The first US president was elected in 1789, and while some traditions remain, many voting laws have changed and evolved since then. So, who gets to vote? Why do Americans vote on Tuesdays? And, what’s even on the ballot?

Let’s face it: Politics can be baffling. As important as it is to research the candidates, it’s just as important to understand the political system, so you can be empowered to participate effectively in your government. Here are a few TED-Ed Animations that can help to demystify US elections:

1. The fight for the right to vote in the United States

In the United States today, if you are over eighteen, a citizen, and the resident of a state, you can vote (with some exceptions). So, how have voting rights changed since the first election in 1789? Nicki Beaman Griffin outlines the history of the long fight for a more inclusive electorate. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

2. Why do Americans vote on Tuesdays?

Since 1845, Americans have been voting on Tuesdays – but why? In this humorous video, Jacob Soboroff shares the history of Election Day and shows how voting on a Tuesday affects voter turnout. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

3. Gerrymandering: How drawing jagged lines can impact an election

Why might you vote as part of a different district than your neighbor across the street? District lines, and the groups of voters within them, may seem arbitrary, but a lot of thought (and political bickering) is put into these carefully drawn lines. From “packing” a district to “cracking” a district — learn how the shape of districts impacts political parties during election season. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

4. Does your vote count? The Electoral College explained

You vote, but then what? Discover how your individual vote contributes to the popular vote and your state’s electoral vote in different ways — and see how votes are counted on both state and national levels. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

5. How is power divided in the United States government?

Okay, so what does the President do? And how is that different from what Congress does? Articles I-III of the United States Constitution allow for three separate branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial), along with a system of checks and balances should any branch get too powerful. Belinda Stutzman breaks down each branch and its constitutionally entitled powers. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

This November, Americans are not just voting for President, but for congressional seats, as well. If you’re a US citizen over 18, take a look at what seats in your district are up for reelection before heading to the ballots. And of course, make sure you are registered to vote!

You can register to vote here.

Thinking about how to discuss Syria with your students? Here are 4 key ideas that can help kids go beyond the latest headlines:

1. Syria’s cultural significance. For thousands of years, Syria has been a place where human beings lived, loved — and created art. Bordering the Mediterranean Sea, located between Lebanon and Turkey, and a bit bigger than the American state of Pennsylvania, the independent country of Syria was established in late 1945 (after a few decades of French rule, which ended 400 years of Ottoman rule). Syria contains ancient artifacts of global significance, including 6 UNESCO World Heritage Sites that used to attract tourists from all over the world. In 2011, a series of factors ignited a sprawling civil war in Syria. Watch this video to find out more about Syria and how the war began:

2. What is a refugee? About 60 million people around the globe have been forced to leave their homes and seek refuge in other countries to escape war, violence, and persecution. Here’s what it means to be a refugee. In the past 6 years, almost 500,000 Syrians have died — and millions more men, women, and children have fled into the unknown because of the ongoing conflict in Syria. In this short film, a young Syrian named Mohammed Alsaleh describes what happened after he fled violence and imprisonment by the Assad regime. Mohammed now lives in Canada, where he counsels newly arrived refugee families. Watch this video to hear his story:

3. How leaders are responding. Countries respond to international crises in different ways, and future history books will record how world leaders responded to this ongoing crisis and other matters of global significance in 2017. Watch this video to see how countries are responding to Syria now:

4. What do you think? As a student, do you feel moved to take action about the news regarding Syria and the global refugee crisis? Why or why not? Here’s one way that an individual responded. As a young leader, do you agree with how your country has responded to the conflict in Syria, and to the needs of refugees? Why or why not? What would you do if you were in charge of your country’s response?

To learn more about the news in Syria from a variety of media perspectives, check out The Week’s ongoing coverage. To learn something new every week, sign up for the free TED-Ed Newsletter here >>

What are facts? Facts are the truthful answers to a reporter’s 5 key questions: who, what, when, where, and how. Facts may include names, numbers, dates, definitions, quotes, locations, research findings, historical events, statistics, survey and poll data, titles and authors, pronouns, financial data, institution names and spellings, and historical or biographical details attributed to anyone or anything. Facts are checkable.

