Dealing with propaganda, misinformation and fake news
It is vital for schools to provide students with a solid education on media and information literacy as part of the curriculum.
Teachers must be well-trained in the subject to empower students with the necessary competences to critically understand and assess information reported by all forms of media.
Projects in partnership with national and local authorities and media organisations are encouraged.
Facts & figures
Two thirds of EU citizens report coming across fake news at least once a week.[1]
Over 80% of EU citizens say they see fake news both as an issue for their country and for democracy in general.[2]
Half of EU citizens aged 15-30 say they need critical thinking and information skills to help them combat fake news and extremism in society.[3]
What is propaganda, misinformation and fake news?
The terms ‘propaganda’, ‘misinformation’ and ‘fake news’ often overlap in meaning. They are used to refer to a range of ways in which sharing information causes harm, intentionally or unintentionally – usually in relation to the promotion of a particular moral or political cause or point of view.
It is possible to separate out three clearly different uses of information which fall into this category:
- Mis-information - false information shared with no intention of causing harm
- Dis-information - false information shared intentionally to cause harm
- Mal-information - true information shared intentionally to cause harm.[4]
Although none of these phenomena are new, they have taken on new significance recently with the widespread availability of sophisticated forms of information and communication technology. The sharing of text, images, videos, or links online, for example, allows information to go viral within hours.
Why is propaganda, misinformation and fake news important at school?
Since information and communication technology is so central to their lives nowadays, young people are particularly vulnerable to propaganda, misinformation and fake news. Young people spend a significant amount of their time watching television, playing online games, chatting, blogging, listening to music, posting photos of themselves and searching for other people with whom to communicate online. They rely heavily on information circulated online for their knowledge of the world and how they perceive reality. Many parents do not have sufficient technical competence to keep up with their children’s online activity, or educate them about the risks they might be facing. Schools, therefore, have a duty to provide young people with the critical and information skills which they cannot access at home.
“The significant rise of fake news as propaganda in recent years makes it critical that students have the skills they need to identify truth and discern bias.”[5]
The ability to respond critically to online propaganda, misinformation and fake news is more than a safe-guarding tool, however, it is also an important democratic competence in its own right. Analytical and critical thinking, and knowledge and critical understanding of the world, including the role of language and communication lie at the heart of the Council of Europe Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture. They are central to Digital Citizenship Education and Media and Information Literacy.[6]
“School is the one place where it is absolutely crucial to train future citizens to understand, to criticise and to create information. It is in schools that the digital citizen must begin and maintain constant critical thinking in order to attain meaningful participation in his or her community.”[7]
The ability to handle off-line as well as online propaganda, misinformation and fake news is also a key skill in a number of other school subjects, e.g., History, Social Studies, Science, Religious Studies and Art. Young people may study the use of nationalistic and patriotic slogans, or so-called ‘atrocity propaganda’ in WW1 in History, for example; or art forms designed to support particular ideologies in Art lessons.
Another area in which information and communication technology is becoming an issue for schools is through adverse comments made about teachers and schools on social media. Schools are finding that parents and others increasingly turn to social media when they have a dispute or disagreement with their school, e.g., over school rules, school policies, or staff behaviour. How to handle online critical or defamatory comments or campaigns of this sort has become a matter of concern for leaders and managers in some schools.[8]
What are the challenges?
There are a number of challenges facing schools wishing to take propaganda, misinformation and fake news seriously as an educational or social issue:
- Teachers’ own online activity and area of experience is often quite limited and frequently lags behind that of their students. This can make them reticent to take on this area of teaching and learning without a significant commitment to professional development.
- The speed with which technology and young peoples’ online activity changes makes it difficult for teachers to keep up-to-date with recent developments. Even professional development programmes can go rapidly out-of-date.
- It can be difficult finding a discrete slot in the school timetable where issues relating to the creation and sharing of information can be taught. While aspects may be raised in a number of subjects, it can be a problem finding a space in an over-full curriculum where the phenomenon can be dealt with head-on as an issue in its own right.
- The description ‘fake news’ does not mean there is such a category as ‘true’ news. All news is a selection and written to suit a particular audience for a particular purpose. Providing the depth of analysis and sophisticated skills that do justice to this topic can be a challenge for some schools, especially in terms of teacher competence and training.
“States should take measures to promote media and digital literacy, including by covering these topics as part of the regular school curriculum and by engaging with civil society and other stakeholders to raise awareness about these issues.”[9]
How can schools get active?
