media literacy for adults: misinformation and disinformation

http://www.youthmediareporter.org/2010/02/15/using-media-literacy-to-combat-racism/, Pew Research Center. Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center. For older adults in particular, given their documented struggles with digital literacy skills, it may be difficult to successfully confer new skills and techniques, particularly in a short period of time. Sept. 8, 2022 Between lessons about the Revolutionary War and the functions of Congress, juniors in several history and U.S. government classes at Palmer High School in Colorado Springs are taught. She is the Vice Chair of Education of the Department of Emergency Medicine and holds a master's degree in Adult Education and Life-long Learning. The sample included demographic and regional quotas based on the 2019 U.S. census. volume12, Articlenumber:6008 (2022) Understanding whether interventions improve peoples ability to engage in discriminant trust of news or instead cause them to become more suspicious of news overall, making them more accurate at judging the veracity of false news but less accurate at judging true news, is important. Watch on Summary Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, online researchers say disinformation about abortion has flooded websites and social media, and some of that disinformation is. Disinformation can refer to false or inaccurate information or news that is intentionally spread to mislead the audience while misinformation is false or inaccurate information or news that is spread but not necessarily with the intention to harm. Relative to other digital literacy training resources, MediaWise for Seniors was designed specifically for older adultsthe training progressed at a slower pace, employed trusted instructors that would be familiar to the population (e.g., Joan Lunden, Christiane Amanpour), and focused heavily on Facebook since older adults are significantly more likely to use Facebook than other social media platforms and are currently Facebooks fastest growing user group14. This figure was made using Stata38. Stanford, U of Wash. faculty fought disinformation, got sued In addition to their performance on the headline classification task, we examine whether those who participate in MediaWise for Seniors report greater understanding or use of skills and techniques important for identifying misinformation online after the course compared to before. Inside Higher Ed. Exposure to untrustworthy websites in the 2016 US election. Many Adults Did Not Learn Media Literacy Skills in High School. What Lately, I've been attending a series of webinars on Information Literacy and the most recent was Media Literacy for Adults: Misinformation and Disinformation, presented by Nicole Cook, Associate Professor at the University of South Carolina. By providing people with examples of information online that turned out to be false and by priming them to think more critically about the veracity of online information, they may become more suspicious of the media they encounter online after the intervention. For example, experimentally priming people to be suspicious of message senders decreased the extent to which they rated messages from those senders to be true21,22. Psychol. A 5-minute game that helps protect you against COVID-19 misinformation. Moreover, disinformation purveyors increasingly use fake outlets (Alba & Nicas, 2020) and fake local hashtags (Starbird et al., 2019) to replace real, local journalism that is disappearing from communities, particularly those with less affluence (Abernathy, 2020). Less science-literate nonwhite respondents who approve of taking risks to protest for racial justice may be motivated by sources and issues they deem credible regarding political advocacy, while more science-literate individuals also factor in the safety risks of this action into their decision-making. We recognize that this is a limitation of research estimating the prevalence of true and false news in individuals media diets, which often relies on lists or databases of fact-checked or verified false news1,2,3,27. Science audiences, misinformation, and fake news | PNAS 89, 485500 (2019). Progressive group combats disinformation campaigns aimed at Latino voters. PDF Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and This article takes an international perspective on adult learning and disinformation, exploring how they have recast the global landscape. Coronavirus myths explored. This essay was published as part of a Special Issue on Disinformation in the 2020 Elections, guest-edited by Dr. Ann Crigler (Professor of Political Science, USC) and Dr. Marion R. Just (Professor Emerita of Political Science, Wellesley College). "Fake news" is inadequate to capture the complex problem of disinformation. After providing veracity judgments for the headlines in each survey, respondents were asked if they did any research online to inform their judgment of the veracity of each headline (yes/no). Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) advice for the public:Mythbusters. AARP. Theres no such thing as the Latino vote. 2020 results reveal a complex electorate. the much accelerated rate at which misinformation, disinformation, . analyzed the data, wrote the first draft of the main text and supplementary materials, and constructed the figures and tables. An analysis of government communication in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic: Recommendations for effective government health risk communication. Exploring the role of visual content in fake news detection. If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate. As a consequence, in deception detection tasks in which people are asked to judge the veracity of messages as true or false, a pattern of results persists across nearly all published studies in which people are more accurate at judging the veracity of true messages than false messages, simply because they are more likely in general to interpret messages as true. Tiffany Hsu covers misinformation and Sapna Maheshwari covers TikTok. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that those who took MediaWise for Seniors showed significantly greater understanding and use of skills and techniques important for identifying misinformation online after the course compared to before. Media Literacy Education in Libraries for Adult Audiences is made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services grant LG-13-19-0089-19. (2021). We adopted Hargittai and Hsiehs widely-used measure of internet skills to measure respondents level of skill for these techniques and concepts35, in which individuals are asked to rate their understanding of internet-related terms (e.g., firewall) from 1 (no understanding) to 5 (full understanding). Misinformation, Disinformation, Malinformation: What's the difference? Individuals took one post-intervention survey, immediately following their completion of the intervention. Polit. Mis & Disinformation - Media Literacy - LibGuides at Ithaca College That uplifting tweet you just shared? In this study, the use of a control group alleviates this concern. 2018). https://criticalmediaproject.org/why-identity-matters/, DiResta, R., Shaffer, K., Ruppel, B., Sullivan, D., Matney, R., Fox, R., Albright, A., Johnson, B. StataCorp. Relatedly, our results indicate that, at baseline, individuals were more likely to accurately detect false news rather than true news (see Fig. AARP. (2020b, November 23). Soc. Marcos says Filipinos 'suffer' from disinformation, to launch media Battling disinformation on the front lines of the pandemic: Physicians The New York Times. 18, 881890 (2019). demonstrates the utility of examining the durability of misinformation interventions, as their intervention initially appeared to decrease trust in true news but that decrease did not persist 1week later, in which an outcome much closer to discriminant trust was present. This article takes an international perspective on adult learning and disinformation, exploring how they have recast the global landscape. CFAs and Cronbachs alpha confirmed reliability for summed scores of measures for Media Literacy for Source (=.90) and for Content (=.88) of News (Austin et al., 2016); science media literacy (=.69); and COVID-19 disinformation beliefs (=.82), updated from previous research on disinformation (e.g., Bode & Vraga, 2018), to reflect COVID-19 disinformation messages in early 2020 that had gone viral (Brennen et al., 2020; Johns Hopkins Medicine, 2020; Medical News Today, 2020). In Disinformation, Misinformation, and Fake News in Social Media: Emerging Research Challenges and Opportunities (eds Shu, K. et al.) https://www.stradaeducation.org/publicviewpoint/, Sui, M., & Paul, N. (2017). Indeed, recent evidence from a large-scale digital media literacy intervention in India (not focused specifically on older adults) supports this possibility17. The survey included an informed consent procedure that had to be completed prior to answering survey questions. The New York Times (2020). Hispanic/Latinx respondents who indicated additional ethnicities were coded by Qualtrics as Hispanic/Latinx unless Native American. Psychol. IEEE Consum. A digital media literacy intervention could have a similar effect by making people more suspicious of news overall. This study examined how media literacy skills may help reduce effects of disinformation campaigns, such as those occurring during the COVID-19 pandemic, to the extent they 1) contribute to rejecting disinformation and 2) contribute to political engagement for reducing opportunity gaps. Indeed, this may help explain the difference between the 36% increase pre to post intervention in our studys treatment groups ability to detect true news and the 7% increase in their ability to detect false news. Chapter Consistent with our pre-registered hypothesis, older adults (Mage=67) in the treatment condition (N=143) significantly improved their likelihood ofaccurately discerning fake from true news from 64% pre-intervention to 85%post-intervention. This study explored how media literacy might help protect individuals, particularly people of color, from believing COVID-19 disinformation and how it might promote political engagement. This is different from believing misinformation, which is innocently spread, inaccurate information that can result from confusing or incomplete information sharing. Canaries in the coal mine: COVID-19 misinformation and black communities. Go Viral! Nicole A. Cooke is the Augusta Baker Endowed Chair and an associate professor at the School of Library and Information Science, at the University of South Carolina. Mass Commun. COVID-19 knowledge items included common misperceptions