What is fact-checking? Fact-checking is the process of confirming the factual accuracy of certain statements or claims, in order to create and share accurate, evidence-based media that relies on high-quality, reliable primary and secondary sources.

What kinds of facts do people often get wrong? The most frequent mistakes occur in the spellings of names and institutions, and the attribution or wording of quotes. These errors can be relatively harmless — for example, a throwaway remark about Ben Franklin. Or, they can be devastating — for example, listing the wrong person in a breaking news article about a bombing. If you’re a student, get in the habit of getting it right.

While the majority of factual errors are probably not nefarious, there are instances in which people may deliberately hide important facts or introduce inaccuracy. For journalists in these situations, three maxims are useful in finding the facts: ‘follow the money’, ‘consider the source’, and ‘who benefits?’ Remember, a reporter’s job is to find and share the facts that matter, even if people don’t like it.

Facts are only as good as their sources. There are two main types of sources: primary sources and secondary sources. Primary sources may include people, transcripts, videos, visitor logs, raw data, peer-reviewed scientific studies, recorded interviews, your own original research, and in-person observation. Secondary sources may include newspaper articles, magazine articles, and books. (Important note: unlike magazines, many books are not factchecked! If you’re using a book as a source, look for a bibliography or notes to track down an author’s sources, and then re-report if needed.)

As with all sources, watch out for inaccuracy, outdated information, and unconscious bias (for example, avoid disproven studies, or articles that talk about people ‘looting’ vs ‘finding’ and ‘rioting’ vs ‘protesting’).  Avoid spreading inaccuracy, outdated information, or unconscious bias. Instead, try to increase the world’s supply of truth by shining a light on facts that matter.

To learn more about the media, read “How to tell fake news from real news.”

Art credit: iStock

Laura McClure is an award-winning journalist and the TED-Ed Editor. To learn something new every week, sign up here for the TED-Ed Newsletter.

This is an age of epic political turbulence. From the fracturing of major political parties, to the spread of bottom-up movements like Black Lives Matter, individuals across the political spectrum are reclaiming power. The question that today’s activists have to face is: Are you ready? Do you understand power? And if you want to make change in the world, do you know how? Below, we’ll look at where power comes from, how it’s exercised, and what you can do to become more powerful in public life.

Power is no more inherently good or evil than fire or physics. It governs how any form of government works, and it determines who gets to determine the rules of the game. So, learning how power operates is key to being effective, being taken seriously, and not being taken advantage of.

Our focus is on the civic arena, where power means getting a community to make the choices and to take the actions that you want. There are 6 main sources of civic power.

First, there is physical force and a capacity for violence. Control of the means of force, whether in the police or the militia, is power at its most primal.

A second core source of power is wealth. Money creates the ability to buy results and to buy almost any other kind of power.

The third form of power is state action, or government. This is the use of law and bureaucracy to compel people to do or not do certain things. In a democracy, we the people, theoretically, give government its power through elections. In a dictatorship, state power emerges from the threat of force, not the consent of the governed.

The fourth type of power is social norms, or what other people think is okay. Norms don’t have the centralized machinery of government; they operate in a softer way — peer to peer. They can certainly make people change behavior, and even change laws. For instance, think about how norms around marriage equality today are evolving.

The fifth form of power is ideas. An idea, such as individual liberty or racial equality, can generate boundless amounts of power if it motivates enough people to change their thinking and actions.

The sixth source of power, then, is numbers — lots of humans. A vocal mass of people creates power by expressing collective intensity of interest and by asserting legitimacy. Think of the Arab Spring, or the rise of the Tea Party. Crowds count.

These are the six main sources of power. Now, let’s think about how power operates, by taking a look at the three laws of power.

Law #1: Power is never static. It’s always either accumulating or decaying in a civic arena. So if you are not taking action, you are being acted upon.

Law #2: Power is like water. It flows like a current through everyday life. Politics is the work of harnessing that flow in the direction you prefer. Policy making is a method to freeze and perpetuate a particular flow of power. Policy is power frozen.

Law #3: Power compounds. Power begets more power; and so does powerlessness. The only thing that keeps number three from leading to a situation where only one person has all the power is how we apply laws one and two.

