Consider these scenarios: An influential political commentator posts a reel on social media, cherry-picking facts to manipulate a situation for political gain. His post gets no likes, no shares, and no angry emojis from users.
A scammy online ad using a celebrity’s image pops up on people’s social media feeds. Nobody clicks on it.
A wellness influencer shares disproven health advice and is entirely ignored. And a deepfake artificial intelligence (AI) video is downgraded by the algorithm because nobody believes it.
Instead, people are fact-checking before sharing or commenting. They’re consulting experts and scrolling beyond the AI summary at the top to seek out reliable information sources that abide by the standards of accuracy, independence and ethics.
These situations may seem laughable in our algorithm- and AI-driven online world where emotion is key to engagement.
But they are, in fact, the simple practical outcomes of a media literate society. And our report on a newly developed media literacy course shows there’s a cheap and effective solution to the scourge of misinformation at the heart of our overwhelming, and often polarised, online environment.
Misinformation is a global risk
We live in a world where anyone with an internet connection can publish instantly to the world – with few guardrails for accuracy or ethics.
Misinformation has been ranked first or second in the top short-term global risks by the World Economic Forum for three years running. Misinformation is often at the heart of fear campaigns and hate speech that can help fuel extremism and polarisation. It erodes trust in governments and institutions. It’s a public health hazard and a threat to public order and disaster management.
And now it’s being supercharged by low-effort generative AI. These tools spit out plausible and convincing content, but can also be wildly inaccurate and biased. As such, Australians are deeply concerned about misinformation. More so than many of their counterparts around the world.
Children have for many years been the focus of media literacy programs and research, such as Civic Online Reasoning in the US. Meanwhile adults – particularly those who were raised in the pre-internet era of landlines and snail mail – have been left floundering.
Educating adults is now an urgent priority. We found just 60 minutes of media literacy training makes a measurable difference to people’s ability to apply critical thinking skills to deal with misinformation.
A spoonful of adult education
To find solutions through media literacy, we focused on older people (aged 55+) who are known to be more vulnerable to misinformation, have fewer media skills, and feel less confident in their media abilities. We recruited our study participants from across Australia through libraries, the news media, and social media.
Through a simple short course delivered online and in person, we taught 79 participants how to:
- identify misinformation
- fact-check and verify
- find reliable sources, and
- be self-aware while navigating the online world.
The media literacy levels of the participants grew by 23% on average, regardless of their background and political beliefs. Their ability to determine the reliability of information improved especially – by 27% – as did confidence in their ability to critically navigate the online world (by 32%).
Importantly, our course – the first known empirically validated resource of its kind targeted at older Australians – helped people who are socially excluded the most.
We tested participants’ media literacy before the short course, immediately after, and three months later. Older, regional, less educated, and culturally and linguistically diverse groups maintained their gains for longer.
But our research also confirmed what others before us have fretted over: media literacy training is not a one-off. Overall, advances from education diminished over time among our study participants, although scores remained 11% higher on average than pre-course levels even after three months.
This suggests media literacy programs must be embedded in people’s everyday lives as a life-long learning process. It would help us keep pace with new platforms, digital systems and social trends.
Where to next?
The outcomes from the short course led to the development of the Stay Smart Online program, a toolkit to provide a simple and flexible way of teaching media literacy.
We conducted a pilot using an adapted version of the short course with libraries and their patrons throughout Australia with impressive results: 97% of patrons said they would recommend the course to a friend.
Libraries are ideal institutions to deliver this training to the public, especially older Australians. Among library staff nationally 99% see media literacy as essential work, but just 10% feel adequately equipped to support that mission.
What sets our research apart from many other misinformation and media literacy interventions (and is, perhaps, among the reasons for its success), is that it incorporates through the course materials the concept of intellectual humility.
Put simply, this is the acceptance that each person’s knowledge is limited, that we may be wrong, and we are open to revising our views based on evidence. As the term suggests, it’s a humbling notion. However, as we’ve found, it’s essential to media literacy.
In order to embrace evidence-based facts, we need first to acknowledge how our life experiences, upbringing, education, friends and family, community, language and culture have shaped our worldview. All of these influence how we approach and process information and media.
Being conscious of our own inherent biases helps us apply the critical thinking skills we need to build resilience to misinformation.
- This article first appeared on The Conversation
