Photo by Jon Tyson

In 2024, Project Censored introduced Beyond Fact-Checking: A Teaching Guide to the Power of News Frames to critically analyze narrative strategies media outlets use to present news stories. Framing shapes how we understand these stories by emphasizing certain aspects and downplaying others, ultimately promoting a particular interpretation of events. The point of framing is that it’s subtle and extremely easy to overlook, so the guide walks readers through framing red flags, such as selective sourcing, passive voice in headlines, and deceptively cropped images.

Although my colleague, Andy Lee Roth, and I initially developed this guide to educate students about how news can be factually accurate and still misleading due to framing, this concern is not limited to news. Framing shapes our interpretations of all kinds of content seen online every day.

After all, we’re all the architects, or framers, of our personal online presence. We carefully curate what we want others to see or know about us and deliberately omit the less desirable aspects of our lives. But in a more extreme form, this curation becomes the domain of influencers, where false advertising, dubious health recommendations, or shameless self-promotion are often tools to boost one’s image and ultimately generate significant income.

Algorithmic curation on platforms like X, Instagram, and TikTok also works to make framing a mostly invisible practice. Algorithms subtly amplify certain narratives more than others, ultimately trapping users in harmful echo chambers they’re unaware of.

For example, a user who repeatedly comes across a particular type of political content can begin to assume that most others on the platform share that same perspective. When, in reality, it’s not a matter of........

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