What rules do we set up so that a few people don’t accumulate too much power, and so that they can’t enshrine their privilege in policy? That’s the question of democracy.

If you don’t like how things are in your campus, city, or country, then you have work to do. First, map out who has what kind of power, arrayed in what systems. Understand why it turned out this way, who made it so, and who wants to keep it so. Study the strategies others in such situations used. Then, learn to express yourself. Speak up in a voice that’s authentic. Organize your ideas. Last, organize other people. Practice consensus building; practice conflict. Use what you’ve learned about power to make change happen. The bottom line? You’re more powerful than you think.

Author bio: Eric Liu is the founder and CEO of Citizen University and executive director of the Aspen Institute Citizenship and American Identity Program. He is the author of several books, including “You’re More Powerful Than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen” (March 2017).

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In schools everywhere, students are deeply affected by current events. Certain policy changes and related commentary can cause children to experience fear, confusion and anxiety. For example, some kids might fear deportation. Others might be upset about hurtful generalizations they hear regarding their cultures and countries of origin. A lot of kids might fear the loss of rights.

Teachers around the world have shared that having conversations about these topics is challenging, and sometimes they end up avoiding these conversations altogether. So how might teachers facilitate a classroom discussion that allows students to express their perspectives and work through their emotional distress? It’s important to note that an emotionally charged conversation requires a different set of skills than leading an academic class discussion. Here are 10 tips for success:

1. Come up with class norms. It is hard to have a spontaneous conversation about a controversial issue. Classroom procedures for conversations and discussion can help your conversations go smoothly. At the beginning of the school year, establish guidelines for class discussions with your students’ input. What are the qualities of a good listener? How can students feel heard and understood? What happens if someone becomes overly emotional? Post the guidelines in your classroom, review them periodically, and stick to them during discussions. If you have guidelines in place, students won’t feel singled out if you have to give them feedback about their style of participation.

2. Make sure everyone has the same basic background information. Not all students are politically minded or have access to news media. Before starting a class conversation, provide a basic summary of events. Students are less likely to tune out if they understand what the conversation is about.

3. Provide explanations and clarifications. Sometimes students’ emotions are rooted in confusion, fear, and misinformation. Students look to teachers for information and clarification, so don’t forget your role as an information source. Even if you don’t have an answer, you can search for it alongside your students. If fake news seems to be at the root of the problem, empower your students to evaluate news sources. PBS has an excellent lesson plan for that here.

4. Avoid debates. There will likely be a variety of viewpoints in your classroom. Debates can be a constructive activity in the context of an organized, structured lesson. Yet when students are emotionally charged, debates can often devolve into arguments and personal attacks. Shift the focus from changing minds to exchanging ideas. Frame the conversation as an opportunity for understanding and empathy.

5. View yourself as a facilitator. If you view yourself as a facilitator, you can provide a comfortable space for students to express themselves and develop their own opinions. Your role is not to persuade students of a particular point of view. Instead, you are providing a safe, structured space for students to work through a specific topic.

6. Reflect what you hear and encourage students to do the same. Simply repeating back what you hear can be tremendously helpful. It can help students understand their emotions and thoughts about particular issues and events and it can help deescalate emotionally charged situations by showing that you have heard and understood your students. Model this technique for your students and encourage them to repeat back what they have just heard before they respond to a classmate.

7. Provide space for students to experience their feelings. If students are experiencing strong emotions, that is OK. Oftentimes, adults try to cheer kids up when they are angry or sad. This can send the message that they need to suppress their emotions so that the people around them aren’t uncomfortable. Acknowledge their emotions and encourage classmates to do the same. When students judge each other’s emotions with comments like, “You have no right to feel that way,” encourage them to recognize the emotion of their classmate instead. Remind them that people do not all have exact same experience. When you establish your classroom norms, this can be an important point to cover. Brene Brown’s video resource on empathy can help show the importance of allowing others to experience their emotions.

8. Provide time for independent reflection. Give students some time to write (or create an audio file, drawing or other product) independently so that they have a chance to process the conversation. Let students know that this isn’t a graded assignment, and that you are open to feedback about ways to improve the classroom discussion.

