Video footage of Hamas fighters purportedly parachuting into Israel on Saturday. A photo of an official White House document seemingly showing that the Biden administration is sending $8 billion in military aid to Israel. A video of Israeli air force planes apparently attacking the Gaza Strip last weekend.
Each of these reports is false, relying on doctored content and repurposed images from different conflicts, yet all have circulated widely on social media since Hamas’s attack on Israel began. Many have been viewed millions of times.
Misinformation like this has become a common phenomenon during quickly evolving world crises such as the Israel-Hamas war, making it challenging to determine what’s real and what isn’t.
Fueled by social media and, more recently, artificial intelligence, the amount of misinformation fed to people daily has reached crisis proportions. Fortunately, addressing the problem may not be as complex as many people believe.
Consider what’s taking place in Chicago teacher Alba Mendiola’s classroom at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School. To help her high-school students navigate the flood of news, content, and social media they encounter online every day, Mendiola asks them to think about two questions: Do you want to be informed? Or do you want to be influenced?
Mendiola is part of a growing movement of educators who are making media literacy a cornerstone of their curricula. In her bilingual broadcast-journalism class, she helps students distinguish between fact-based news coverage and the paid advertisements, influencer campaigns, and often misleading videos and photographs that fill their feeds. In classrooms where news literacy is taught, students learn how to find credible information during world news events so they don’t fall prey to out-of-context images similar to what quickly proliferated after Hamas attacked Israel.
Unfortunately, unlike Mendiola’s students, most young people are not being taught the skills they need to think critically about news and information. Currently, only three states require media-literacy instruction, leaving youths vulnerable to misinformation that can chip away at our democracy.
Combatting Misinformation
To effectively address the misinformation crisis and build a future founded on facts, more states and school districts need to make media-literacy instruction a requirement. For the philanthropic community, that means playing a bigger role in supporting nonpartisan legislative advocacy and investing in research that demonstrates the efficacy of media-literacy instruction.
U.S. Is Far Behind
Models for large-scale media-literacy efforts exist in other countries. Finland, for example, has made media literacy a requirement in every subject and grade, recognizing the important part schools play in developing a citizenry with the skills to identify and resist misinformation. It’s likely not a coincidence that Finland’s residents ranked as the most resistant to misinformation in the Open Society Institute-Sofia’s 2022 Media Literacy Index of European nations.
The United States needs a similar nationwide movement for media literacy. In our far bigger, decentralized education system, it will take a sustained large-scale effort to convince more school and government leaders that media-literacy education should be mandatory.
News-literacy instruction can start in elementary school with students examining social media to determine the purpose of a message, using kid-friendly examples such as an actual post from a local police department claiming the Disney character Elsa had been arrested. Middle-schoolers can discuss and debate different news articles and learn how journalists decide whether and how to cover a story. By high school, students can learn to identify conspiratorial thinking.
Donors need to support organizations that are building momentum, from the grass roots in classrooms to decision makers at the school board and the statehouse.
We’ve seen this at work at the organization I lead, the News Literacy Project. In New York’s North Salem Central School District, a media specialist who uses our free resources encouraged a district director to apply for our district fellowship, which offers an opportunity to spend two years designing and implementing a systemwide media-literacy plan. North Salem Central was selected to join the program and is now working on a framework for incorporating media literacy into all its schools.
Supporting Policy, Not Politics
Each leg of this work requires support, including legislative advocacy, which has proven a difficult sell for grant makers as education policies are increasingly mired in politics and controversy. Donors need to know that it’s possible to back legislative efforts supporting media-literacy education without taking political sides.
One of the greatest strengths of the media-literacy movement is that it is rigorously nonpartisan. Misinformation affects everyone, regardless of political affiliation — and media literacy teaches people how to think about news and credible information, not what to think.
So far, media-literacy requirements have gained traction in only a few states. New Jersey recently became the first state to require that every student from kindergarten through 12th grade be taught information literacy, which encompasses media literacy and all other forms of information. The legislation passed with strong bipartisan support. Delaware also now requires media-literacy education in every grade, and Illinois has adopted similar standards for high-school students.
Philanthropic investment in advocacy efforts will help build awareness and support for similar bipartisan legislation elsewhere. For example, the DemocracyReady NY Coalition, which promotes civic education and participation, is pushing for a media-literacy requirement for all New York public-school students. The coalition’s efforts are powered largely by educators and would benefit from more resources to expand the movement and increase public awareness.
Proving the Case
To help separate media literacy from politics, policy makers need more proof that it works. That will require funding for longitudinal studies that show how teaching media literacy affects long-term understanding of information and the ability to separate fact from fiction.
In the shorter term, the evidence is already promising.
Research has shown the effectiveness of what’s known as “prebunking” — essentially inoculating people against misinformation by introducing it to them before false information and propaganda fill their news feeds. Researchers at Google, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Bristol found that study participants who viewed short videos teaching common misinformation tactics — emotionally charged language, false equivalence, or personal attacks — were better able to separate misinformation from accurate content than those who had not received the misinformation “inoculation.”
The News Literacy Project has also tracked the results of our online lessons on topics including how to spot misinformation and why people fall for conspiracy theories. Pre- and post-test assessments during the 2021-22 school year show that students made significant gains. For example, 72 percent recognized when a social-media post did not provide credible evidence — a 15-point increase from the start of the classes.
“At the end of the lesson, my students gain a deeper understanding of the complexity involved in presenting information impartially, as well as the difficulty of writing news when sources are not verified, and we let our bias influence us,” says Mendiola, who built her own media-literacy curriculum but uses resources from the News Literacy Project.
This work is urgent. Misinformation threatens all of us. Vaccine skepticism has fueled a resurgence of once-eradicated illnesses, racist and xenophobic conspiracy theories have propelled mass shootings in supermarkets and places of worship, and conspiratorial thinking has led to attacks on our election systems and the peaceful transfer of power. Without a shared set of facts, our health, our lives, and our democracy are at risk.
The rapid mainstreaming of artificial-intelligence bots that spread fake images, make fake audio, and even launch whole “news” sites — complete with fabricated stories, staff bios, and editorial policies — has rapidly accelerated the problem. Despite A.I.’s tendency to make up facts and plagiarize, more students are turning to chatbots as a source for school assignments. In this environment, news-literacy skills such as checking multiple sources and turning to trusted, fact-based news outlets for information are vital.
The tools for building a more media-literate future are readily available, but they won’t work if more people don’t use them. Education, advocacy, and legislation are the most promising avenues for getting the message to those who need to hear it.