This is your MPR life kit on information and maybe more importantly, false information

and how to see through it or avoid it.

I'm Miles Parks with the MPR Politics Team.

Let's start with a story that shows just how high the stakes are when fake news spreads.

Caitlin Dickerson is an immigration reporter for the New York Times.

She covered this story and it took place in Twin Falls, Idaho before the term fake news

was even in the National Vocabulary.

Security Council meetings are usually pretty low stakes, but at this meeting in the summer

of 2016 during the public comment period where anybody can come to the microphone and just

offer comments on what's happening around town, a series of people get up one after the

other.

All asking about the same thing.

They say a horrible crime has been committed in their community.

And they start to ask about a sexual assault case involving refugees, Muslim refugees.

It's an appalling story.

Basically the people in Twin Falls are concerned about a five-year-old who people say it was

assaulted by a group of Syrian refugees, but at the meeting.

The city council members have no idea what they're talking about.

There's lots of confusion.

The local government officials say they'll look into it, but over the next few days and weeks

it goes from these sort of fringe, highly partisan blogs into the national media.

It goes viral at a time of intense fears about refugee resettlement and Islamic terrorism.

...