media literacy for adults: misinformation and disinformation

Science audiences, misinformation, and fake news | PNAS Low digital health literacy affects large percentages of populations around the world and is a direct contributor to the spread of COVID-19-related online misinformation (together with bots). Gender, race, and media representation. Triangulate, verify, and fact check. Coronavirus myths explored. (2018, October 9). It refers to critical thinking about media sources and content, including the meaning of stylistic characteristics, the contents accuracy and completeness, the sources implied values, and the context in which messages have been shared. (2020). Disinformation is the creation and spreading of false information with the intent to deceive. Media Literacy for Adults Guide and Webinars Rolling Stone. They need especially strong skills to manage their responses to disinformation messages intentionally designed to provoke their emotions and promote social media sharing. Misinformation is a long-term problem that demands long-term, sustainable solutions as well as short-term interventions. This representative, national survey of U.S. adults, performed during the height of the pandemic and protests during early summer of 2020, found consistent differences between white and nonwhite participants for levels of media literacy, COVID-19 knowledge, acceptance of COVID-19 disinformation, levels of voting intent, and willingness to take risks to protest for racial justice. Existing research demonstrates that effects of misinformation interventions can (fail to) endure in ways that are important to capture, such as Basol et al. Measures for media literacy for sources of news and media literacy for content of news were based on previous studies that have used these measures to represent self-reported media literacy skills. Malinformation:Deliberate publication of private information for personal or corporate rather than public interest, such as revenge porn. Evaluating the fake news problem at the scale of the information ecosystem. Beyond "Fake News": Misinformation Studies for a Postdigital Era 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. It's going to get uglier. These skills and techniques were selected based on digital literacy tools and techniques discussed in prior work to be effective at improving peoples ability to identify credible information (e.g., lateral reading13; reverse image search32), however we note that the efficacy of teaching these skills to an older adult population, to our knowledge, has not been formally evaluated prior to our study. Sci. It's an essential life skill that empowers you to be both a critical thinker and an effective communicator.. Media literacy is just one branch of the literacy tree!. McGrew, S., Smith, M., Breakstone, J., Ortega, T. & Wineburg, S. Improving university students web savvy: An intervention study. Edward R. Murrow Center for Media & Health Promotion Research, Washington State University, USA, Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, Washington State University, USA. According to the National Science Foundation (2018), people with more education and income tend to know more about principles of scientific inquiry. Content-wise, our results clearly emphasize a need to make the point explicit in interventions like MediaWise for Seniors that individuals should not assume all incoming news is false but rather emphasize the conditions under which people should be more or less suspicious of the veracity of news. We refer to this as the ability to engage in discriminant trust. Disinformation targeting communities of color is an ongoing problem that became even worse in the context of the 2020 elections taking place during the COVID-19 crisis (Timberg & Stanley-Becker, 2020). 29, 316323 (2020). Los Angeles Times. A more pernicious possible outcome is that digital literacy training could make individuals less trusting of all news, both false and truthful news. More work is needed to think through these trade offs, but it does appear that MediaWise for Seniors built discriminant trust in this study, at least among news which was fact-checked to be true or false. Random House. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abd9788. Guess, A. M. et al. The survey included 76.4% participants from urban zip codes, near to actual rural/urban distribution in the U.S. Census (United States Census Bureau, 2019). Contrary to some prior digital media literacy interventions26, the MediaWise for Seniors intervention appears to have improved individuals abilities to accurately detect both true and false news, what we refer to as the ability to engage in discriminant trust: trusting reliable news while distrusting false news. Finding 2: Also shown in Table 1, people of color tended to report more acceptance of COVID-19 disinformation and less accurate knowledge about COVID-19. Responses skewed heavily toward enthusiasm for voting, so even the modest associations found with media literacy measures could represent an important clue for motivating participation. Guess, A., Nagler, J. Why identity matters. Schaffel, G. Facebook most popular with older users. We obtained a positive and significant interaction between the Intervention Group and Post-intervention variables (B=4.436, SE=0.505, p<0.001), indicating that the increase in the likelihood of reporting doing research to inform a headline veracity judgment among the intervention group from pre-intervention to post-intervention was significantly greater than change in the likelihood of doing research among the control group (see Table S4). Using text data from 5,613 distinct COVID misinformation stories and 70 anti-vaccination Facebook groups, we tracked highly salient keywords regarding anti-vaccine discourse across Twitter, thousands of news websites, and the Google and Bing search engines from May through June 2021, a key period when progress on vaccinations very clearly stalled. A representative, national survey of U.S. adult residents (N=1264) was fielded through Qualtrics June 22-July 18, at the height of lockdown and social-justice demonstrations. Wineburg, S. & McGrew, S. Lateral reading and the nature of expertise: reading less and learning more when evaluating digital information. (2021). Sci. The Titanic Truthers of TikTok - The New York Times CNN. The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance (307) 777-6333 statelibrary@wyo.gov. Fighting fake news in the classroom Misinformation, Disinformation, Malinformation: What's the - Minitex Chapter Indeed, recent evidence from a large-scale digital media literacy intervention in India (not focused specifically on older adults) supports this possibility17. Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative. She suggests we start using the termsmisinformation and disinformation rather than fake news. ISSN 2045-2322 (online). https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/400941-intentionally-deceiving-voters-should-be-a-crime, National Association for Media Literacy Education. 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. Google Scholar. Still, future work should study these types of interventions using an experimental framework, in which individuals are randomly assigned to an intervention to improve causal inferences that can be drawn about digital literacy interventions effects. Scientific Reports https://medium.com/national-center-for-institutional-diversity/teach-them-well-media-literacy-as-a-survival-tool-for-marginalized-youth-207322e3cd44, Chavez, N. (2020). Public Interest 21, 103156 (2020). https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2020/plandemic-recirculates-after-platforms-say-they-took-it-down/, Johns Hopkins Medicine. 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. Join us for a free webinar as part of a new series on Media Literacy in the Library. Journal of Communication, 50(2), 131-154. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2000.tb02845.x, Fain, P. (2020, June 17). Exploring the role of visual content in fake news detection. Media literacy has often been concentrated on logically looking at the information in question along with its source, Starbird replied, but reactions to news or information are not always approached logically. Journal of Social Issues, 71(1), 171-185. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12103, Squires, G. D. (2017). In this study, the use of a control group alleviates this concern. When Teens Find Misinformation, These Teachers Are Ready (2007, November). Access Inf. People of all ages need better access to information, such as how images need better access to information, such as how images and messages can be digitally altered to spread disinformation. Measurement-wise, if it is the case that individuals are significantly more likely to accurately detect false compared to true news at baseline, then it may be more difficult to detect improvements to peoples ability to identify false news compared to improvements in peoples ability to identify true news. Misinformation has been identified as a contributor to various contentious events, ranging from elections and referenda 5 to political or religious persecution 6 and to the global response to the. The sample included demographic and regional quotas recruited by Qualtrics based on the 2019 U.S. census and reviewed by the first author. Knowing the News, a series of virtual media literacy activities, is part of PEN America's response to the ongoing threat of disinformationmade even more urgent during our current global public health crisis. 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). The results reported here indicate that digital literacy interventions are a viable strategy to assist older adults at improving their ability to sort fact from fiction online, important given growing evidence that they are often targeted by disinformation campaigns and other malicious actors online39. Towards psychological herd immunity: Cross-cultural evidence for two prebunking interventions against COVID-19 misinformation. A combination of general and science-specific measures for media literacy, political engagement, and the specific situation of the COVID-19 crisis provided an opportunity to examine relationships between media literacy and the effects of COVID-19 disinformation campaigns. Nicole has published numerous articlesand book chapters. 8, 1687 (2017). StataCorp. International perspectives on media disinformation: Critical media Individuals took one post-intervention survey, immediately following their completion of the intervention. For these reasons, in addition to MediaWise for Seniors tailoring of their content for older adults, we expected that the training would be effective in improving participants ability to correctly identify true and false news headlines. The contents of the course were highly multimodalinformation was presented as text, in photos and infographics, through instructional videos, and through interactive examples where participants were walked through examples of encountering online misinformation. EU Code of Practice on Disinformation | Brookings The results also suggest that media literacy skills can be empowering despite systemic barriers to formal education and other resources. This may reflect that when institutional barriers exist for making a difference through voting, people of color embrace other ways to advocate for change. The media literacy program comes after Microsoft invested $10 billion in buzzy startup Open AI, maker of the A.I. (2021). & Hargittai, E. A review of Internet use among older adults. Science Education, 98(4), 549-580. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.21115, FluTrackers.com [@Flutrackers]. J. Educ. It is poss that [Tweet]. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are properly credited. In contrast, older adults in the control condition (N=238) did not significantly improve (from 55% to 57%). By staying vigilant, fostering critical thinking, and promoting digital literacy, we can work towards a more informed and resilient society in the face of disinformation and its associated . General media literacy skills are associated with COVID-19 knowledge and political engagement, while science media literacy is associated with less acceptance of COVID-19 disinformation. From October 1 to November 6, 2020, 238 older adults recruited from online survey purveyor Lucid also completed both our pre and post surveys, without taking MediaWises course or being exposed to any other control stimuli (Mage=63.8years, 60.5% female, 89.5% white). Also, during summer of 2020, bots were used to amplify messages discouraging a Latinx boycott of Goya that followed statements from the companys CEO praising President Trump. 