Media literacy is at an all-time low

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Media literacy is slowly becoming an uncommon practice in today's digital age. Media users are spreading misinformation at a dangerous rate every day.

The ability for people to critically examine, analyze, and assess the media they come across is a skill more paramount than ever in the age of the internet. “Don’t believe everything you read online” is a sentiment ingrained into the rising generations' minds since the cradle, but it seems the heart of this mentality—media literacy—is sorely lacking in the modern age. 

While the widespread and immediate access to unfathomable and overwhelming degrees of information brings with it copious positives, like connecting people across the globe or decreasing barriers to knowledge, we would be remiss to ignore the negatives that come with it as well. Now, more than ever, the everyday person has the ability to read, create, and disperse rumors, half-truths, full-on lies, and/or improper skews of information with little to no effort. 

When it takes so little time to start a snowball of misinformation and conspiracy, it is important for the individual to take the time to make sure what they have read is believable or true before they accept the information as fact, or even go to pass it on and become part of the cycle of misinformation. People need to hold themselves accountable for making sure they are acquiring and spreading what they hear in a responsible way because, unfortunately, it has been seen that we cannot trust those in positions of power or professionalism to do it for us. 

At no time was this more apparent than during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when political leaders, celebrities, and even scientists spread dangerous sentiments and conspiracies about masking procedures, disease prevention, and vaccine safety. In a study published by PubMed Central, 1,500 random tweets concerning COVID-19 information, research, and advice were pulled. When this sample was then analyzed, it was found that 1,274 of the original 1,500 were found to be completely false, while the other 226 were partially false. Even more concerningly, it was found that the samples that had proven to be completely false were more likely to be shared and spread to larger audiences due to them often concerning more “hot button” or controversial issues. This was exacerbated to an even further degree if the source of the original misinformation was a verified account. 

As our society adjusts to a digital landscape, we must figure out the best ways to slow down the speed at which people can create and disperse falsified information. This has the ability to harm our world’s knowledge systems, political landscapes, and beliefs in large and harmful ways. Many young adults have noted how older relatives do not have the proper knowledge of how to use the internet or research engines well enough to fact-check social media “sources” at all. 

This means they have to put their trust in the media sources that allow for this public spread of information to make sure systems in place exist to try to fact-check and mitigate the frequency of misinformation on their site, or at least misinformation that has no kind of disclaimer that it is not telling the truth. 

The beginning of this process can be seen in some social media sites like X, formerly known as Twitter, with their “Birdwatch” feature. This allows for crowdsourced fact-checking that will then create an addendum to any post on X that is misinformed, stating that the information is false and even sometimes adding the correct information. This is a good start, but I feel this job should not be left to the random kindness of the public to combat misinformation in the media. Rather, media companies should take it upon themselves to limit the amount of misinformation their websites are home to. The decreasing ability of the general public to tell whether or not they are interacting with false information, combined with the increasing amount of false information on the internet, is a scary reality we have found ourselves in. Making sure we are smart and diligent members of the online community is more important than ever to make sure we are not being taken advantage of by those who would wish to use the desire of those on the internet to take what they are reading at face value.