that might be linked to confusion, evolving information, and mixed messages rather than to deliberately spread COVID-19 disinformation. Media literacy often is defined as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create media in a variety of forms (National Association for Media Literacy Education, 2007). To obtain Article Wilkerson, I. Individuals rated their own skill level on each skill from 1 to 5 where a rating of 1 represents no understanding of that skill and a rating of 5 represents full understanding. https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/400941-intentionally-deceiving-voters-should-be-a-crime, National Association for Media Literacy Education. Kahne, J. This problem for communities of color is not new, although it worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic. through Media and Information Literacy (MIL) 70 by Magda Abu-Fadil Synopsis 70 Outline 71 Module Aims 76 Learning Outcomes 76 Module Format 76 Suggested Assignment 79 . Access Inf. All 12 headlines were taken from articles or posts fact-checked by professional fact-checking organization Snopes. As older adults increasingly adopt social media and make use of modern communication technologies to consume news, it will be important to ensure that they have the skills necessary to sort true from false content and protect themselves from misinformation. Media Literacy/Countering Disinformation - American Spaces LibGuides: Media Literacy & Misinformation: Getting Started Interventions for older adults have emerged to improve digital literacy, although there has been little evaluation of their effectiveness in improving older adults resilience to fake news. Media literacy skills appear important for empowering and informing communities of color. Not all skepticism is "healthy" skepticism: Theorizing accuracy- and To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Monogr. Roozenbeek, J., Maertens, R., McClanahan, W. & van der Linden, S. Disentangling item and testing effects in inoculation research on online misinformation: Solomon revisited. In other words, because few states require and assess media literacy instruction in formal education, an unequal presence of community-based voices promoting critical thinking about media and circulating information could help explain equity gaps in media literacy (Media Literacy Now, 2020). Cao, J. et al. (2020, May 18). https://www.npr.org/2020/02/26/809224742/with-an-election-on-the-horizon-older-adults-get-help-spotting-fake-news (2020). This tendency is referred to as the truth bias. Gender, race, and media representation. Basol, M. et al. Psychol. Overview Digital media literacy (also known as online critical thinking skills) is vital to the safety, security, health, and well-being of individuals and communities. Native American respondents with other ethnicities were coded as Native American. International perspectives on media disinformation: Critical media In particular, we address former president Trump's naming of certain Caribbean and African nations as "shithole countries," as well as other related experiences, and work to locate these comments within a neocolonial, racist epistemewhat we term the . Behav. Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media, School of Media and Journalism, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As can be seen in Table S2, we obtained a positive and significant interaction between the Intervention Group and Post-intervention variables in both the models for true headlines (Model 2; B=1.570, SE=0.265, p<0.001) and false headlines (Model 3; B=0.580, SE=0.120, p<0.01). This pattern provides support for our hypothesis. In 2019, U.S. Nonwhite respondents likely to approve of taking risks to protest for racial justice tended to be younger, more educated, and less science media literate but more media literate for sources. These disinformation campaigns often promote election boycotts, attack mainstream candidates and promote third-party candidates. Spot the Bot https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/19/media/reliable-sources-covid-research/index.html (2021). conceived the project and designed and implemented the study. Ideally, future work should carefully curate other interventions which vary some intervention features (e.g., what tips and techniques are taught) while holding others constant (e.g., population tailoring, duration, multimodality) to best learn about what features of the intervention make it most effective. Social Engineering And The Disinformation Threat In Cybersecurity - Forbes and J.H. Furthermore, previous work has shown that older adults often feel skeptical of new technologies or perceive that theyll be difficult to use18,19. A representative, national survey (N=1264) of adults conducted June-July 2020 found that nonwhite respondents tended to report less COVID-19 knowledge, media literacy, and voting intent than white respondents, but more acceptance of COVID-19 disinformation and for risks associated with protesting for social justice. Allen, J., Howland, B., Mobius, M., Rothschild, D. & Watts, D. J. Scholars have postulated that older adults limited digital literacy may explain their heightened susceptibility to fake news online4. 