Would you tell fact from fiction?
Tablets have replaced traditional children’s games, videos have taken the place of fairytales and applications are a better pastime for youngsters nowadays than, for instance, an outdoor activity.
As adults, we are constantly in front of a smaller or bigger screen, with our eyes swirling at the online content hurricane and our brains endlessly disrupted.
In the online world, media consumption has increased immeasurably and social media has created a perfectly enabling environment for the spread of fake news, thus a healthy media diet should be introduced immediately. Every person learns how to read, how to count, what is healthy to eat or not, they should also learn how to search if a news source is credible or if it is a bot sharing fake news for a political motive.
With democracy facing serious challenges such as the rise of populism and the Far-Right around the world, it is more crucial than ever to have responsible, quality journalism that fearlessly reveals the truth and holds those in power accountable. The media have long lost the public’s trust and attention. “We’ve had a shock during the past few years. It is a battle, an uphill, but what people need to know is that we are working on it” Thomas De Graeve from VRT said on the high-level conference of the first ever European Media Literacy Week. “We changed the way our newsroom works.”
The journalists ought to ameliorate in their methods and be more careful when they upload a piece of information. Fact-checking and verification are not just some fancy words, but pivotal components of accountable journalistic practices. Apart from that, there is a citizen on the other end of the screen, who consumes the content and feels disempowered with the proliferation of fake news and manipulative media. Growing numbers of people turn away from news and politics, since they feel alienated and fatigued from the situation being out of control.
Being an active citizen means that you are roundly informed, you are a critical thinker and you feel empowered to make your own choices. Media literacy is more than an abstract term, it is an important education that every person must acquire, so that they are actively aware of bias and disinformation and make informed decisions. 68% of Europeans come across fake news at least once a week.
What is the role of the public authorities though? Social media and the internet in general are highly unregulated. Some people argue that social media should be treated as media and they should follow the same rules. “From Facebook, I would love you to see reinstating access to those plugins that actually shed light on the micro-targeting, like ‘Who targets me’, like ‘ProPublica’, like ‘Mozzila’ which you disabled recently”, Juliane von Reppert-Bismarck from Lie Detectors commented, adding that in the global south, the poorest parts of the world, apps like WhatsApp allow falsehoods to travel with impunity at breakneck speed with no ability to fact check. “I would really also like to see what Google often says is the problem; the algorithms. There is got to be an answer to that.”
Many initiatives are now trying to counter-balance the fake news epidemics, like FightHoax, FactCheckEU, Lie Detectors, Truly Media and the European Observatory Against Disinformation. Are our weapons enough? Gianni Rota, an Italian journalist and professor at LUISS School of Journalism, made a good point by mentioning that the EU budget supports farming, fishing, movies, books, theater, culture in general, but zero budget goes to quality journalism. “A lot of journalists say no to money from politics. It is not money for the publisher to bring what the Commission wants. This is money to retrain journalists, this is money for quality projects, this is money for literacy, for teaching kids how to be journalists.”
The civil society’s aversion to media is not a good sign neither for journalism nor for democracy. As the Freedom House reported in 2017, online manipulation and disinformation have been used in at least 18 countries during elections in recent years. With the EU and other elections coming up, we need to make sure that the media ecosystem is not rotten and that citizens are provided with the right tools to spot the credibility of information, for information has transformative power.
