Empathy can be a powerful tool for action. Just look at how students across the nation mobilized to support the victims of the Parkland school shooting. But waiting for something drastic and tragic to happen is not the way we want to build empathy in our young people. So how can we use historical empathy—or “the process of understanding people in the past by contextualizing their actions”—to help them engage with history and process their own roles in the world today?

Facebook’s recent admission that social media can have a negative influence on democracy is the most overt acknowledgment to date that the spread of fake news could have impacted the 2016 US presidential election. The recent surge of misinformation on social media for political gain is a call to action for educators to take a closer look at fake news as propaganda. But when does fake news cross that line?