Ebonee Otoo
Posted: March 14, 2024
If you worry about your own screen time, just think about the young people in your life.
The amount of time they spend consuming media and scrolling through content might alarm you. Teens are glued to screens for more than eight hours a day, reports show. So much screen time could pose risks for adolescents — including exposure to toxic misinformation.
With millions of Americans voting in federal, state and local elections this year, misinformation poses grave challenges to our democratic processes.
News literacy teaches students how to think, not what to think.
Standards-based news organizations carefully fact-check information with an eye toward fairness and a dedication to accuracy. Yet much of what populates our social media feeds is user-generated, unvetted and of varying reliability.
Too often, it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction in the onslaught of information we face. Many students — our next generation of voters — have no idea how to tell the difference between what’s meant to inform them and what’s meant to entertain them, sell them something or even mislead them. Luckily, a growing number of states are tackling this problem by helping students become more media literate. More states must follow.
In 2023 alone, New Jersey and California passed laws requiring that students be taught media literacy skills. Those states join others, including Delaware, Illinois and Texas, that led the way for mandating such requirements.
Media literacy teaches students how to access and evaluate all types of communication. News literacy falls under the umbrella of media literacy, and is focused on helping students understand the importance of a free press in a democracy and on developing the ability to determine the credibility of news.
News literacy teaches students how to think, not what to think. It develops a healthy skepticism — not cynicism — about the news.
Students who learn news literacy skills, for example, are more likely to notice when a social media post does not present credible evidence, assessments show. Studies have shown that “prebunking” — preemptively teaching people the common tactics used to spread false and misleading information — can effectively teach people to resist it. At a time of historically low levels of trust in news organizations, news and media literacy builds appreciation of and demand for quality journalism, a cornerstone of our democracy, and prepares students to be informed participants in our civic life.
States have taken different approaches to helping students find credible information: In Illinois, students must receive at least one unit of news literacy instruction before graduation. New Jersey has gone even further, requiring students in every grade to learn “information literacy,” an umbrella term that includes the ability to navigate all forms of information.
Legislation to require media literacy instruction is a powerful part of the solution to misinformation, but it won’t solve the problem alone. Doing so will also require help from social media and technology companies, media organizations, civic organizations and the philanthropic community.
We need to do away with the myth of the “digital native.” Just because young people have grown up with technology does not mean that they instinctively know how to navigate the challenges of our information landscape. A recent report showed that teens receive more than 200 alerts on their phones a day. It’s important that we teach young people how to recognize the different types and quality of information they’re bombarded with, or we will leave them vulnerable to information that is unreliable or even intentionally misleading.
Most Americans are concerned about misinformation. As we head into an election cycle with AI technologies becoming more widely available and social media companies scaling back moderation efforts, it’s more important than ever to make sure everyone knows where to turn for accurate information about where, how and when to vote. This is especially true for our students who are just becoming old enough to cast their ballots for the first time.
By ensuring that more people are news literate, we can build a stronger, more inclusive democracy.
In 2024, let’s expand this work in schools and at home.
Ebonee Otoo is senior vice president of educator engagement at the News Literacy Project.