58 https://www.edelman.com/trust/2021-trust-barometer (2021). Of primary interest in our surveys was a deception detection task for news headlines. One possibility that may explain our promising results is that individuals in our treatment group, who self-selected into participating in MediaWise for Seniors and electing to take our surveys, may have had a greater motivation to improve their digital literacy relative to other older adults who would not elect to participate in such an intervention. COVID-19 Misinformation Online and Health Literacy: A Brief Overview Because knowledge and science media literacy were based on what individuals believed to be true, the variable was coded to represent knowledge or a lack of knowledge. The total score represented the number of correct responses to the questions. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The authors do not have any potential conflicts of interest. Poynter. This global deficit in digital media literacy has been identified as a critical factor explaining widespread belief in online misinformation, leading to changes in education policy and the design of technology platforms. Neutral ratings of 4 were excluded from analysis36. View other webinars in this series and download the practitioner's guide. 53 No. She suggests we start using the termsmisinformation and disinformation rather than fake news. Several factors likely contribute to this pattern. Predicted values of skill levels and probability of researching headlines. A lack of effective gatekeeping means that information consumers must determine what sources and content to believe (Bergstrom & West, 2020; Linvill & Warren, 2019; Starbird, Arif & Wilson, 2019). 1, True Headlines) and from a post-intervention probability of accurately judging the veracity of a false headline of 75% [95% CI 7079%] to a post-intervention probability of 82% [95% CI 7886%] (Fig. Intervening in the medias influence on stereotypes of race and ethnicity: The role of media literacy education. national survey of U.S. adults, performed during the height of the pandemic and . Misinformation was defined as false or inaccurate information deliberately intended to deceive, while disinformation also included misleading or biased information, manipulated narratives or facts, and propaganda. First, we examine our pre-registered hypothesis: participants in the MediaWise for Seniors intervention will classify news headlines as true or false more accurately after the course compared to before (data and code to reproduce results available upon request). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the. To what extent will the ways media literacy associates with political behavior beliefs, COVID-19 knowledge, and COVID-19 disinformation beliefs differ for nonwhite respondents as compared to associations for white respondents? By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines. Education Dive. https://lawyerscommittee.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/DeceptivePracticesReportJuly2012FINALpdf.pdf, Critical Media Project. Finally, our study does not provide much information about the durability of the effects of participation in MediaWise for Seniors. Disinformation campaigns prey on peoples uncertainty and emotional responses (Bergstrom & West, 2020; Linvill & Warren, 2019), but media literacy interventions can reduce disinformations impact by strengthening critical thinking about sources and message content (Austin, Pinkleton & Funabiki, 2007; Austin, Muldrow & Austin, 2016; Austin, Austin, French, & Cohen, 2018). Strengthen Media Literacy to Win the Fight Against Misinformation https://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2018/nsb20181/report/sections/science-and-technology-public-attitudes-and-understanding/public-knowledge-about-s-t, News Literacy Project. (2020). Psychol. Given the avalanche of COVID-19 disinformation circulating during 2020, this study also included media literacy measures specific to science- and health-related information. (2020a, September 23). It is poss that [Tweet]. Demographics represent institutional opportunities and barriers, and long-standing discriminatory policies require sustained advocacy to remedy (Wilkerson, 2020; Rothstein, 2017). It could be someone posting "2 + 2 = 5"; it is false but has no clear intent to harm any person or group. Media Literacy & Misinformation: Getting Started - Monmouth University Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. With these digital challenges in mind, organizations have begun developing digital literacy training programs for older adults to aid them in sorting fact from fiction online, although to date there has been little formal evaluation of such interventions. Her latest books are Information Services to Diverse Populations (Libraries Unlimited, 2016) and Fake News and Alternative Facts: Information Literacy in a Post-truth Era" (ALA Editions. Some young adults share. As of late, many people, including library patrons, have been reacting from their guts instead of their heads. 6, 2056305120948162 (2020). (2021). & van Dijk, J. Internet skills and the digital divide. R.M. Levine, T. R., Shaw, A. S. & Shulman, H. Assessing deception detection accuracy with dichotomous truth-lie judgments and continuous scaling: Are people really more accurate when honesty is scaled?.

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media literacy for adults: misinformation and disinformation

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