Teaching kids to spot fake news: media literacy to be required in California schools; The Guardian, December 5, 2023

Robin Buller, The Guardian ; Teaching kids to spot fake news: media literacy to be required in California schools

"California next year will become one of the few US states to teach students media literacy, a move experts say is imperative at a time when distrust in the media is at an all-time high and new technologies pose unprecedented challenges to identifying false information.

A state bill signed into law this fall mandates public schools to instruct media literacy, a set of skills that includes recognizing falsified data, identifying fake news and generating responsible internet content.

Researchers have long warned that the current digital ecosystem has had dire consequences on young people, and have argued that such instruction could make a difference. The US surgeon general has cited digital and media literacy support as one way to combat the youth mental health crisis spurred by social media. The American Psychological Association already has urged parents and schools to teach media literacy before they expose young people to social media platforms."

Fighting Disinformation Can Feel Like a Lost Cause. It Isn’t.; The New York Times, March 7, 2022

Jay Caspian Kang, The New York Times; Fighting Disinformation Can Feel Like a Lost Cause. It Isn’t.

"Joel Breakstone, the director of the Stanford History Education Group, believes that there needs to be more attention paid to what, exactly, is taught in these media literacy programs. Frequently used lessons like the memorably named Currency Reliability Authority Purpose (CRAP) test ask students to put their information through a gantlet of questions. But Breakstone believes they do not really work for a variety of reasons, the most salient being that most people don’t really know how to check sources and the reliability of information.

What he and his group suggest, instead, is a more comprehensive approach that teaches kids how to assess not only the reliability of the specific information they’ve found online but also who published it and for what purpose. In doing this, students are looking at the whole ecosystem in which the information resides, which improves their ability to question things that may seem to come from sources that look reputable enough."