Fighting Misinformation: Digital Media Literacy

Overview

The internet gives you great power and with it comes great responsibility. Before you hit “share,” “forward,” or even “like,” do your due diligence on that headline. Your friends, family, and contact lists deserve it.

Americans spend hundreds, even thousands, of hours a week engaging with a wide range of media sources—TV, computers, tablets, radios, MP3 players, cell phones, newspapers, magazines, books, and more. Through these, we constantly access a wide range of platforms and media, from news to novels to Twitter feeds to email, and much more. Because we are continuously taking in information from a variety of sources, we are under constant threat from those who would intentionally (or accidentally) misinform—from foreign operatives, advertisers, politicians, and general scammers to our own friends and family. We all experience a near-constant barrage of incoming information. Combine that with the human brain’s reaction to stress or fear, and conditions are ripe for the spread of misinformation. To better prepare you to defuse this threat, IREX (International Research & Exchanges Board) has teamed up with The Great Courses to provide a guide for navigating this tricky landscape with Fighting Misinformation: Digital Media Literacy, an eight-lecture course designed to arm you with the skills you need to be a savvy media consumer. Tara Susman-Peña, a senior technical advisor, and her colleagues at IREX, Mehri Druckman and Nina Oduro, will lead you step by step through the history, evolution, science, and impact of misinformation, helping you to develop the skills you need to combat fakes, stereotypes, and frauds within every kind of media source.

Course Structure

01: The Misinformation Threat

Democracy depends on a well-informed, discerning electorate, equipped to judge the validity of the information available. In this first lecture, Ms. Susman-Peña and her esteemed colleagues at IREX delve into the concepts of misinformation and disinformation, and explain the critical ways in which falsehoods, slander, prejudice, and bad ideas can threaten American democracy.

Duration: 23 min

02: The Evolution of Media and Misinformation

Options for news sources have expanded exponentially in the digital age. Content is at our fingertips from traditional news sources, but anyone can now be a publisher of information on the internet, and computer algorithms are influencing what you see every day. How do we sort the legitimate news from false, misleading, or opinion content? Travel with your instructors through the history of communication technology as you learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Duration: 27 min

03: Misinformation and the Brain

Humans often fail to critically evaluate the world around us. Take a close look at the machinations of misinformation, and how it can be used in conjunction with our natural cognitive biases to lead us astray. Learn about the role of reality distortion, the “Barnum effect,” selective recall, and confirmation bias in misinformation, and how techniques like “Label to Disable” and “Care before You Share” can help.

Duration: 24 min

04: Seeing Through Visual Misinformation

Visual images have been selected, edited, reframed—even manipulated—before they reach us, often in ways designed to elicit an emotional response. Explore the impact of reuse and mislabeling, photo selection effect, and deliberate alteration or forgery to affect how we see and feel about an image. Then, employ Label to Disable to diffuse the threat of visual misinformation.

Duration: 22 min

05: Countering Fakes and Stereotypes in Media

How do fake information and stereotypes combine to produce an especially damaging type of misinformation? Fake information, including fake social media accounts, fake chat messages, and fake reviews, can infiltrate our electronic lives. See how stereotypes can magnify the damage done by fake information, and consider the difficult questions presented by the human tendency toward bias.

Duration: 28 min

06: Journalistic Verification Skills

Your ability to differentiate between fact and opinion and to judge the quality of media content is vital to a functional democracy. You do not have to go it alone. Learn how the professionals test and verify information, as well as what websites, plug-ins, and tactics can help you determine journalistic integrity and accuracy of information.

Duration: 27 min

07: Assessing Science and Health News

How can we make good decisions about important health and science issues if we cannot trust the news we get about them? Scientific knowledge, by its very nature, is always changing, but using some simple methods described in this segment, you can ascertain the validity of health and science information.

Duration: 26 min

08: Technology, Misinformation, and the Future

The rise of new technology has led to a simultaneous, exponential increase in misinformation—locally, nationally, and even internationally. Learn how artificial intelligence and augmented reality programs are being used to spread misinformation, and how media literacy, Label to Disable, and Care before You Share can be used to combat its spread.

Duration: 28 min