by Jeffrey A. Greene, Ph.D., the McMichael Professor in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Remember when the Internet was fun? I do. It used to be a place where we could connect with our friends, meet interesting new people, get the news as it happened, and even leverage collective action to make the world a better place. Now, with an infodemic of ads, misinformation, and manipulation, it feels like the Internet uses us more than we use it. In fact, in a recent survey conducted by The Harris Poll for the American Psychological Association, 82 percent of people worried others may be basing their values and opinions on false or inaccurate information and 56 percent worried about unknowingly spreading misinformation themselves. Taking back our Internet, and making it useful again, is possible. But it is going to take some work. Similar to how we have to decide what food to put in our body, or how museums decide what to display, each of us needs to become curators of the information and sources we rely upon online.

Our online “diet” becomes the food we use to think and learn, in ways we realize as well as ways we do not. When a ridiculous headline appears in my

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