- Priority Area Media and Information Literacy for Citizens Empowerment
- Year 2023, 2024, 2025
- Country United Kingdom
- Project Status Ongoing
Over the last decade, there has been an acceleration of Media and Information Literacy programmes, many of which have targeted young people and vulnerable communities. However, one crucial constituency that has been overlooked but has a significant impact on making rules about social media and addressing threats and opportunities platforms offer, is judges and policymakers. Research from our team has demonstrated that there are:
- misunderstandings about the impacts of digital tools, including whether they will have the desired effect (e.g. does fact-check to address misinformation impede the spread of offline harms?);
- a lack of awareness and understanding of alternative tools for addressing the genuine challenges of content moderation failures or manipulation of social media;
- misunderstanding about the processes and guidelines of how to engage more effectively with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and social media platforms to address issues information disorder;
- a lack of capacity, technical expertise, and experience with social media and AI works, on the part of policymakers and judges to respond to issues such as disinformation.
Our goal is to equip our end users, namely judges and policymakers, with the necessary information literacy to ensure that when they develop or implement policies, or make and interpret laws, relating to information disorder, they do so with high levels of information literacy and are able to craft responses that are suitable, necessary, and reasonable. Through the support of the EMIF, we will develop an innovative approach to train this group of influencers by establishing the Information and Media Literacy Programme for Judges and Policymakers (InfoLead). This project is a “training of the trainers” and has the potential to significantly shift discourse within Europe about media and information literacy and broader citizen understanding of disinformation.
