Week 6 Exercises — Six Reps in Digital Discernment

Reading about verification builds nothing. The reflex is a muscle, and these six reps are the gym — roughly 30–45 minutes total. Do them with your actual feed, not a hypothetical one, because the whole point is to catch yourself mid-scroll. Keep your work in one file (a note, a doc, whatever you’ll use for Project 6); some of it becomes raw material for the Discernment Audit.

One ground rule carried from Week 1: any rep where you use an AI assistant ends with a one-line AI usage note — what you asked, what it got wrong, and what you verified yourself. The human owns the verdict.

Rep 1 — Run the 30-second check on a real post

Open one of your own feeds and find a shareable faith-related claim — a quote graphic, a “did you know” fact, a shocking news card. Run the three questions on it: who actually said this, where’s the original, who else reports it. Produce a small “verification card”: the claim in one line, your answer to each of the three questions, and your verdict — Share / Check first / Don’t share.

Rep 2 — Hunt a quote to its home

Pick a quote attributed to a well-known Christian (Lewis, Bonhoeffer, Augustine — the meme favorites) that you’ve seen circulating. Copy a distinctive phrase, paste it into a search engine inside quotation marks, and try to find its real home — a book with a page, a sermon, a letter. Produce a one-line verdict: real (with the source) or misattributed / unfindable (only meme graphics). Note how many clicks it took to know.

Rep 3 — Catch your AI inventing a citation

Ask any free AI assistant for three Bible verses about a topic you choose (say, honesty or discernment) and one quotation from an early church father. Now verify all four against real sources — open an actual Bible for the verses, search for the quote. Produce a four-row list marking each verified or wrong/unfindable. End with your AI usage note. (If it got all four right this time, say so — and remember it won’t always.)

Rep 4 — Reverse-image a shocking photo

Find one image being used to prove a point — an “ancient artifact,” a protest sign, a dramatic scene. Drop it into a free reverse-image search (right-click → “search image” in most browsers). Write 2–3 sentences: where the image actually comes from, whether the caption matches, and whether it changes your read of the post.

Rep 5 — Draft a gracious retraction

Imagine you shared something last week that turned out to be fake, and a skeptical acquaintance called it out publicly. Write the 3–4 sentence correction you would actually post: name what was wrong, thank the person, and — in one line — say why truth-telling matters to you as a Christian. No defensiveness, no “but the point still stands.” This becomes a template you’ll be glad to have ready.

Rep 6 — Reply, DM, or scroll?

Write down three real (or realistic) comment-thread situations you might face this month — a false claim spreading to onlookers, a friend you actually know posting something wrong, an angry stranger fishing for a fight. For each, decide: reply publicly, take it private, or let it go — and give one sentence of reasoning tied to Proverbs 26:4–5. The skill being graded is discernment, not a rule.

Check yourself

A good set of reps this week looks like:

• Your Rep 1 card answers all three questions with specifics, not a gut feeling — and you can defend the verdict.
• In Rep 2 you can state plainly whether the quote is real and where it lives, or that it only exists on meme graphics.
• Rep 3 shows you actually opened a real Bible and a real source — and your AI usage note is honest about anything the assistant got wrong.
• Rep 4 traces the image to a genuine origin, not just “looks fine to me.”
• Your Rep 5 retraction owns the error without a single word of self-defense.
• Rep 6 shows you can name why each situation calls for its move — you’re reading the situation, not applying one blanket rule.

If those hold, you’re ready for Project 6 — The Discernment Audit — where you’ll run five real claims all the way to a verdict and write the honest reflection.