias, and (5) maintaining objectivity. This process runs as a matter of routine — and is almost never taught outside journalism schools or newsrooms. Meanwhile, we have access to more information than any generation in history. But social media and AI algorithms surface content by trending-ness rather than accuracy, and there is no guarantee that all the relevant facts will be included. Smythe calls this skills gap the greatest civic problem of our time. ## America Lags as the Rest of the World Acts The United States currently has no national media literacy education standards. Eighty-six percent of Gen Z gets its news from social media, and children born today will grow up turning to Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube — not the New York Times or Fox News — as their primary sources of information. Other countries have started to move. Australia has banned social media use for those under 16, with Denmark following. Germany begins media literacy education in elementary school; in some classrooms, journalists are invited to teach students how to vet sources, identify state-sponsored disinformation, and pause before sharing emotionally charged content. ## The Finland Model: Skepticism Built Into the National Curriculum Finland draws Smythe's particular attention. Having won independence from Russia more than a century ago, Finland developed a culturally embedded alertness to propaganda, and today media literacy is a pillar of the national curriculum from kindergarten through university and adult learning. The cross-disciplinary approach is what makes it distinctive. In literature, students learn the basics of news verification and source vetting. In math, they study algorithms and statistics. In art, they analyze image-editing techniques. In history, students examine how the same events of World War II are narrated differently depending on which country wrote the account. Some students also spend a week playing a computer game called Troll Factory, taking on the role of a troll who deliberately spreads disinformation to maximize account visibility. One student put it plainly: "The more offensive the thing you spread, the more followers you get." Finnish education authorities are equally plain about the stakes: if citizens cannot distinguish truth from falsehood, they can be deceived and democracy becomes fragile. A phrase widely known in the country captures the philosophy — "You have the right to your own opinion. You do not have the right to your own facts." Finland has ranked first in the Open Society Foundation's Media Literacy Index every year since the index launched in 2017. ## What We Can Do Smythe closed her TED Talk with a set of concrete calls to action: contact elected representatives to push for national media literacy education standards; practice "journalistic thinking" in daily life and call out misinformation when you see it; subscribe to your local newspaper; when getting news on social media, choose creators who have journalism training; and share this toolkit with children and the people around you. She left the audience with one question: if the social media team behind Fyre Festival had been asking the questions a Finnish elementary schooler asks every day, what might have happened differently? Her closing thought: "The ability to think for yourself may be the most important civic skill we have left." ## Takeaways - Fyre Festival showed how influencer-driven curated content can cause mass misjudgment by exploiting the confusion between 'likability' and 'trustworthiness' — a dynamic social media algorithms actively amplify. - The five-step information-verification process that journalists learn through professional training is almost never taught outside newsrooms, and that skills gap is itself a structural vulnerability for democracy. - Finland's cross-disciplinary, K-12-to-adult media literacy curriculum has held the top spot on the Media Literacy Index since 2017, demonstrating that a layered approach — from individual daily habits to nationally mandated standards — is both achievable and effective.