Providing training for teachers on media and information literacy is the key to raising the profile of the issue in schools. Even though it may have a tendency to date, training can at least alert teaching staff to the importance of this area of learning for their students. The more important teachers see the area, the more they will feel the need to continuously up-date their skills themselves.
While it is important to recruit as many teachers as possible to this work, it can be more effective in the long run to start by appointing an individual teacher, or a small team, to lead on media and information literacy in the school. This element of specialist expertise can be charged with:
- Keeping staff up to date with new developments in information and communication technology
- Training them in strategies for handling propaganda, misinformation and fake news
- Helping them integrate these issues into the curriculum of different subjects
- Leading on school-policy development and action planning in this area.
In addition to these sorts of developments, there are a number of other initiatives a school can take to meet the challenges of the rapidly changing world of online propaganda, misinformation and fake news. These include:
- Special days or events in school on the subject of propaganda, misinformation or fake news as a way of overcoming the problems of an over-crowded formal curriculum
- Peer education initiatives in which older students instruct and counsel younger students in the safe handling of information they access in the media
- Partnerships with outside professionals or companies with expertise in this area, e.g., journalists, IT companies, universities
- Virtual links with schools in other regions or countries enabling students to get a different perspective on news and current affairs
- Recruiting parents with expertise in information and communication technology to help with school policy development or work alongside teaching staff to enrich student learning.
[1] Flash Eurobarometer 464 , 2018
[3] Flash Eurobarometer 455, 2018
[4] Wardle & Derakhshan, H., 2017. Information Disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making. Strasbourg, France: Council of Europe.
[5] When is fake news propaganda?, Facing History and Ourselves, 2018
[6] Digital Citizenship Education Handbook, 2019
[8] Council of Europe: Managing Controversy: a whole school training tool, 2017
[9] OSCE: Joint declaration on freedom of expression and “fake news”, disinformation and propaganda
Resources on Dealing with Propaganda, misinformation and fake news
Related schools projects
Address: via Duca degli Abruzzi, 17 - 25124 Brescia
Country: Italy
Project: Make the Web a better place
Working language during the project:
- English / Italian
Themes of the Council of Europe campaign “FREE to SPEAK, SAFE to LEARN - Democratic Schools for All” covered:
- Preventing violence and bullying
- Dealing with propaganda, misinformation and fake news
Competences from the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (CDC) addressed and where / how they were integrated:
- Valuing human dignity and human rights
This value underlies the whole project but is especially related to the theme Preventing violence and bullying, which are clearly both violations of human rights. - Autonomous learning skills
These skills are connected with the theme Dealing with propaganda, misinformation and fake news, whose main aim in our project is to test the reliability of the various sources of information and to assess them for possible distortion or bias. - Civic mindedness
This attitude of civic duty stems from both the themes selected in our project, in which the students are educated to have an interest in the affairs and concerns of the community
Target group age range:
- 15-19
Level of education:
- Upper secondary education
Short description of the project:
This project is centred on two of the six themes of the” Free to Speak, Safe to Learn - Democratic Schools for All” project, i.e. ‘Preventing violence and bullying’ and ‘Dealing with propaganda, misinformation and fake news’, which appear to be complementary to the initiatives developed at our school following national guidelines and recommendations.
Before going into details, it may be useful to know that the five-year curriculum of Italian upper-secondary school is divided into three levels (‘primo + secondo biennio’ + ‘quinto anno’), depending on the students’ age: 15-16, 17-18 and 19-year-olds.
In our project, the theme of ‘Preventing violence and bullying’ is mainly aimed at the younger students of the first level, whereas the theme ‘Misinformation, propaganda and fake news’ is intended for older students.
This division is due to the outcomes of a seminar organised in October 2018 in Milan by the Catholic University CREMIT (Research Centre on Education for Media and IT), whose title in English would be “Cyber-adolescents: risks and opportunities for young Internet users”.
The experts of the seminar painted the issue as the fearful picture of young teenagers being victims of the dark sides of the Net, including violence and cyberbullying. In parallel, they stressed the importance of teachers’ professional intervention to counteract these risks.
On the 5th February 2019 our school joined the celebrations of international “Safer Internet Day”, devoting some English classes to analysing the materials featured on the sites selected by the Ministry of Education for the purpose. Several follow-up activities, such as questionnaires and personal comments on the materials displayed by the above-mentioned sites, were assigned to the students as homework.