9. Check in with distressed students. If a student is particularly anxious or upset, check in with that student privately. If you are worried about a student, avail yourself of other resources in your building and district so that students get the support they need to function well during the school day.

10. Consider a class project related to the discussion. A class project can help build cohesion and a sense of community in your classroom. It can also show that even in the midst of controversy and disagreement, people can work together for a common goal. The project does not have to be complicated or expensive. For example, TED-Ed Innovative Educator Kristin Leong created Roll Call, a project that highlights the commonalities between students and teachers.

Author bio: Dani Bostick is a writer, teacher, and TED-Ed Innovative Educator in Virginia. 

Art credit: iStock.

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Tips on how to protect yourself.

At the American Civil Liberties Union, privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian (TED Talk: How to avoid surveillance … with the phone in your pocket) spends much of his time thinking about how individuals can protect themselves from spying. Last year, he recorded a Facebook Live conversation with his fellow TED Fellow, Will Potter (TED Talk: The secret US prisons you’ve never heard of before) — an investigative reporter who specializes in covering dissident politics and culture. Read on for their tips about how to protect your online privacy and security:

Will Potter: If I don’t have anything to hide, why should I be concerned about privacy or security, anyway?

Christopher Soghoian: I hear this all the time from people, and you know, I think many of us do have something to hide. We may not all be worried about the government, but there are things we may not want our employers or members of our families to know. We have curtains in front of our windows, we wear clothes, we get prescription medications, and we have components to our lives that we don’t reveal to everyone we know. Children may not be worried about the government, but they may not want the principal at their school to know what they’re interested in or who they’re talking to.

The concept of privacy is more nuanced than just, “do I care about my privacy or not?” It’s, “who am I worried about? Who am I trying to protect my information from?” Yes, every once in a while, you find someone who has truly no secrets, but there are plenty of other people who do have things to hide, and we shouldn’t flush privacy down the toilet because a few people are privileged enough to have nothing to worry about.

What are the top few things we should all do to protect our basic information?

There are some general tips that I would recommend for everyone. The most basic one, and the tip that is really the best bang-for-buck when it comes to privacy, is putting a sticker or a Band-Aid over your webcam on your laptop. When I first started researching privacy and surveillance, I was shocked to learn the capabilities of the many software tools that people can buy online and install surreptitiously on someone’s computer. The ease with which someone can take over your webcam, turn on the camera and have it surreptitiously collect video footage even without the light on the camera turning on is really staggering.

And while I hope that one day we will have computers that are secure enough that they can protect us from that, when you put a sticker or Band-Aid over the camera, you don’t have to worry about that any more. Now you’re not trusting the security of your operating system or the security of your computer, you’re trusting the fact that there’s something physical between the lens and you.

Would you suggest covering up the microphone as well?

Certainly there is spying software that is both commercially available and used by governments that can remotely enable the microphone either in a smartphone or in a laptop when it’s not being used. The problem with the sticker approach is that a sticker over the microphone doesn’t actually work that well. The folks I know who are truly paranoid either put hot glue in the microphone port, or they will actually open up their laptop and cut the wire. Now you know, I’m not going to recommend invasive laptop surgery for the layperson. But it’s really hard to protect the microphone on your device. There’s no easy sticker-thing you can do for the microphone.

So if you’re worried about sensitive conversations being picked up with a hacked microphone, the best thing to do is to leave that phone out of your bedroom. If you’re having a private conversation in your office, leave the phone outside. Maybe you don’t need to take that phone into the bathroom. There are places that maybe we shouldn’t have microphones.

Okay, so how likely is it that I’m actually being watched if I’m just a regular person going about my life?

The first thing you really need to think about is, who am I worried about? Depending on where you live, your socioeconomic status and your race, maybe you’re less worried about the police. But there are plenty of law-abiding African-Americans and Latino-Americans who have good reason to be worried about the police, even though they’re just regular, tax-paying, law-abiding individuals.

Then again, maybe you’re worried about your employer watching what you’re doing or what you’re saying. Maybe you’re worried about advertisers tracking you as you surf the web. You visit a page on WebMD because you’re worried about some potential disease you might have, and then two weeks later, you see a popup advertisement for a related medication. Maybe someone harassed you in the past, either in person or over the internet, and you’re now worried this person may be furthering that stalking through technology. The first question to ask is, who is out there that I’m worried about — and then what can I do to limit their access to my information?

