By Elise Gravel
A cartoonist uses jokes and cartoon blobs to show how a lie gets built, who makes money when people believe it, and why our own brains fall hardest for the ones we already wanted to be true.
It opens with a rumor that killer underwear is invading, which is plainly nonsense, and then Elise Gravel spends a hundred pages showing how a piece of nonsense like that gets made and sold. A photo gets doctored and suddenly everyone believes scorpions are pouring out of the toilets. A website runs the headline GOVERNOR MARRIES A TURTLE, not to tell you anything but to get you to click, because the click is money. A politician says his opponent pinches puppies, and says it again, and again, until repetition is doing the job that evidence should be doing. Gravel names the machinery out loud: disinformation, conspiracy theories, clickbait, confirmation bias. She's also clear that we don't fall for lies because we're stupid. We fall for them because we're scared, and because a lie that agrees with what we already think slides right in. It's all drawn in cartoon blobs and it's genuinely funny, and about halfway through she stops to say that fake news itself is not funny and can be dangerous.
What sets this one apart is that it actually teaches the skill in the title. A lot of media-literacy books for this age stop at 'people see things differently,' which is true but won't help a child with a video someone built on purpose to fool them. Gravel goes further. She explains motive, the piece children rarely get handed: somebody is lying to you and there's a reason, usually money or power or wanting to be liked. Then she turns it around and points it at the child reading it, because confirmation bias isn't something only other people have. Hearing that at ten, in cartoons, while you're laughing, does more than a year of assemblies about online safety. And because it's short, silly, and full of pictures, the child who won't go near nonfiction will read this one straight through.