Gratitude and godspeed to Samantha Reusch and colleagues for the media-literacy campaign they plan in September to help young voters identify disinformation and dubious online sources.

The researcher at Apathy Is Boring says the goal, in advance of the imminent federal election call, is to help youth “think critically about what they’re seeing online and why it might be spreading.”

The campaign begins Sept. 8, runs until the UN’s International Day of Democracy on Sept. 15, and could profitably be aimed at citizens of all ages.

Earlier this year, a federal task force was established to watch for foreign interference in the Oct. 21 election and a NATO researcher has said Canada should assume Russia will attempt to interfere as it did in the U.S. in 2016.

There’s much individuals can do by way of critical thinking to avoid being manipulated. The first task might be to amend terminology from the current “fake news.”

Fake news is a misnomer. There is no “news” in it. And the term has become mere shorthand to dismiss anything with which the user of the phrase disagrees.

News is what is produced by credible outlets, committed to a search for truth, subject to the discipline of verification, to the scrutiny of editors and to professional codes of accountability.

So-called “fake news” is the purposeful dissemination of propaganda to mislead and manipulate. Let’s call it disinformation. Or, in the Russian, “dezinformatsiya.”

To be sure, humankind has always distorted and exaggerated. We are a species famously susceptible to buying the unlikely or preposterous. Our neurology ensures we’re more aroused by emotions than facts. Our cognitive biases make our opinions difficult to change once they’re formed.

In recent times, the price of such imperfection has risen.

The malevolent propagation of the false, the calculated exploitation of social division, has mushroomed with the means of spreading it.

“The information-technology revolution has completely altered the terms on which democracy must operate,” David Runciman wrote in How Democracy Ends. “We have become dependent on forms of communication and information-sharing that we neither control nor fully understand.”

As seen in 2016, subverting an election didn’t require tampering with voting machines.

American scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson wrote in Cyber-War: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President that saboteurs crafted and placed ads on U.S. platforms, organized rallies to inflame cultural divisions and created imposter sites to achieve their ends.

“With a focus on constituencies whom Donald Trump needed to mobilize, Russian messages stoked fears of the multicultural, multiracial, ecumenical culture that the Clinton Democrats championed. . .”

Through a troll farm in St. Petersburg that produced blog posts, comments, infographics and viral videos, the Russians achieved a technological coup, Jamieson said.

“Russian hacking and social-media messaging altered the content of the electoral dialogue and contributed to Donald Trump’s victory.”

In response to this history, Reusch’s campaign will explain the algorithms that spread disinformation and showcase how propaganda is aimed at our emotions.

Voters will be urged to consider their news sources, assess the credibility of information on which claims are based, and the qualifications of those making them.

Not all opinions are equal. Our belief in a statement should depend on the strengths of the evidence supporting it. This involves critical thinking. And that involves time and effort.

“Thinking rationally is difficult, which is why most of us try to avoid doing it until absolutely forced,” the University of Toronto’s Joseph Heath wrote in Enlightenment 2.0.

If the price of freedom is vigilance, citizens have a responsibility to inform themselves. By not doing so, they are easy marks for demagogues.

Any User’s Guide to Identifying Disinformation might include the following:

  • Get familiar with website domain names — the three-digit suffix of the URL — and those most likely to suggest credibility.
  • Note how committed news sources are to fact-checking, how promptly and prominently errors are corrected.
  • Look for explanatory depth and context. Look for sources that put numbers in context, explain where they came from and how they were collected.
  • When assessing polls, consider methodology, sampling sizes and margins of error.
  • Academic sources of information tend to be trustworthy and are better than think-tanks, often fronts for partisan agendas.
  • Opinions are not the same as reportage.

In Weaponized Lies, Daniel J. Levitin said the best tool yet devised to determine if something is true or false is the scientific method. Observe. Question. Test the hypothesis. Repeat.

“Critical thinking doesn’t mean we disparage everything; it means we try to distinguish between claims with evidence and those without,” he said.

There is plenty of available material for arming ourselves against disinformation. Mustering the will to do so should be easy when the stakes are considered.

History shows that trusting in falsehood can have dire, even catastrophic consequences.

The examples are everywhere about us.