Developing digital and media literacy skills

Although they started as a place to socialize online, social media platforms have increasingly become a place where people get their news worldwide. According to a 2022 Pew Research Center study, approximately 70 percent of Americans get at least some news from social media platforms. Concerns have risen as more people turn to social media to get news. While some information on social media platforms comes from trustworthy news outlets, other news sources are unreliable, misleading, and even inaccurate.

Scammers adopt fake identities and use them to defraud people using texts, emails, social media sites, ecommerce sites, dating apps, and banking apps. Scammers can operate from almost anywhere in the world and in most cases victims have little chance of getting their money back.

It can be hard to know what to believe, especially when what looks or sounds like a legitimate news story is tainted with bias and opinion or is riddled with flat-out lies and disinformation. Media bias and disinformation are two different things, but they often share the same purpose: to manipulate how members of the public think and act rather than allow people to make up their own minds based solely on the facts.

Though experts disagree about the specific meaning of the term digital literacy, it is usually used to refer to a variety of skills, including the ability to find content online, to create digital content, to communicate digitally, and-perhaps most important-to evaluate what is found online for accuracy and trustworthiness.