Media Literacy Initiatives Struggle to Combat Rising Misinformation Tide

Students and educators struggle to navigate today’s complex media landscape and politically charged discussions, according to a new report released this month by the Or Initiative, a program dedicated to improving digital literacy and civil discourse skills among young people.

The report, based on interviews with middle and high school students and teachers in New York City and southern California, along with an examination of 84 curriculum models, found that traditional media literacy approaches are inadequate for today’s algorithmically driven digital environment.

“The traditional media literacy skills that they’ve been taught around checking whether the source is credible, looking for an additional source, et cetera, are very poorly matched to algorithmically driven environments and feeds where sources, stories, ideas vanish into a scroll,” said Vikki Katz, executive director of the Or Initiative and professor at Chapman University in California.

The research specifically examined how students and teachers engage with polarizing topics, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Russia-Ukraine war, the January 6 Capitol insurrection, and other divisive current events that appear in students’ social media feeds over extended periods.

Researchers discovered that teens often make critical errors when evaluating information. Some believe a fact is more credible simply because they’ve seen it multiple times in their feed, unaware that algorithms deliberately show users content similar to what they’ve previously engaged with. Others mistakenly identify platforms like TikTok as information sources rather than recognizing them as content distribution channels.

Despite these challenges, students expressed a strong desire to discuss important news events with peers who hold different perspectives. One California high school student named Lia lamented the lack of open conversations, recalling how a teacher preemptively shut down potential discussions about parallels between historical events and current politics.

“I remember one time we were learning about a certain [historical] tariff, which is very similar to the tariff that Trump was implementing. And [my teacher] prefaced, before she taught it, saying: ‘I don’t want anybody to try to make a connection [to Trump] or anything…. I don’t want you to think that I, blah, blah; I just want to preface…’ and kept saying stuff like that,” Lia explained.

Educators, meanwhile, expressed their own concerns about facilitating these discussions. Many want to create safe spaces for evidence-based dialogue but worry about appearing biased or politically motivated. They also reported receiving little guidance from school leadership on navigating these complex conversations.

One New York school leader observed that students have adopted communication styles from social media: “The experience of living in a Twitterized discourse is that you can say anything you want. I’m not sure that teachers are necessarily comfortable or equipped to know how to navigate those conversations when someone comes in using a—Twitter voice, for lack of a better descriptor.”

The report offers several recommendations for educators hoping to facilitate meaningful discussions about contentious topics. Rather than ignoring the digital landscape students inhabit, teachers should ground classroom conversations in evidence while helping students develop critical skills like lateral reading (fact-checking against reputable sources) and “critical ignoring” (deliberately disengaging from low-quality information).

Katz suggests that teachers shouldn’t wait for major news events to practice these skills. Instead, they could start each week by discussing images or stories that dominated students’ social media feeds over the weekend, facilitating nuanced, fact-based discussions that respect different viewpoints.

“The idea isn’t to help students learn how to ‘win a debate,'” Katz explained. Rather, it’s about teaching students to engage “civilly with someone who might have come to a different outcome based on the same evidence” they themselves reviewed.

District and school leaders must also provide clear support for teachers who bring up uncomfortable topics for the sake of open dialogue. Without institutional backing, many educators may continue avoiding these essential conversations.

The stakes are high, according to Katz. Students must learn to “deeply understand issues in the world that matter and that they are going to be left to solve,” she said, “and that they have to know how to talk to each other even when they don’t agree.”

In a world where AI can create convincing fake content, influencers compete with legitimate news organizations, and algorithms reinforce existing beliefs, teaching students to navigate information critically and engage respectfully across differences isn’t just an educational nicety—it’s becoming an essential life skill.