The Role of Educational Content in Raising the Skill of Media Students in Detecting False News on Digital Platforms: A field Study on a Sample of Students from Media Colleges and Departments in Arab Universities

Abstract

The study aimed to test the hypothesis of the relationship between the rates of interest of media education courses in the component of "critical thinking" (at the two levels: knowledge and skill) and the rates of media students' benefit from mechanisms for verifying the credibility of news content on social media platforms, both internal evaluation mechanisms for methods of content delivery, based on An individual's cognitive experiences, or external validation mechanisms through critical comparisons of content. The study relied on the survey method, in addition to the comparative method. Using the questionnaire tool in the process of data collection, the study sample consisted of (150) students from media colleges in Arab universities using the available sample method. The results of the study showed that social media platforms are a basic information and knowledge resource for students of media faculties and departments, and this intensity of use is an important factor that prompted media faculties and departments to include critical thinking courses and media or digital education within the educational content system that they rely on in preparing and the development of a number of basic knowledge and concepts among students. The students seemed affected in their assessment of the types of information most likely to be falsified on communication platforms by their rates of use of these platforms, and it was proven that there are differences between students in evaluating the types of information most likely to lie according to the degree to which they benefit from different types of digital platforms. Evaluate visual information as the most likely information to lie. Students use a number of mechanisms to ensure the credibility of content on social media platforms, especially the comparison mechanism. Then comes the content writing language testing mechanism. It has been proven that the students’ resort to the linguistic verification mechanism of content credibility has a significant relationship to the degree of students’ comprehension of knowledge related to critical thinking, and that resorting to the “comparison” mechanism in verifying the credibility of the content is related to the degree of students’ comprehension of the elements of critical thinking.