Be Aware of News Mirages

When a community is exposed to one, they feast on what looks like safe and trustworthy information—but it isn’t news, it’s just sand.

Hi, everyone—Nabiha and Sisi here to discuss something that’s been on our minds lately.

We’re sadly all too aware of the crisis of news deserts: communities starved of credible, trustworthy information. With an election looming, the problems they pose rise to the level of a full-on threat to democracy. But because it’s the 2020s, we’re here to talk about a new and different type of hellscape that compounds the problem of news deserts—what we call news mirages.

News mirages are entrancing. When a community is exposed to one, they feast on what looks like safe and trustworthy information—but it isn’t news, it’s just sand. We’ve become accustomed to some ...