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How is it possible, you might ask yourself, that nearly half the country believes the 2020 election was stolen? Or that the QAnon conspiracy, which holds Barack Obama is part of a pedophile cabal that eats babies, is now as popular as some major religions?

How could the best educated nation in the world be full of people who cant distinguish fact from fiction?

False information travels six times faster than the truth on Twitter, research has shown, but while 95 percent of Americans agree this is a problem, only 2 in 10 say theyre very concerned that they have personally spread misinformation, a 2021 poll found.

Yet misperceptions abound, and the left is not immune: During former FBI Director Robert Muellers investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Democrats were falling for unfounded conspiracy theories about Trump having sexual trysts with prostitutes in Russia. Still, Republicans in the Trump era have embraced the most dangerous misinformation of all, President Trumps baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

The challenge now is for Americans to learn to sort good information from bad, a skill that seems to be in short supply. And the place to start is in our public schools.

You get some information you dont just put that information into a story, you check it out. Thats the core of what were asking everyone to do, thats the core of media literacy, says Sen. Vin Gopal, chair of the states education committee. You dont just take something as fact, you compare it with other information, you use your brain a little.

New Jersey, to its great credit, is trying to do something to fix this. As Florida is banning schools from using the word gay, we are charging in the other direction. A bipartisan bill reintroduced in January would have them learn in the classroom how to spot false news and use critical thinking skills when assessing the truth of what theyve read.

A troubling 2019 study by Stanford University of prospective young voters found they were easily duped by what they saw online. More than 96 percent of high schoolers failed to do a simple Google search to reveal the organization behind a climate change website was funded by fossil fuel companies, for instance, and more than half believed a grainy video on Facebook was strong evidence of voter fraud in the U.S., even though it was actually shot in Russia.

Interestingly, it was Sen. Michael Testa, co-chairman of the Trump campaign in New Jersey, who first approached Sen. Shirley Turner with this legislation to combat disinformation among students. It seems like we make strange bedfellows in some respects, said Turner, a Democrat, but I felt this was a good bill and asked him if I could co-prime it.

We agree we do need more than a course on civics; this should be woven into a K-12 education. Testa told us his wife, a school librarian, has spoken to him about students over-relying on Internet sources such as Wikipedia; they need to have the skills to use their own critical thinking to decide if the resource theyre looking at is a reliable resource, he said. Right.

But Trump was a man known to spread inaccurate stuff on social media, like his rigged election lie that spawned the violent insurrection at the Capitol. So how does Testa square this with his role as chairman of the Trump campaign?

I mean, I gotta be honest with you, I havent been really following Ive been focused on my constituents in Legislative district 1, he said, after a long pause. I was focused on, you know, maybe selfishly, my own reelection in 2021. To me, that election was now two years ago. So, I think those of us in New Jersey have moved on from the 2020 election.

But does he believe that Trump was spreading disinformation? I dont know why youre even going there, Testa said. This is a bill that looks like its getting bipartisan support, and how this is even tied to President Trump is beyond me. Because its not.

Lets move on: A good bill is a good bill. The New Jersey Center for Civic Studies at Rutgers already offers a PowerPoint for teachers to use on media literacy, a useful starting point. It offers tips for spotting false news and identifying errors in reasoning, like a red herring: An intentional diversion to redirect the conversation away from a topic that someone does not want to address.

This problem, of course, is not limited to kids. American adults need this kind of education as well.

What do we do with all of the adults who havent had media literacy instruction or a civics course? Thats tougher, asks Arlene Gardner at the New Jersey Center for Civic Studies at Rutgers. Several people have asked us about a civics course for adults. Maybe Ill suggest to Rutgers that we offer such a course.

Not a bad idea.

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Fight the disinformation that threatens our democracy: Think like a fact-checker | Editorial - NJ.com