‘Fake News’ (and) Literacy

I’m not seeing quite as many ICA 2018 sessions as I might like, because of other meetings, but this Sunday morning I’m in a session on ‘fake news’, whatever we mean by that term. Mo Jang is starting us off. He begins by noting that the knowledge production and publication system has diversified with the increasing role of online publication, and this has undermined gatekeeping processes. This has also led to the increasing spread of unverified information, rumours, hoaxes, and other forms of ‘fake news’.

How may this be combatted, then? Literacy is one approach; enhanced algorithms is another; and crowdsourcing – such as peer-reviewed fact-checking – is a final option. But the focus here is on literacy: would increased media literacy help users identify ‘fake news’; what kinds of literacy are required for this; and how might this be assessed?

Literacy is the ability of citizens to access, analyse, and produce information for specific outcomes. This goes well beyond the written word, of course. There is also media literacy (understanding media systems) and information literacy (navigating and locating information efficiently); these might be assessed variously through self-reporting or knowledge tests. Further, there’s also news literacy: here, authors and audiences, messages and meanings, and representations and reality feature strong. And finally, digital literacy focusses specifically on digital and online skills and knowledge.

The study tested such literacies in an experimental setting, confronting a demographically representative group of U.S. participants with manufactured ‘fake news’ stories. Older participants appeared more capable of identifying ‘fake news’, as were participants with liberal views. People who said they’d been exposed to ‘fake news’ frequently were actually less able to identify such stories.

People with good information literacy (as opposed to the other forms of literacy) also turned out to be better at identifying ‘fake news’. This needs to be further explored, and might have implications for what kinds of literacy should be foregrounded in combatting ‘fake news’. The key role of information literacy might be explained by the need for users to find additional information in order to debunk such stories. At the same time, though, information literacy is also the only measure that is assessed through knowledge tests – the other literacies are assessed by self-reporting, which is likely to be less reliable and may be affected by respondents’ own cognitive biases.