Misinformation Spreading in 2022
Can you tell what’s real and what’s fake?
I stumbled upon an article on wired.com about a photoshopped meme that seemingly circulated online as a cynical joke amongst one online community, but ended up going viral when a Facebook group called ‘Vets for Trump,’ shared it with the caption:
“#Seattleseahawks — no more NFL.”
The photo surfaced in 2016 when many professional athletes protested police brutality by remaining seated for the national anthem during football games.
The photo is fake, but within 24 hours, it was shared, liked, and commented on roughly 10,000 times. The engagement on the post was fueled by outrage from radically agitated people all over the country saying things like “Maybe he’ll burn his damn leg off,” and “for sure he’ll burn in hell.”
Day by day, social tech mediums are continuing to exponentially expand.
Today we have access to vast databases of information that at one point were available only to limited groups of people.
Communication and information sharing in general have drastically changed in the past ~25 years.
Information that used to require someone physically seeking it through a library, or research center is available to anyone [with internet access] within seconds.
The accesibility of information is amazing for our generation and generations to come in that there has been a shift in knowledge holding and gatekeeping.
Withholding information and knowledge has been used numerous times throughout history to control disadvantaged groups of people; and living in a time period where we have so much information within reach is a privilege in itself.
However, access to information does not equate to knowledge.
Misinformation in mass media isn’t a new concept. People have been using misleading titles & headlines to attract audience attention for centuries.
As new media platforms emerge, more creative forms of deception form along with them.
There are a multitude of cultural truisms that make people more susceptible to accepting, and/or simply not questioning certain information that is presented to them. (i.e: if someone has been deceived by news sources in the past, they may no longer trust what is shared on the news; thus, missing messages that they actually need to be aware of .)
Excsessive mass messaging typically leads to one of two reactions:
- People believe they are more efficacious at information processing than they really are.
OR
2. People get overwhelmed at how much information is being processed, and give up on processing it at all.
Media literacy education is vital to our society’s future well-being. According to the Media Education Manifesto by David Buckingham:
“Rather than simply warning students about the various horrors that await them online, they need to understand the wider context.”
He goes on to explain how ideal media literacy education classes will have a foundational curriculum that outlines:
- Media production processes, and the labor that is involved to produce mass messaging content.
- Ethos, or how credibility is established in general.
- The history of media law & regulation.
- Media business & advertising.
Misinformation spreading isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
🤷🏽♀️
Human attention, viewership, & engagement converts to $$$$ for paid advertisers. Many mass media platforms are free to use, but these platforms are still businesses that exist to make profit, no matter how much they attempt to minimize their commercial intent.
Exciting information gets more attention.
Exciting information doesn’t necessarily mean it is true.
And so… the cycle continues.
Based on a media literacy news index by medialiteracynow.org, As of 2019, The United States ranks 15th in media literacy amongst 44 countries examined.
Media literacy will not solve all of our problems, but it is a foundational start in the right direction.
I’ll end this post with a quote from David Buckingham, a scholar, author, and Emeritus Professor at Loughborough University, and Visiting Professor at Kings College London. He is also the founder and director of the Centre for the Study of Children, Youth, and Media.
The emphasis on media literacy is happening at the same time as governments are backing away from regulation. They are leaving media and communications to the operations of the commercial market — partly because they seem to believe that they can no longer control what is happening, but also because they implicitly believe that markets will provide. And the problems that may arise — well, they become the responsibility of the individual. People have to regulate their own use of media, because governments no longer see this as their role: hence ‘media literacy’.
— Media Education in the Digital Age: An Interview with David Buckingham For publication in Sociologia della Comunicazione, 2021.
My comments are open for discussion. What do you think about the future of media literacy education?
Until next time,
Natt✨
Here are the consecutive links to my sources hyperlinked throughout:
https://www.amazon.com/Media-Education-Manifesto-David-Buckingham/dp/1509535888
https://ddbuckingham.files.wordpress.com/2021/06/sociologia-della-communicazione-2021.pdf
