Combatting Visual Fake News with a Professional Fact-Checking Tool in Education in France, Romania, Spain and Sweden

Thomas Nygren,Divina Frau-Meigs,Mona Guath,Carl-Anton Werner Axelsson

doi:10.3390/info12050201

Thomas Nygren, Divina Frau-Meigs + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/info12050201

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Abstract

Educational and technical resources are regarded as central in combating disinformation and safeguarding democracy in an era of ‘fake news’. In this study, we investigated whether a professional fact-checking tool could be utilised in curricular activity to make pupils more skilled in determining the credibility of digital news and to inspire them to use digital tools to further their transliteracy and technocognition. In addition, we explored how pupils’ performance and attitudes regarding digital news and tools varied across four countries (France, Romania, Spain, and Sweden). Our findings showed that a two-hour intervention had a statistically significant impact on teenagers’ abilities to determine the credibility of fake images and videos. We also found that the intervention inspired pupils to use digital tools in information credibility assessments. Importantly, the intervention did not make pupils more sceptical of credible news. The impact of the intervention was greater in Romania and Spain than among pupils in Sweden and France. The greater impact in these two countries, we argue, is due to cultural context and the fact that pupils in Romania and Spain learned to focus less on ’gut feelings’, increased their use of digital tools, and had a more positive attitude toward the use of the fact-checking tool than pupils in Sweden and France.

Highlights

Faced with the challenges that are caused by information disorder and infodemics, there is a demand for educational interventions to support citizens and safeguard democracy [1,2,3]
This gap between professionals and the general public is further widened by the evolution of disinformation itself; fake news is text-based, and increasingly imagebased, especially on the social media used by young people, and so debunking news requires more sophisticated approaches
We investigated whether a two-hour educational intervention in four European countries, using a computer-based tool that was designed for professional fact-checkers, could stimulate pupils’ visual literacy and make them better at determining the credibility of digital news

Summary

Introduction

Faced with the challenges that are caused by information disorder and infodemics, there is a demand for educational interventions to support citizens and safeguard democracy [1,2,3]. Disinformation—defined as inaccurate, manipulative, or falsified information that is deliberately designed to mislead people—is intentionally difficult to detect This poses a challenge for professional fact-checkers in mainstream media and digital platforms, and for media literacy specialists, whose expertise does not extend much beyond imparting basic source verification strategies [3]. The journalistic profession has been able to benefit from a growing number of fact-checking initiatives that have generated digital tools and novel responses to infodemics. Such tools have not broadly reached the general public, which has mostly been left to its own devices. This gap between professionals and the general public is further widened by the evolution of disinformation itself; fake news is text-based, and increasingly imagebased, especially on the social media used by young people, and so debunking news requires more sophisticated approaches

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