22, 2948 (2019). Although digital media literacy training has been shown to boost younger individuals abilities to identify online misinformation15,16, it is not yet clear whether such programming can be similarly effective for older adults. A digital media literacy intervention increases discernment - PNAS Standard errors were clustered on participants. Article Future interventions to increase media literacy should include direct action on platforms where misinformation and disinformation may be prominent, with crowdsourcing offering a promising strategy for community-based interventions (Allen et al., 2020). 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). (2020, August 26). The authors do not have any potential conflicts of interest. We report the results of a digital literacy intervention for older adults administered during the 2020 U.S.election. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/06/17/pandemic-has-worsened-equity-gaps-higher-education-and-work, Fives, H., Huebner, W., Birnbaum, A. S., & Nicolich, M. (2014). Polit. In today's context of disinformation and misinformation, the ultimate jeopardy is not unjustifiable regulation of journalism, but that publics may come to disbelieve A website of the American Library Association Public Programs Office, Media Literacy for Adults: Misinformation and Disinformation, Public Programs Office | 225 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1300, Chicago,IL60601 |, Media Literacy for Adults: Media Landscape and Economics, Media Literacy for Adults: Meeting Patrons Where They Are, Media Literacy for Adults: Media Engagement and Creation, Media Literacy for Adults: Architecture of the Internet, Learn how to teach their patrons to be savvy information consumers, Be provided with library program ideas and starters around misinformation and disinformation, Learn about resources they can provide to patrons and effective discussion questions on misinformation. & Tucker, J. Attitudes about local news mostly stable amid COVID-19. ADS By administering surveys to older adults who took MediaWises training before and after the training, in addition to administering the same surveys to a control group of older adults who did not take the training at the same points in time, we were able to examine the effect of participation in the digital literacy training on three key outcomes: (1) Older adults ability to correctly identify true and false news headlines, (2) their likelihood of doing research online in order to inform their judgments about the veracity of those headlines, and (3) their comprehension of skills and techniques important for identifying misinformation online (e.g., lateral reading, reverse image searching). For example, if an intervention is being evaluated without a control group, using different news items in the pre and post-intervention surveys may introduce a confound for measuring the effect of the intervention if the news items in the post-intervention survey are easier to detect as true or false than the news items in the pre-intervention survey. Higher values indicate greater probability of correctly judging the veracity of a given headline. The measures in this study for general media were self-assessments, whereas the measures for science media literacy required actual knowledge about the meaning of science reporting concepts such as correlation, random assignment, and the differential quality of publication outlets. Bars are 95% confidence intervals. As can be seen in Table S2, we obtained a positive and significant interaction between the course enrollee and post-intervention indicator variables for all news headlines (i.e., true and false news headlines combined; B=1.073, SE=0.159, p<0.001). Pearce, K. E. & Rice, R. E. Digital divides from access to activities: Comparing mobile and personal computer internet users. 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 . In addition, we measured levels of skill on the concepts and skills taught in the course important for being able to identify disinformation online. Less than you think: Prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on Facebook. Media Literacy in The Age of Misinformation | Post University AARP. Countering disinformation requires lasting investment in building societal resilience and media and information literacy. (2012). The tactics & tropes of the Internet Research Agency. 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). The Washington Post. Deceptive election practices and voter intimidation: The need for voter protection. The sample included demographic and regional quotas based on the 2019 U.S. census. The results support concerns that people of color tend to be inordinately affected by disinformation campaigns designed to impede or dissuade their participation in political engagement to improve their physical, societal, and economic health. This interaction suggests that improvement in the ability to accurately judge the veracity of news headlines among the intervention group from pre-intervention to post-intervention was significantly greater than change in that ability among the control group. Communities of color, suffering equity gaps and disproportionate COVID-19 effects, also must resist ongoing disinformation campaigns designed to impede their political influence. https://osf.io/jv8hk?view_only=51e12172bc8542ee86211d58ae150bdb, http://www.aarp.org/home-family/personal-technology/info-2018/facebook-users-age-fd.html, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055421000459, https://www.edelman.com/trust/2021-trust-barometer, https://www.npr.org/2020/02/26/809224742/with-an-election-on-the-horizon-older-adults-get-help-spotting-fake-news, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42699-6_8, https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/19/media/reliable-sources-covid-research/index.html, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/old-and-online-fake-news-aging-population, http://www.aarp.org/politics-society/government-elections/info-2018/power-role-older-voters.html, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, Ability of detecting and willingness to share fake news, Exposure to untrustworthy websites in the 2020 US election, Cancel LibGuides: Media Literacy & Misinformation: Getting Started Hum. By Stephanie Pappas Date created: January 1, 2022 10 min read. Scientific Reports (Sci Rep) However, as was discussed, while overall accuracy is informative, an intervention should improve individuals discriminant trust in newsthat is, their ability to accurately judge true news as true and false news as false. Front. Nat. (2018). To our knowledge, however, this is the first time this effect has been documented among older adults. