The Case for Building Better Media Literacies amongst Peruvian Adolescents

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Paola Palomino-Flores, whose interest is in the intersections of media literacy and misinformation. Misinformation here is defined as false information that is shared unintentionally by users who believe it to be true but have failed to verify its accuracy. This can still disseminate quickly and then cause some very serious harms, of course, confusing people and leading them to poor decision-making.

Paola’s focus is on Peru, and she notes the high reliance of Peruvians on social media for their news; more than 60% of Peruvians get their news from social media, but they (and especially young people) may not necessarily have strong media literacies. These literacies are not necessarily integrated into school curricula, and as a result young people lack the ability to critically analyse media content.

Media literacy should increase people’s resilience to misinformation: this might happen at the individual and social level, and focus especially on digital and cognitive resilience. This project, then, seeks to explore how media literacy can increase Peruvian youths’ resilience in a digital information environment, and to reduce their susceptibility to misinformation, poor collective decision-making, and societal division; it worked with some 500 young people aged 18-25, representing all socioeconomic categories across the country, and conducted interviews with them.

Media illiteracy in Peru turned out to be fairly evenly distributed across all strata of society, and all geographic regions of the country. 40% of young people are uncertain about their ability to detect misinformation; 70% struggle to detect misinformation across multiple platforms. 65% struggled especially with visual misinformation compared to text-based content.

This clearly points to an urgent need for greater media literacy education for these groups – but digital resilience should also be understood as a lifelong skill, and cannot be left to this group alone. There is a need to build a critical mass for change, and make such media literacy efforts culturally relevant. This should also empower creativity in the defence against misinformation.