You’ve talked about how the encryption tools that are built into certain devices are disproportionately favoring privileged populations over others. Can you explain a little bit more about what that means, and the repercussions that that has?

Sure. In a nutshell, Apple has spent a lot of time and money to build security features into mobile products such as the iPhone and the iPad. Those devices encrypt data by default, which means that if you have a password on your device and someone tries to get into it, they’re going to have a really difficult time, whether that someone is an employer, your partner or a government agency, Apple devices are really, really secure.

Separately, Apple devices automatically encrypt text messages sent by one person with an iPhone to another person with an iPhone, which means if the police are investigating you, and they go to Verizon or AT&T and they say, “hey, last week Will and Chris exchanged messages, can we get a copy of them?” AT&T or Verizon will say they don’t have them, because the messages are transmitted in a way that the phone companies cannot read them.

For Apple’s customers, this is a great thing — but Apple devices are expensive. Not everyone can afford to spend $600 on a smartphone. With its $50, $100 Android phones, Google is really killing it at the lower end of the smartphone market, and unfortunately, the security of Android is really lacking in comparison.

This isn’t just a privacy issue or a cyber-security issue. It’s really an issue of equality and racial justice, because if the poor and vulnerable in our societies are using devices that do nothing to protect them from surveillance, and the rich and powerful are using devices that make them essentially off-limits to the government, that creates a system of surveillance inequality, and further perpetuates the existing problems of inequality that we have in our society.

What advice do you have for teens and young people online today?

I’m not a teenager anymore, and I haven’t been a teenager in a while. I don’t know what it’s like to be a teenager in this modern world, but I have to imagine it’s truly terrifying. But one thing I hear over and over again when I talk to adults is this feeling that young people don’t care about privacy, and how awful that is.

And that’s actually not true, and some amazing research has been done on this by academic experts. danah boyd has a book about how teenagers use technology, and how teenagers view privacy, and her big insight is that yes, teenagers are not concerned about the FBI or the NSA, but they are concerned about their teachers, their principals and their parents. And teenagers are so good at protecting their privacy, they’re so good at hiding sensitive information from their teachers and their parents, that their adults think they’re not taking any actions at all. They’re basically hiding in plain sight.

So if you are a parent, and you’re worried that your kids are sharing more information online than you think they should be, I think you’ll be surprised at how tech-savvy and privacy-savvy many kids are. And I think the massive popularity of services like Snapchat, which delete messages after a very short period of time, demonstrates that kids inherently get the harm that comes from the long-term retention of data. We’ve all been idiotic children at one point, and some of us have done idiotic things later in our lives too. When technology captures that and saves it forever, we can be haunted by those stupid things. I think kids using services like Snapchat are super smart, because they shouldn’t be haunted for the rest of their lives because of something they say or do when they’re 16.

How heavily are social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter used for surveillance by governments and organizations?

There are two types of surveillance of social media that we should be thinking about. One is surveillance of private communications, and one is surveillance of what you might call public communications. So if you have a public Twitter profile, and anyone can follow you, there are still going to be companies and governments that want to see that information. And there are so many people tweeting every day that it’s actually difficult for these large organizations to focus on individual things.

Now Twitter has had a very difficult time making money, and one of the ways that Twitter makes money is by selling access to what’s called the firehose: they basically sell bulk access to every tweet. And then analytics companies come in, mine the tweet stream and sell data to companies and governments that want it. There are companies that say they can predict social uprisings or major, world-changing events before CNN has even reported them. A few months ago, Twitter announced they would no longer sell this data to the CIA. But the Department of Homeland Security is still a subscriber.

So that’s the public surveillance. But all of the tech companies also routinely receive demands for private user data from government agencies in the US and from abroad. To their credit, Facebook, Google, Twitter and all these big tech companies publish an annual transparency report revealing how many requests they’ve received. And I’m not blaming the companies for this. In many ways, if they have data, they’re required to turn it over to governments when those governments satisfy legal requirements. But what is clear from these transparency reports is that governments in the US and elsewhere have an enormous appetite for data.

