"The site is very dubious", judges Eleonore, who, like her 27 other classmates, benefits from at least one hour per week of media and information education courses in this college in Raincy, in Seine-Saint -Denis.

Their teacher, Alexandrine Lopez-Follin, showed them this brief published on Nordpresse.

Ayoub points out that alongside this news, we can read other equally bizarre ones on this site, as well as "quite annoying advertisements".

And yet, "this name 'Nordpresse' looks serious," he remarks.

Ms. Lopez-Follin, head of the college's documentation center, gives them some advice: "Do other information sites, considered reliable, pass on the same news?".

This is not the case.

During this two-hour session, the college students first had to go through two articles on a computer in pairs that they chose from a selection made by their teacher.

After some research on the internet, they filled out a small "tool sheet", where they specified the source of the news and whether it was news or fake news, giving their arguments.

Then, they all discussed together the different news and the best way to spot the true from the false.

"The Sensational and the Emotional"

Students of this generation, notes Ms. Lopez-Follin, "are confronted with a very large amount of unfiltered information from an early age".

“Faced with a screen, without mediation on the part of the parents, they can find themselves faced with false content without realizing it,” she adds in an interview with AFP.

An observation widely shared by all professionals.

To remedy this, Arcom (ex-CSA, the audiovisual regulator) and CLEMI (Centre for Media and Information Education) have set up a whole series of training courses for teachers and students.

Each year there is also a week dedicated to this subject in schools, which starts on Monday.

Last year, four million students benefited from such teaching in this context, according to Arcom.

The difficulty, explains Ms. Lopez-Follin, is that "we have to be up to date with their latest habits, find out and learn ourselves to use the tools they use so as not to be completely out of step".

The advent of digital over the past twenty years has upset habits: if grandparents were informed by reading a paper daily, their grandchildren go on social networks and platforms, even abandoning the television watched by their parents. .

When she arrived nine years ago at college, the teacher remembers that Facebook was used a lot, since abandoned for Instagram and Snapchat.

According to her, children are "in the sensational and the emotional all the time (...). They become receivers and propagators of false information without realizing it".

But, at the same time, they turn out to be "very receptive" to the education sessions.

"We can see when they come out that they understand the mechanism," she says.

Asked at the end of the course, Clément explains that from now on, "he is more suspicious and will check" the information.

Regarding the controllers made with dog truffles, he claims that "if that had been true, I would have stopped playing the console".

A "fake news" that could inspire parents...

© 2022 AFP