Giving Compass' Take:

• Helen Lee Bouygues argues that schools need to teach students to find trolls' motives in order to combat the damaging impact of online trolls. 

• How can funders support a wide-spread movement to teach students to recognize and fight trolls?

• Learn about teaching students to spot fake news. 

High school students often combat social media trolling by leaping before they look, jumping into heated arguments online. There’s a better way, though, that requires teenagers to imagine themselves as the trolls who are dedicated to manipulating them.

Students often find themselves on the front lines of the battle against the ever-multiplying mass of inaccurate and intentionally misleading information online.

Young people are tomorrow’s news creators and news consumers, and will soon make future-shaping decisions based on what they believe to be true. High school students are also teenagers, though, and while they may be technologically savvy, they are often psychologically unsophisticated and eager to be part of a cause or group — making them easy marks for the purveyors of misinformation. Only half of Americans say their schools gave them strong critical-thinking skills, according to a study released this week by the Reboot Foundation, where I serve as executive director.

Asking students to think hard about the motives of trolls — whether it’s to make money, help a political party or candidate, or sow division and undermine citizens’ faith in democracy — takes these young people a few steps closer to understanding the dangers that such misinformation poses to society. One hopes it may also raise hackles among participating teenagers, a demographic that is famously averse to feeling manipulated and controlled.

Read the full article about fighting trolls by Helen Lee Bouygues at The Hechinger Report.