The last thing I’ll add is that there is an extremely common practice, particularly in schools, for police officers who are posted in those schools to create fake Facebook accounts — friends, students — in order to try and learn what’s going on. They’re not submitting a court order and demanding data from Facebook; they’re tricking the students into sharing their data.

Law enforcement has been using this against political activists as well, increasingly.

For sure. And there are a number of Black Lives Matter activists, Tea Party groups and others who are worried they are being surveilled. It’s really hard when you’re organizing a social movement that anyone can join. How do you know if the person who’s seeking to join is truly an interested individual who wants to change the world, or an undercover law enforcement agent?

Right — how do you be inclusive, while also being safe? So is there any kind of software that might be useful in tackling or detecting unwanted surveillance?

One of the most interesting things for me is that the best practices for security that are followed by experts are so different from the best practices followed by laypeople. So none of the experts that I know, myself included, use antivirus software. We think of antivirus software, essentially, as a scam that’s designed to take money from consumers who don’t know any better. Whereas if you ask the average person what they should do to protect themselves from viruses, the first thing they’ll say is, “antivirus.”

Ask a regular person what kind of password they should have and the layperson would say they’re supposed to have uppercase and lowercase and numbers and special symbols. The expert says you should have a bunch of words, they can all be lowercase. Have a password that’s three or four words long, and the words should have nothing to do with each other. It shouldn’t be lyrics from a song, but it should be easy to type and easy to remember.

We never hear that! A lot of websites now will prompt you and say you have to have X number of numbers and characters and whatever.

And that’s super infuriating. And, you know, we live in a world now where it seems like there are data breaches every week. So if you are using the same password to access multiple websites, it’s only a matter of time before one of your passwords gets hacked. And there’s no way for a human being to remember 50 different unique passwords; our brains don’t work that way.

So I recommend the use of tools like password managers where you install the tool and then it creates random, long passwords for every website you visit. It enters them automatically into the sites you visit, so you don’t have to remember any of that stuff, you just need the one passphrase for the password manager. There are several out there: LastPass, 1Password, KeePass. I don’t really care which one you use, but use one of them.

Okay. So if you don’t do any of this, and then something happens and you get hacked or lose your information, what steps should you take?

It’s really hard to recover after a hack. In the US and in many other countries, laws are really built around data breaches in which financial information is stolen. So you can put a fraud alert on your credit file. You can ask your banks to send you new credit card numbers, and in many cases the banks will know if your card is hacked before you will. But that, in many ways, is a system that is built around the kinds of hacks that we had two or three years ago, where it was just financial information that was being stolen.

Today, you have forums like Ashley Madison, a dating website for people who are engaging in nontraditional relationships, in many cases outside of marriage. Or there are websites for people with some kind of sensitive medical condition. You can get a new credit card number, you can even get a new Social Security number, but you cannot establish an entirely new life, and if the first Google result for your name is that sensitive medical result from a test that got hacked, you’re toast. If you have photographs of yourself without clothing that are hacked and put online, and the first Google result for your name is a nude photo of you, that’s going to haunt you for the rest of your life. Every future job interview, your employer’s going to type your name in and see this information.

We don’t really have a way to deal with breaches of non-financial information, and in many ways, the financial ones are the easiest to deal with — it’s a pain in the butt, you get some new cards. But in all countries around the world it seems like hospitals are moving towards electronic health records, and it’s terrifying. I’ve been in the situation where I’m filling out an intake form at the doctor and I’m wondering how much of my medical history I actually want to disclose. Normally, I want my doctor to know everything possible so they can help me, but now I’m asking myself what exactly I want to tell this doctor, because I’m worried that at some point down the line this doctor might get hacked, and all my stuff will be online.

It sounds like fundamentally we need better education about privacy, technology, and how to be smart from the start.

In the same way that it would be great if we taught financial literacy to young people in schools, I think it would be great if we taught digital security and privacy. I think kids do figure out privacy, but they don’t always get all the details right, and I think the threats that are out there are so real that everyone would be helped by learning a little bit more about privacy and security.

Would we be safer if we used open-source software like Linux or Mozilla?

