A new program in Italian high schools will aim to teach students how to identify fake news.

According to The New York Times, the program will occur in 8,000 high schools throughout Italy starting Oct. 31.

"Fake news drips drops of poison into our daily web diet and we end up infected without even realizing it," Laura Boldrini, the president of the Italian lower house of Parliament, told the Times.

"It's only right to give these kids the possibility to defend themselves from lies."

Boldrini is leading the program and said Google and Facebook are participating in it. Part of the instruction given to students will involve identifying parody urls for websites and verifying sources of news they read through research.

The topic of fake news has dominated the headlines for several months after the U.S. intelligence community said Russia tried to influence last year's presidential election through computer hacks and the spreading of fake news on websites and social media networks.

This week, for example, it was reported that Russia's Internet Research Agency created a fake Twitter account that claimed to represent the Tennessee Republican Party. The account eventually gained at least 136,000 followers before Twitter took it down in August.

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