People have always been bad at separating fact from fiction. And it seems that as technology improves, it's becoming harder, not easier, to find truthful information. As the barrier to push information out to people en masse lowers, the amount of noise grows. More than that, it's easier than ever to use false information as a weapon. To give an example, in Canada, election manipulation through disinformation has been a very hot issue for the past few years.
So, while it's true that mis/dis-information (or propaganda or whatever you want to call it) is nowhere near a new problem, it is certainly a more important problem than ever. People's beliefs have a material impact on the world. What people buy, who they vote for– all of it genuinely matters. When someone uses their platform to push a demonstrably false narrative to further their own interests, it can and does impact lives.
Anecdotally, Canadian media literacy education seems to be in a rough place. During my ‘Digital Literacy’ courses throughout high-school a few years ago in British Columbia, we were taught about the idea of a digital-footprint and how to set up a Wordpress site. While the curriculum does mention ‘Research and Information Literacy’, it was clear from my own experience and those I've talked to that modern implementation is lacking.
For students in high school, there's little to no motivation to do well in a digital literacy course. Universities typically look at the grades you've attained in upper year core courses (math, science, english, and certain electives). Even if the curriculum's content was fantastic, there's still the major issue of getting people to care. Integrating media literacy content directly into existing classes might be an interesting area to explore.
To re-iterate the criticality of the issue: we have a growing problem that can only truly be solved by the education system suddenly becoming great at promoting critical thinking skills.
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So, to say the least, some creative approaches are going to be needed to tackle this. I wrote an article about how puzzles can be used to build intuition about fraud for ‘Paged Out!', a zine about programming tricks and hacking. You can read it here:
The puzzle idea isn't perfect (there's the whole self-selection bias issue of those who would try a puzzle in the first place, for instance). My hope is that by getting an audience of a bunch of creative problem solvers to think about media literacy, some more ideas will come out of it.
Send me an email at the address found here if you have any thoughts!