Youth and Disinformation Literacy: helping young people spot online disinformation
Youth and Disinformation Literacy is a project created during the 2019–2020 Assembly Student Fellowship at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. One of three tracks in the Assembly Program, the Assembly Student Fellowship convenes Harvard students from across a variety of schools and disciplines to tackle the spread and consumption of disinformation. Assembly Student Fellows conducted their work independently with light advisory guidance from program advisors and staff.
The Youth and Disinformation Literacy infographic and this post was authored by Matthew Finney (SEAS ‘20), Michael Jasper (College ‘21), and Jennifer Nilsen (HKS ‘20).
Young people convene on the internet to create, consume, and share political information, but many first-time voters lack tools to identify and confront false, misleading and inauthentic information. A full 62% of Gen Z and Millennial voters worry that they can’t spot misleading information online, according to a January 2020 NPR/PBS/Marist poll. Worse, social media platforms are especially vulnerable to disinformation, with young voters much more likely than older voters to get news through social media.
Bad actors have already started to take advantage of this vulnerability: in this year’s New Hampshire democratic primary, a mass disinformation campaign aimed to confuse young voters about voting laws. Publications and platforms have also, sometimes inadvertently, misdirected teens. For example, earlier this year, Teen Vogue published a particularly flattering, uncritical article about how Facebook was developing its plans to promote election integrity in the November election. The story was quickly noticed by disinformation and other journalists online, and panned as an “uncritical platform” for the social media giant. Shortly after publishing, Teen Vogue added the label “sponsored content” to the web version of the story, adding further confusion. Was the article advertising for Facebook or journalism about the platform’s efforts to combat disinformation? Eventually, the story was taken down entirely. This, particularly egregious, story illustrates the messy information environment that teens are navigating online.
Disinformation literacy is a critical tool for young people, especially new voters
To meaningfully participate in civic life, voters — particularly, first-time voters — need to be equipped with necessary tools. In the past, these may have been knowledge of America’s political institutions and history already provided in the standard education curriculum. Today, disinformation literacy is also one of those necessary tools.
We consulted with the Berkman Klein Center’s Youth and Media team to identify an opportunity for a project to raise disinformation literacy among new voters. While the Youth and Media team has designed a range of disinformation curriculum plans for high school classrooms, we realized there was an opportunity to translate that information into a form more easily consumed and distributed. We settled on an infographic because it could be effectively distributed online across different channels.
When we first set out on this project, our aim was to teach students the steps necessary to identify disinformation online. However, we discovered that disinformation literacy is more complicated than just a set of steps.
Successfully navigating today’s media environment requires a nuanced understanding of how news is produced, distributed, and manipulated by multiple actors across the internet. It is only by understanding how information is produced that students begin to feel confident identifying disinformation. The goal of the infographic is to acquaint students with the basics of what disinformation is, while also encouraging further conversation about journalism and media production more broadly. In addition to distributing the infographic online, we hope to distribute it in classrooms once they reopen.
Our infographic helps young people navigate disinformation online
The infographic comprises two particularly key messages that we believe youth need to understand to navigate our complicated information environment. First, young people need to know what disinformation is and what it might look like, and second, they need tips to reduce their own chances of sharing disinformation.
On the first point, the creators of disinformation use many techniques to appear trustworthy and trick youth into spreading it.
- Fake news articles on websites that mimic real news organizations
- Fake social media posts and accounts that impersonate celebrities, politicians, and public figures
- Inauthentic official documents that use a company or government agency’s branding
- Viral threads and memes that encourage recipients to unknowingly share false information with friends and family
- Misleading photos and videos that are repurposed, taken out of context, or even doctored
These three examples capture common disinformation tactics:
^ This fake “Canadian Department of Health” message shared on WhatsApp spread false medical information about the coronavirus.
^ This tweet shares a false summary of a real news article to lend credibility to a conspiracy theory.
^ This real photo of trash in London’s Hyde Park was repurposed to trick people into thinking the mess was left behind by climate protesters.
Given these common disinformation tactics, we offer three tips for young people to reduce their own chances of sharing disinformation:
- Pause before sharing,
- Compare the information to other sources to double check its veracity, and finally,
- Critically examine where the information came from and the source’s reputation.
These three steps might seem small, but they will help young people become more careful, critical consumers and sharers of information, and be less likely to inadvertently be vectors for mis- or disinformation.
To learn more about Assembly: Disinformation, visit bkmla.org