Open-source software is not always more secure. There’s this idea that the more people who can look at software, the easier it is to find the bugs — and that hasn’t actually shown to be true. Flaws can hide in plain sight for long periods of time. In many cases, what affects the quality of the software, what affects the security of a tool, is more about how many people are working on it. If you have one tool made by a volunteer, it may be less secure than a tool made by 50 people who were getting paid to do it full time. So while the Firefox browser is probably more privacy-preserving, it is actually less secure than Chrome.

It’s unfortunate that we have to choose between which browser is more secure and which browser is more private, that we cannot have one that does both. I mean, Google is the largest advertising company in the world. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that the web browser given away for free by the largest advertising company in the world is not going to protect you from other advertising companies, or companies including Google, online. Chrome facilitates that mass delivery of your personal data to every advertiser when you browse the web. You leave a trail of data behind you when you browse with Chrome. At the same time, the Chrome team does a great job of keeping you secure from hackers. And so you sort of have to pick your poison: are you more worried about being hacked, or are you more worried about online advertisers tracking what you’re doing online?

When you set your security settings on Facebook or on social media to allow only certain people to see what you’ve posted, is that stuff still being recorded or monitored or open to surveillance, despite you trying to stop it from blasting out to the world?

Privacy settings really only control the distribution of information through the platform. The privacy settings do not stop Facebook’s ability to collect and retain data, and they don’t stop Facebook’s ability to turn over your data to the government if the government asks for it. Separately, I think many people think that Facebook is only watching what they’re doing when they’re on Facebook. That is a huge misconception. Everywhere you see a Like button on the internet, Facebook is watching you. Think of the Like button, in many ways, as a pair of eyes. [Editor’s note: At this point in the Facebook Live conversation, all “likes” stopped cold … before starting up again about ten seconds later.]

Newspapers and blogs have Like buttons so that you can like an article. What that means is that Facebook has this view of what you’re doing online. They know which articles you’re reading, they know which videos you’re watching, they know which content you’re looking at. And so they can pool this information, and then monetize it and use it to deliver ads to people that the company thinks are more relevant. But what that also means is that Facebook has truly unparalleled access to information about the kinds of people we are, what makes us tick, what makes us happy, what makes us sad. That’s information that they leverage for advertising purposes. It’s also information that governments or divorce lawyers could come and ask for really at any moment.

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“If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” said Frederick Douglass in 1857. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.” [Read the full text of this 1857 speech here, and explore books by Frederick Douglass here.] To learn more about US history, watch these 5 TED-Ed Lessons about American power, politics and protests:

1. How to understand power

Every day, we move and operate within systems of power that other people have constructed. But we’re often uncomfortable talking about power. Why? Eric Liu describes the six sources of power and explains how understanding them is key to being an effective citizen. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

2. How is power divided in the United States government?

Articles I-III of the United States Constitution allow for three separate branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial), along with a system of checks and balances should any branch get too powerful. Belinda Stutzman breaks down each branch and its constitutionally entitled powers. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

3. What you might not know about the Declaration of Independence

In June 1776, a little over a year after the start of the American Revolutionary War, the US Continental Congress huddled together in a hot room in Philadelphia to talk independence. Kenneth C. Davis dives into some of the lesser known facts about the process of writing the Declaration of Independence and questions one very controversial omission. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

4. History vs. Andrew Jackson

Andrew Jackson was both beloved and loathed during his presidency. In this imaginary courtroom, you get to be the jury, considering and weighing Jackson’s part in the spoils system, economic depression, and the Indian Removal Act, as well as his patriotism and the pressures of the presidency. James Fester explores how time shapes our relationship to controversial historical figures. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

5. How to turn protest into powerful change

We live in an age of protest. On campuses, in public squares, on streets and social media, protestors around the world are challenging the status quo. But while protest is often necessary, is it sufficient? Eric Liu outlines three strategies for peacefully turning awareness into action and protest into durable political power. Watch this TED-Ed Lesson below.

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How do you get what you want, using just your words? Aristotle set out to answer exactly that question over 2,000 years ago with a treatise on rhetoric. Below, Camille A. Langston describes the fundamentals of deliberative rhetoric and shares some tips for appealing to an audience’s ethos, logos, and pathos in your next speech.

