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1/8 If I hear "we will only solve the disinformation campaign by teaching critical thinking" one more time, I'm going to go berserk.
2/8 It's like saying, we will only reduce traffic accidents by first teaching people how a catalytic converter works.
3/8 We reduce accidents by teaching drivers to stop at red; not to cross double lines; to look in their rearview mirror before switching lanes. The equivalent on the Web?
4/8 Google scientist Dan Russell in a Scientific American blog (alas, still behind a paywall, sorry) cites research that shows that 90% of users don't know how to locate a word on a webpage using Control-F 
5/8 I didn't believe it when I read it. I told this to the very smart, very thoughtful group I was having dinner with that evening. Two of four didn't know what Control-F was either.
6/8 To quote Dan, in lieu of Control-F: "The large majority [of searchers] have to do a slow (and errorful) visual scan for a string of text on a website."
7/8 This is the tip of the iceberg. I've seen intelligent people try to find who's behind a site by typing its url in the browser and being SEO'ed to death (they have no idea what SEO does or what it stands for). @holden can regale us with similar stories. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_en…
8/8 Don't get me wrong. I'm all for critical thinking. But maybe we ought to start by teaching students the Web's equivalent of "stop"? gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/18/06/…
Dan Russell in non-paywall. Shout out @keikoinboston theatlantic.com/technology/arc…
