During the early presidential debates in 2015, a tweet about then-candidate Donald Trump went viral. It read simply "DonaldTrump is like if a Comments Section ran for office." Here, "The Comments Section" is a synecdoche for social media, i.e., the place where our students are receiving much of their informal education about politics, culture, and society. It is also a place full of Ad Hominens, Post Hocs, Slippery Slopes, Straw Men, False Dichotomies and a menagerie of other poorly conceived rhetorical devices. As social media become the way we receive most of our news, some of the work that was traditionally done by broadcast media, like editing and fact-checking, must now be done by the information consumer. In the University of Iowa Libraries' course, Being Responsible Online (BRO), we teach students to be good information consumers by demonstrating various methods to evaluate online information. This year we introduced a new module in which we asked students to do a "Logical Fallacy Show-and-Tell" where they brought in examples of specific logical fallacies that they found from their own social media use. The results were mixed. Some students succeeded while others made logical fallacies while attempting to identify the fallacies of others. The latter case provided teachable moments in which we could illuminate the illogical argumentation habits of our students and help them do the difficult work of information consumption in the age of The Comments Section.