Rhetoric, according to Aristotle, is the art of seeing the available means of persuasion. Today we apply it to any form of communication. Aristotle focused on oration, though, and he described three types of persuasive speech. Forensic, or judicial, rhetoric establishes facts and judgments about the past, similar to detectives at a crime scene.

Epideictic, or demonstrative, rhetoric makes a proclamation about the present situation, as in wedding speeches.

But the way to accomplish change is through deliberative rhetoric, or symbouleutikon. Rather than the past or the present, deliberative rhetoric focuses on the future. It’s the rhetoric of politicians debating a new law by imagining what effect it might have, and it’s also the rhetoric of activists urging change. In both cases, the speakers present their audience with a possible future and try to enlist their help in avoiding or achieving it.

But what makes for good deliberative rhetoric, besides the future tense?According to Aristotle, there are three persuasive appeals: ethos, logos and pathos. Ethos is how you convince an audience of your credibility. Logos is the use of logic and reason. This method can employ rhetorical devices such as analogies, examples, and citations of research or statistics. But it’s not just facts and figures. It’s also the structure and content of the speech itself. The point is to use factual knowledge to convince the audience — but, unfortunately, speakers can also manipulate people with false information that the audience thinks is true. And finally, pathos appeals to emotion, and in our age of mass media, it’s often the most effective mode. Pathos is neither inherently good nor bad, but it may be irrational and unpredictable. It can just as easily rally people for peace as incite them to war. Most advertising, from beauty products that promise to relieve our physical insecurities to cars that make us feel powerful, relies on pathos.

Aristotle’s rhetorical appeals still remain powerful tools today, but deciding which of them to use is a matter of knowing your audience and purpose, as well as the right place and time. And perhaps just as important is being able to notice when these same methods of persuasion are being used on you. Below, watch the TED-Ed Lesson:

Animation by TOGETHER/TED-Ed

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In November 2016, Stanford University researchers made an alarming discovery: across the US, many students can’t tell the difference between a reported news article, a persuasive opinion piece, and a corporate ad. This lack of media literacy makes young people vulnerable to getting duped by “fake news” — which can have real consequences.

Want to strengthen your own ability to tell real news from fake news? Start by asking these five questions of any news item:

Who wrote it? Real news contains the real byline of a real journalist dedicated to the truth. Fake news (including “sponsored content” and traditional corporate ads) does not. Once you find the byline, look at the writer’s bio. This can help you identify whether the item you’re reading is a reported news article (written by a journalist with the intent to inform), a persuasive opinion piece (written by an industry expert with a point of view), or something else entirely.

What claims does it make? Real news — like these Pulitzer Prize winning articles — will include multiple primary sources when discussing a controversial claim. Fake news may include fake sources, false urls, and/or “alternative facts” that can be disproven through further research. When in doubt, dig deeper. Facts can be verified.

When was it published? Look at the publication date. If it’s breaking news, be extra careful. Use this tipsheet to decode breaking news.

Where was it published? Real news is published by trustworthy media outlets with a strong factchecking record, such as the BBC, NPR, ProPublica, Mother Jones, and Wired. (To learn more about any media outlet, look at their About page and examine their published body of work.) If you get your news primarily via social media, try to verify that the information is accurate before you share it. (On Twitter, for example, you might look for the blue “verified” checkmark next to a media outlet name to doublecheck a publication source before sharing a link.)

How does it make you feel? Fake news, like all propaganda, is designed to make you feel strong emotions. So if you read a news item that makes you feel super angry, pause and take a deep breath. Then, doublecheck the item’s claims by comparing it to the news on any three of the media outlets listed above — and decide for yourself if the item is real news or fake news. Bottom line: Don’t believe everything you read. There is no substitute for critical thinking.

If you get in the habit of asking all 5 of these questions whenever you read a news article, then your basic news literacy skills will start to grow stronger. However, these are just the basics! To dive deeper into news and media literacy, watch the TED-Ed Lesson: How to choose your news. To find out more about what students need, read the Stanford University report, published here.

Laura McClure is an award-winning journalist and the TED-Ed Editor. To learn something new every week, sign up here for the TED-Ed Newsletter.