Investing in U.S. Media Literacy Initiatives

In June 2020, the Poynter Institute expanded its partnership with Facebook to launch the MediaWise for Seniors program, teaching older Americans how to find reliable information and spot inaccurate information about the presidential election as well as COVID-19. This moves the MediaWise program beyond teens and college students to older Americans, teaching them key digital media literacy and fact-checking skills to ensure they make decisions based on fact and not fiction.

Through this partnership, MediaWise will host a series of Facebook Lives teaching media literacy, working with Poynter’s PolitiFact, create two engaging online classes for seniors on Poynter’s e-learning platform, News University, and launch a social media campaign teaching MediaWise tips across platforms.

Older Americans are increasingly engaged on social media, with more than 40% of people over the age of 65 actively using social media platforms. As the senior population spends more time on social media, they’re exposed to more potential misinformation and false news stories. As Facebook launches the largest voter information campaign in US history, part of that is helping everyone from first time voters to those who vote in every election spot election misinformation for themselves.

In October, we announced our efforts to help protect the 2020 US elections, which included an initial investment of $2 million to support media literacy projects that empower people to make informed decisions on what to read and share — both on Facebook and across the web.

Today we’re sharing more on these initiatives and the organizations we’re partnering with to help people better understand what they see online. To learn more, jump to each of these sections below:

MediaWise First Time Voter Project | News Co/Lab Video Series And Free Online Course | PEN America ‘Knowing The News’ Program | Facebook Digital Literacy Library

The Poynter Institute is launching a new national media literacy program called the MediaWise Voter Project (#MVP) to reach students who will be voting for the first time in the 2020 election. The nonpartisan project will seek to reach two million American college students, teaching them to be prepared and better informed about the media and information they consume before they head to the polls on Election Day.

The MediaWise Voter Project will create an awareness campaign and host in-person media literacy training sessions at college campuses and other places young people gather across the country.

MediaWise will also create a first-time voter guide to teach students how to responsibly consume media and information, how to become more informed voters and how to learn reliable information about the candidates.

This project will target first-time voters on social media and online platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. MediaWise project staff and Campus Correspondents, a select group of college students, will also hold trainings on college campuses through Election Day. They will also visit college campuses and other places young people gather to hold bootcamp media literacy trainings, starting in April and leading up to Election Day.

And, this fall, MVP will start a cross-country bus tour where the Campus Correspondents will conduct media literacy trainings for their peers at college football tailgates and other events.

MediaWise holds its kick-off event January 24 at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, where they plan on training approximately 200 students. There will be a second training at University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire on January 31.

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The News Co/Lab at the Arizona State University Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication will develop a multi-platform suite of media literacy resources for adults -- specifically for senior citizens, first-time voters and the general voting public.

The project will be anchored by three videos, co-produced with Arizona PBS, that will air on Arizona PBS. They will also be used on social media channels, including Facebook and Instagram, as stand-alone lessons. Another component of the project is a three- to four-week open online course, free and available to everyone, that aims to help people navigate news online. Each week, the course will feature multiple videos from the project, as well as supplementary videos, readings, quizzes and discussion. The videos, course and website will also serve as the foundation for in-person and online events. These events will be a resource for community influencers, librarians and the general population.

“We can all agree that we need to foster and support better information sources in this age of overwhelming supply, too much of which is misinformation,” said Dan Gillmor, co-founder of the News Co/Lab. “We also need to get better ourselves at sorting out what we can trust, and understanding our roles as part of a digital ecosystem in which we’re sharers and creators as well as consumers. Facebook's support for the project helps us do this at scale.”

The News Co/Lab aims to provide multiple opportunities for people to learn more about media literacy -- for example, people can watch the videos on PBS, view shorter clips on social media, find the resources page online and browse through the offerings. One goal is to encourage people who’ve used their materials to become evangelists for media literacy in their families and communities.

Examples of information taught in the course include research on why consumers fall for false news and tips for spotting misinformation; finding trustworthy sources of local information; persuasion, propaganda and advertising; how targeted information works online; tips for using, sharing and commenting on news and information; and creating media with integrity.

“These are lifelong skills people need, but it is especially important as we head toward the November 2020 election,” said Kristy Roschke, managing director of the News Co/Lab. “The civic health of our country depends on an informed public, which will be making important decisions about our future in the coming months and years.”

The video series will begin airing in late spring/early summer 2020 with online resources available early summer. News Co/Lab is aiming to host the open online course in early fall. The Facebook Journalism Project was an initial funder of the launch of News Co/Lab in 2017.

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PEN America, a literary and free expression organization, will build on its work in fighting disinformation and promoting media literacy with the launch of a new program called Knowing the News, a series of activities in ten cities across the country that will help give news consumers a better understanding of the journalistic process and equip communities with tools to assess the trustworthiness of information they receive.

The program will include a series of workshops and community field trips to local newsrooms. The workshops will give participants an understanding of the basics of professional journalism, help individuals assess their own information and news diet to understand what information they consume and how, as well as provide tactics and tools to defend against disinformation and become healthier news consumers. Field trips to local newsrooms will provide community members an opportunity to engage directly with journalists and news editors working in their communities and to better understand how the news gets made.

"Beginning with the 2017 release of our first major report on disinformation — Faking News: Fraudulent News and the Fight for Truth — PEN America has stressed solutions that empower individuals to be more discerning consumers of information," said Suzanne Nossel, Chief Executive Officer of PEN America. "We need to reinvent civic literacy for the 21st century by reasserting the inviolable position of truth in our public discourse, and equipping Americans of all ages with the tools and knowledge to distinguish fact from falsehood. Witnessing multiple assaults on the truth, and the willful enabling of deceit, PEN America will draw on our knowledge and expertise to equip writers, readers and allies to combat the corrosive effect of disinformation in 2020 and beyond. We are grateful to be able to carry out this urgent programming as we see fit and during a critical test of our country's democracy."

PEN America's year-long slate of activities will work with community organizations, newsrooms, Spanish-language and older adult constituents, as well as local libraries in PEN America’s newly launched chapter cities of Austin, Texas; Birmingham, Alabama; Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas; Detroit, Michigan; the Piedmont region of North Carolina; and Tulsa, Oklahoma; as well as San Diego, California; Atlanta, Georgia; Denver, Colorado; and Chicago, Illinois.

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We’ve included a new series of media literacy lessons in the Digital Literacy Library. These lessons are drawn from the Youth and Media team at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, which has made them available for free worldwide under a Creative Commons license. The lessons, created for middle and high school educators, are designed to be interactive and cover topics ranging from assessing the quality of the information online to more technical skills like reverse image search.

The new lessons include:

• What Is Verification? Participants will learn what identification verification is and why it’s important for media consumers to verify what they read and view.
• The Verification Steps Participants will learn about a 5-step checklist they can use to verify where a piece of information comes from, the source, date, location, and motivation of a media image or video.
• Versions of Media Texts This course covers what a ‘scrape’ is and explains why this type of media can make the verification process more difficult during breaking news events.
• Metadata This lesson is about how metadata relates to the news verification process by viewing an image’s metadata on three different metadata viewers.
• Reverse Image Search Students will learn how to verify media images by conducting a reverse image search.

Additional media literacy lessons will be made available later this year. All lessons are free to download and can be found on the Digital Literacy Library and Berkman Klein’s Digital Literacy Resource Platform.

The internet made it possible for people to connect with each other in new and significant ways. Developing media literacy skills is vital to ensuring that people can continue to engage with meaningful content and trustworthy information. We’re excited to partner with leading experts and organizations across the country and support these new initiatives, which will help empower people to make better decisions about what they choose to read, trust, and share.

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