The topic was Three Mile Island: a nuclear accident that I was familiar with from previous reading.  My attention wandered as a nervous classmate read bulleted statistics directly off of her presentation slide, but my focus snapped back to the topic at hand when I heard her say, “299 people were injured.” Knowing that was 299 more people than the actual value, I immediately recognized the fact as false.

How did my classmate find this “fact”? While filters and fact-checking programs can be built into media platforms, fake news is inevitable. Humans, not websites, are to blame. Science can confirm: Soroush Vosoughi, a data analyst and computer scientist at Dartmouth, testifies, saying, “We found that falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth,” connecting the unnerving percentile with human nature’s attraction to novelty.

The Three Mile Island statistic, no doubt perpetuated by a public stigma surrounding the nuclear industry, might not have raised a red flag in the student’s mind. After all, 299 injuries are more exciting than zero. New York Times journalist Sabrina Tavernise sees the effect of unchecked bias, writing that its swirling mess, true and false, is “causing a kind of fun-house effect that leaves the reader doubting everything, including real news.”  But shouldn’t a student know better? Maybe not.

My sporadic lessons on fact-checking sprinkled throughout my schooling have all been consistent: check multiple websites. Blogs and  .com’s are suspicious. .Org’s, .edu’s, and .gov’s are credible.

But what happens when even “credible” websites don’t all spoonfeed the same answer, and instead are riddled with a mix of fact and opinion? Googling the nuclear accident for myself, I found reports ranging from a minor inconvenience to a catastrophe with a rising death toll.

There are tools and tactics that can sort through the bias that surrounds controversial issues like this one. But to the untrained student? Their inaccurate research shouldn’t be surprising us. Real research is complicated, often with dead ends and u-turns. It takes patience, methodology, and analysis. Without experience, how can students learn to find the true answer with all of the world’s perspective at their fingertips?

Information is pouring out of every corner of social media and search engines, available to all readers able to get their hands on it. The issue of disorienting bias and misinformation, though now appearing at a new and unprecedented scale, isn’t going away. In fact, the continuing influx of media influencers will only exacerbate the problem. But that doesn’t mean that students can’t be prepared.

Schools, teachers, curriculums, adapt. Change the way we teach students, giving them the tools they need to navigate the world’s biggest media source.