This briefing explores one question: how effective are media and information literacy programmes in Africa, South America, the UK, and elsewhere in enabling people to identify misinformation?
Overall, we find that media and information literacy programmes show great promise. Interventions with young and adult participants, including long-term classroom training or just short trainings online, were all able to improve audiences’ ability to think more critically about the information they encounter.
We are still far from finding a formula that works in every case. Differences in the populations, issues, styles of intervention and methods of evaluation adopted make it hard to generalise about a single most effective strategy. That said, one conclusion is that media and information literacy interventions can equip fact checkers, educators and civil society partners with another means of fighting bad information.
A meta-analysis of 51 interventions indicates that media and information literacy initiatives increased participants’ knowledge, criticism and awareness of the influence of the media.
Interventions with more sessions had stronger positive effects, while those that tried to teach multiple lessons in fewer sessions performed worse.
Media and information literacy interventions can take many forms, from classroom interventions with children to podcasts and online training for adults, and even newsroom-style games harnessing the power of play.
We need more evidence to assess the outcomes of these interventions over time. One study reviewed here indicates that knowledge is retained a year later. We would need a larger sample of studies to confirm this finding.
We also need more research to determine how the lessons imparted in media trainings translate into real world behaviours.
Overall however, the diversity of participants, interventions and topics investigated suggest that fact checkers can widen their fight against misinformation by teaching audiences how spot and resist misinformation, and work with others in the education sector to do so.
We reviewed a total of six studies; two of them meta-analyses. They were mainly original studies, reviews and surveys published in peer-reviewed journals, as well as reports from non-partisan organisations. Study populations included students, teachers, parents and the general population in Uganda, Argentina, UK and elsewhere. We acknowledge that this is not an exhaustive literature review and look forward to refining this area of inquiry with input from stakeholders.