For Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, social media - especially YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat - has become their source of information about the world, eclipsing traditional news outlets. In a survey of more than 1,000 young people ages 13 to 18, 8 in 10 said they encounter conspiracy theories in their social media feeds each week, yet only 39% reported receiving instruction in evaluating the claims they saw there.
We built our Civic Online Reasoning program to address this gap.
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When we launched the program in 2018, digital literacy was a catchall that included everything from editing and uploading videos to cyberbullying and sexting. "Checking the credibility of sources" was just one criterion among many buried in a list of desired outcomes.
We narrowed the focus of our program to skills essential to being an informed citizen, such as "lateral reading" - that is, using the full context of the internet to judge the quality of a claim, ideati
College students & misinformation: teaching fact-checking 101 https://inquirygroup.substack.com/p/factchecking101 #education #LateralReading