Every year in the course of my teaching I discover that students have been duped by a conspiracy theory or misinformation, typically through social media. From 9/11 conspiracy theories to QAnon and #SaveTheChildren people are susceptible to misinformation and disinformation that alters their relationship to reality. The explosive rise of the internet and various social media platforms, combined with a lack of media literacy, has lead to politically, socially, and culturally destructive outcomes.
The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked some especially explosive and destructive conspiracy theories from 5G causing COVID to anti-vaccination advocates whose efforts have led to low vaccination rates and rising COVID-19 cases. Governments and public health officials across the country have a massive challenge in front of them: how do they convince people to “believe the science” and make the pro-social decision to get vaccinated? Everyone who has spoken with someone who believes a conspiracy theory knows that it’s not that useful to argue with someone about their beliefs, so what can be done?
Although President Biden has recently escalated attempts to blame social media companies like Facebook for allowing misinformation to spread through their platforms, banning or blocking the content spread by leading pushers of disinformation, this approach is being criticized as authoritarian and doesn’t solve the primary root cause of lack of media literacy. Should social media platforms allow misinformation to spread, and should folks like Tucker Carlson be able to get on Fox News and spread vaccine skepticism?
It is certainly anti-social, but also we live in a country with free speech in the post-truth era. Misinformation and disinformation will spread regardless of government policy, and certainly, governments are also responsible for spreading their own misinformation and disinformation. Instead, people need the skills and tools to come to the truth on their own.
As a result, media literacy is a topic every social studies educator has an obligation to teach and to persist in personal learning about how to teach it more effectively. Although students may not always come to the “correct” conclusions, a focus on building media literacy skills prepares students to be thoughtful and critical consumers of information online, and off.
Thankfully, there are a lot of wonderful resources for getting started. Stanford’s Civic Online Reasoning is a great spot to start, as is the News Literacy Project and KQED. The central premise I have developed to guide teaching media literacy skills is: is this authentic? In other words, are students building the skills in ways that match the real-world experience of consuming and analyzing information?
So many of my students enter the classroom with a sort of mental checklist of how to evaluate information, no doubt originating in a teacher’s use of something like a CRAP test. A mental checklist can be useful, but no student is going to enjoy or want to answer 17 different questions every time they are trying to evaluate a source of information, and these checklist-based approaches often lead to student shortcuts. For example, I often hear from students, “Well, it’s a .org, so it’s probably reliable,” or, “It’s a professional-looking graphic.” What on the website made you think this source might be reliable? What biases might it have? What do other websites have to say about this one?
Although those questions are their own sort of checklist, they are fluidly applied based on the unique context of the individual source of information. In my view, there is great utility in having students consider the information they are encountering in context without overly scaffolding the process. What do you notice on this page, and on other websites exploring this same topic?
When I teach media literacy, I often start with the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus website and ask students a question about conservation politics. Most students accept that since a teacher recommended a site, it must be accurate, so they tend to believe the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus is real, despite the fact that the site isn’t convincing and any attempt to read laterally on the topic will quickly lead a student to discover the website is fake. It is useful not only to provide a mixture of useful information, unintentional misinformation, and intentional disinformation to students, but also to ask students to bring in sources of information that pop up on their social media feeds, and to ask a couple of guiding questions:
- Is this a useful source of information on the topic? Why or why not?
- Based on what you see on this site and others, what biases or falsehoods might it represent?
Obviously, there are many more questions worth considering, but I find that these present great opportunities for students to engage authentically and then discuss with their peers, and in the process take part in building the skills of media literacy. For more ways to get started, check out some of the sites I linked above!