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412983341, Lempinen, E. (2020, September 29). Nicole was awarded the 2016 ALA Equality Award, and she was presented with the 2017 ALA Achievement in Library Diversity Research Award, presented by the Office for Diversity and Literacy Outreach Services. CAS The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. 89, 485500 (2019). Kujala, S., Roto, V., Vnnen-Vainio-Mattila, K., Karapanos, E. & Sinnel, A. UX Curve: A method for evaluating long-term user experience. Specific skills important for assessing science-related information might be missing from peoples understanding of media literacy more generally. Compared to white respondents, nonwhite respondents reported less media literacy, less intent to vote, more willingness to take risks to protest for racial justice (but not to reopen the economy), less COVID-19 knowledge, and more acceptance of COVID-19 disinformation. Strengthen Media Literacy to Win the Fight Against Misinformation Luo, M., Hancock, J. T. & Markowitz, D. M. Credibility perceptions and detection accuracy of fake news headlines on social media: Effects of truth-bias and endorsement cues. What to expect in 2021 in the world of misinformation online Check the source, look for an about page. View other webinars in this series and download the practitioner's guide. What are the authors' credentials? conceived the project and designed and implemented the study. Putting media literacy on the public policy agenda. http://www.youthmediareporter.org/2010/02/15/using-media-literacy-to-combat-racism/, Pew Research Center. Respondents exhibiting more media literacy for news sources and content had stronger intentions to participate in political advocacy, knew more about COVID-19 and were less likely to believe COVID-19 disinformation campaigns. Nonwhite participants with intention to vote in the November election tended to be more highly educated and more media literate both for sources and for content. Article Sources: The National Association for Media Literacy Education, the University of Iowa Office of Teaching, Learning . https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/old-and-online-fake-news-aging-population (2019). 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. It is often motivated by the desire to make money, have greater political influence, or sow chaos for chaos's sake. Quality check measures eliminated duplicate, illogical, and improbably fast completions. PubMedGoogle Scholar. Older adults turnout to vote at consistently higher rates than younger individuals in democracies around the globe41,42, so the consequences of their belief in political falsehoods could have meaningful electoral consequences. Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) advice for the public:Mythbusters. We have to counter that with the same coordination (Garcia-Navarro, 2020). Media Literacy for Adults: Misinformation and Disinformation For example, opening up a new tab to search for information about the story, copy-and-pasting the headline into a search engine, etc.. 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. Stacking the deck: How the GOP works to suppress minority voting. The roles of digital literacies and critical literacy for black adolescentfemales. International perspectives on media disinformation: Critical media The central question is how do adults use critical media literacy on social media when gathering information to make decisions? As was presented in the Results section, it does appear that our intervention participants still experienced significant post-intervention improvements in accuracy and digital literacy relative to a subset of the control group who were presented marketing materials for MediaWise for Seniors and indicated that they would be interested in participating in it. As a consequence, these suspicious participants became less accurate at detecting true messages but more accurate at detecting false messages. How can library workers help patrons decipher between what is real and what is fake? Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. (2020, October 20). Meanwhile, accurate information often is poorly presented and unclear (Kim & Kreps, 2020). Future work should make use of longitudinal research designs, administering multiple follow-up surveys at a variety of time intervals, to understand the extent to which the benefits of participating in interventions like MediaWise for Seniors endure after the intervention has ended. Gerontol. Are there citations? Progressive group combats disinformation campaigns aimed at Latino voters. Sci Rep 12, 6008 (2022). CNN. https://tineye.com/, United States Census Bureau. Microsoft launches media literacy program | Fortune provides support for this possibility. Bars are 95% confidence intervals. Calling bullshit: The art of skepticism in a data-driven world. Combating Misinformation through Media Literacy Education Measures also included intentions to vote (I plan to vote in the November 2020 US election, 1 definitely not to 4 definitely yes); approval of taking risks (It is worth risking my health to join a public demonstration.to protest for racial justice or to reopen the economy, on 5-point scales); and demographics of age, education, ethnicity, gender identity, income, political orientation, and population density. https://twitter.com/FluTrackers/status/1288975841100271616, Freelon, D., Bossetta, M., Wells, C., Lukito, J., Xia, Y., & Adams, K. (2020).

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