Lessons from Global Summit on Disinformation: Let’s give media literacy a chance!

By Soledad Arreguez and Adrian Pino (Desconfio Project)

Education is probably the most powerful antidote to disinformation. However, its resistance is built in the long term since it requires a cultural change. It’s important to understand the key role played by the media for citizens to access information and learn about the world around them.

Citizens move in a media scenario with overabundance of information, hoaxes and lies, and where opinions and feelings prevail over facts. In this context, people need to develop the ability to examine information and evaluate communication messages in the digital setting.

Media education promotes media and technology literacy skills. For UNESCO, “[…] it enables citizens to understand the functions of the media and other information providers, critically evaluate their content and make informed decisions as users and producers of information and media content”.

In a hypermediated society, it is essential that future citizens know and understand the rights of digital life. With more education about these phenomena, future citizens can reflect, learn and debate about disinformation, a phenomena that affects life in a democracy. Journalists also have to acquire strategies, skills and competencies in this era. This are part of lesson that we learn on The Global Summit on Disinformation 2021

Three lessons from the Summit

• Media education from early ages. The cultural change begins when we start teaching to youth how to access and search information, read and understand media. After Global Summit we create a dashboard with resources to fight against disinformation: https://cumbredesinformacion.com/recursos/
• Learning to deal with information online is an ability to digital citizenship. Citizens need access to accurate information to make decisions about their lives, for instance, government elections or coronavirus vaccination.
• Journalism has the opportunity to make its routines transparent to build trust with audiencies. Newsrooms could develop credibility indicators to increase rigurosity in their articles.

The specialist´s voices

At the Global Summit on Disinformation, organized in 2021 by the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA), the Bolivian Foundation for Journalism and Argentina’s Desconfío Project, education against disinformation was one of the topics of the conferences and workshops.

Roxana Morduchowicz, doctor in communication from the University of Paris, spoke about digital citizenship against disinformation and media skills against hateful and discriminatory speech. She said: “If people cannot select, analyze and understand the flow of data, rumors, texts, they will not be able to exercise full citizenship”.

Rosental Calmon Alves, founder and director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, who spoke about the importance of media literacy to curb disinformation. “We must educate people about journalism itself, show our methods and processes so that people understand what journalists do. Before, journalism had a monopoly on communication channels. We went from the era of hegemony to the era of mass media, where anyone is potentially a media. There is much that looks like journalism that is not. We must help people to be educated to differentiate what is journalism and what seems but is not, “ he claimed.

The fight against disinformation has a long way to go. And the combination of efforts that the Global Summit on Disinformation showed seems to mark a horizon in which the researchers and actors that promote this battle share knowledge, tools, experiences and strategies.

Interested in connecting with Global Summit on Disinformation? info@desconfio.org

Looking for tools and guides against disinformation? www.cumbresdesinformacion.com/recursos

See more about Global Summit at https://cumbredesinformacion.com

* The authors are researchers at University of Concepción del Uruguay (Argentina) and members of “Desconfio Project”.