To integrate this institutional phase, leaflets of the “Free to Speak, Safe to Learn” project were distributed in the classes and the students were given the task of discussing them in teams.
As regards the older students, “Safer Internet Day” was the occasion to make them familiar with the CDC model of 20 competences, to let them appreciate the conceptual work behind the practice aimed at spreading a democratic culture.
Some weeks later, special meetings with police officers in charge of cybercrime were organised for younger students during the curricular classes; on these occasions, teachers were requested to leave and allow the pupils to interact freely with the police about the issue.
Another important activity for the younger students consisted in joining the national competition ‘The Olympics of videogames - Games@School’ launched by the Ministry of Education; in the final phase, a special prize was awarded to our school team of 15-year-old boys, who designed a videogame entitled “Un’avventura parallela per combattere il bullismo” (‘A parallel adventure for fighting bullying’).
The second theme of the “Free to Speak, Safe to Learn” project in our project - Dealing with propaganda, misinformation and fake news - is addressed to 17-19-year-old students, who by that age are likely to possess some of the competences necessary for dealing with the issue of information.
This phase consisted in several initiatives at school, carried out mainly in mid-February 2019 during the “Copernicus’ days” (after the school name) - a period when regular classes are replaced by seminars, courses and meetings to discuss cultural and up-to-date topics. The whole school community contributed, including students, parents and experts from outside the school.
Among others, a conference entitled ‘FAQ the fakes’ was delivered by two external experts.
In addition, a 10-hour course on fake news has been organised for the students on a voluntary basis during extra-curricular time. The focus was on making the students aware of the different features of fake and reliable news, by teaching them how to interpret the language of mass media and face the issues connected with the manipulation of news. The course included a final test, consisting in the assessment of two homepages, two statements and the excerpt of an article.
Aims/objectives
Our final objective is to form students who ideally, in the long run, will become active citizens capable of holding up the values of a democratic society.
This ambitious aim is only possible if students use critical thinking, an attitude they can be endowed with through education. As a natural consequence, they are expected to reject any form of violence, including online violence, along with being capable of judging the quality of information and of detecting propaganda and misinformation.
Expected results/outcomes
Students are expected to become more and more involved in the activities of the project and to regard them as an important part of their educational experience. The project will hopefully represent one of the pillars of next school years’ mandatory new subject ‘Citizenship and constitutional law’.
Moreover, as English has been the working language on many occasions, a tangible increase in the foreign language competence is expected.
Changes
The students are genuinely eager to explore a topic which is central to their interests, and which enables them to show their competence. As a result of the activities connected with the project, they are progressively becoming aware of the benefits of adopting an active attitude when using the Internet.
Overall, the younger students have proactively taken part in the activities revolving around the theme Preventing violence and bullying. It is clear also that they enjoy having the guidance and support of their teachers as far as a safe use of the web is concerned.
As regards the theme Dealing with misinformation, propaganda and fake news, although the process appears slow, some students are inclined to adopt a new critical attitude, which is one of the main aims of our project.
Challenges you faced
So far it has been easier to deal with the theme Preventing violence and bullying than with the second one - Dealing with propaganda, misinformation and fake news.
The reason is likely to be found in the students’ awareness of the potential menace of online bullying. Indeed, they are less alert to the arguably disruptive effects of relying on the Internet as their only source of information. Although it may sound surprising, when confronted with an audience of teenager students it often proves pointless to argue in favour of the importance of multiple and varied sources for reliable information.
For this reason, the Masterclass on ‘Old and new media and fake news’, offered by the CoE for its 70th anniversary, is a valuable opportunity that has been taken up by the project coordinator to cope with the issue.
Time-frame of the project:
The project has been running since the end of 2018, throughout the 2019 school year.
At the moment there is no definite deadline, as the themes of the project will have more importance in Italian secondary schools as a result of recent guidelines by the Ministry of Education.
From next September onwards, a new cross-curricular subject – known as “Citizenship and constitutional law” – will become compulsory, after having been tested during this year’s final exams.
Secondary schools are consequently on the lookout for new content to be able to teach this subject and undoubtedly the themes and materials of the present project are appropriate for this aim.
Council of Europe materials on citizenship and human rights education used while preparing or implementing your practice:
- Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture
