Introduction
I'm going to start off by saying that this project was a roller coaster. At first, we had everything under control and we knew exactly what we were doing which was to hoax the whole school on some fake story created by us. Then after brainstorming ideas for stories and choosing one, we began to work. We had people creating social media pages, others were improving the original story when all of a sudden they told us we wouldn't do this project anymore.
My conspiracy theoryTrying to figure out what conspiracy theory we would make a presentation about for us wasn't the easiest task because we wanted to have something unique but at the same time a conspiracy theory that we had some sort of interest in. So what we decided to present on was the Bogota bracelet conspiracy. Researching for this conspiracy at first was hard because we couldn't find many sources that had information on it but we eventually started to find more and more sources that really helped us out. Looking back at it now I still wouldn't be able to say if it was true or not because many of the sources would only explain the incident and not have to much back up information on the reason why the Colombian's did what they did, and the theory is reasonable and not too crazy which also makes it harder to decide. Another important point is that the conspiracy theory isn't that new so there isn't as much info available compared to other theories.
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Exposing a fake website
Dr. P put our skills to the test when he told us to look at a website and figure out if it was fake or not and I think he underestimated us. We figured out it was him who had made the website in less than fifteen minutes and it was pretty easy. The red flags that gave it away were the fact that the website was created using Weebly and looked very similar to his DP, and the contact page led us to Dr. P since we sent an email and it appeared in his inbox.
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Hoax
Brainstorming ideas for what our story was going to be about may have been the most time consuming part of creating it but at the end it was all worth it because it ended up being the story that would hoax the school. The process we went through to create the story was first figure out what people at our school would be interested in and make it sound realistic. With those two things in mind we created a story about a bananadine outbreak at our school. Working with my partner was very productive and we worked really well. You can read the full story if you click on the link to the right.
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My story so far
The purpose of this essay was to show Dr. P how we felt about our hoax project being shut off and how much we had contributed to the project before we stopped working. The reason why we stopped doing the project was because we didn't want to ruin anyone or the schools reputation by making up a story that would look good on us. Even though it wouldn't be real our teachers still decided to stop it. You can read my story on the right if you click the link but it pretty much explains how I felt about the project not happening and a few more things that went on during the project.
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Police report
A police report may sound random for a project about fake news but for some reason it actually fit into the project really well. The purpose of doing a police report was to get used to and better at being able to find evidence to back up your claim. Which is exactly what you need to do when you are trying to determine if whether or not a source is reliable.
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Biggest threat journalism is facing essay
We wrote this essay based off what we had learned from listening to a few Dan Rather shows and some research on journalism. Looking back at my essay I still agree with what I wrote and every single part about it not just one thing. There is one thing I would change about it and it has nothing to do with me agreeing or disagreeing on what I wrote the first time. All I would change is add more info on fake news and native advertising.
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Our Ad
For our ad my group tried to combine everything we had ever seen in ads throughout our life and put it into one. We also added a quote and picture of Dr. P saying that they were the best pills ever but the viewer may not know in what subject Dr. P has a PhD in, which he has it in theatre. We thought that it would definitely make someone want to buy them more because a "doctor" said they are the best. Another thing that we added was order in the next few minutes and get a second miracle pill for the price of one. This was a really fun assignment and it helped us understand the world of advertising much better.
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Fake news article
For the fake news Olympics we had to create a article from a website onto paper and test the other class to see how many red flags they could find. The articles we created were obviously fake, but they did have some factual information in it, you can see the one we created on the right. So what the other class was responsible for was to find the red flags within our article. An example of a red flag is the website name "NotMyPresident.com" which just from reading that you might make an assumption that the information or opinions from this article may not be too accurate. That was just an example of one red flag but there were more throughout our article. Overall creating these articles was very good practice for us and really helped us when we had to create our own fake stories.
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Final Draft
After we had made so many stories, articles, and researched about fake news coming up with this fake news article was easy. As soon I heard that we had to make a fake news article about anything we wanted to the first thing that came to my mind was the Tijuana sewage spill that happened in February 2017. The sewage spill that actually happened but what I did was make a fake news article by adding fake facts and quotes that weren't real. All of us had to add red flags to our articles which are certain things that you might see in an article which may lead to it being fake. A few examples of red flags could be typos, websites ending in .com.co, the article is biased and many more. The red flags I included were typos, a fake author, fake facts, and quotes, and it was biased. To test our fake news articles we gave them to middle schoolers and they had to determine whether our articles were fake or not and find the red flags. The person that read my article said that it looked very realistic but concluded with it being fake and she was able to find a few red flags but not all of them. Overall I was very proud of my article and thought it came out really well and I will definitely be using my skills to detect fake news in the future.
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Exhibition
The concept we had for exhibition was to turn the classroom into a cafe where people could sit down analyze articles and have food from our food bar. We had all of our articles displayed on one side of the classroom and guests could choose any article they wanted to and with the red flag sheet we provided them they had to analyze the articles trying to find as many red flags as they could. A few days before exhibition I was part of the group that had to set up the classroom and plan how it was going to look for exhibition. I helped out by cleaning up the classroom to make it look more presentable, covering up areas that looked better covered up, sorted out and stapled the articles, and finally help the classroom layout. The best part about exhibition was when I showed my parents my article because they said it did look realistic but they were able to find a few red flags when I went over the article with them. If I had to give someone advice about doing an exhibition like Cafe Faux the best piece of advice would be to make sure that you are well informed and prepared to answer questions.
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