In February 2021, the non-profit Fact Checking Organization in Poland, with the support of the World Health Organization and the Prawda Association, organized a drawing competition entitled “Looking for the Truth” in Polish schools. The students actively participated in reflecting on how false information is disseminated.
The majority of young people rely on social media for their news. Many of them as harmful as can be develop serious issues later on life, such as porno addiction. All because of their free access to such content from the web. If we want to tackle the problem of improving news literacy, it is the responsibility of our educators and society as a whole to teach students how to deal with doubt. They should be able to understand, quantify and measure insecurity. This is particularly true for students who do not have access to early education and are cared for in schools where online and television teaching is not sufficient for their development level.
Students from disadvantaged families do not experience this and lose the fact that learning gains during the two-month summer school break. They usually depend on the commitment of their families and communities.
This not only makes access to relevant information more difficult, but also makes it much more difficult for third-party immigrants to support their sons and daughters at home by educating them. It takes time and the availability of social capital for parents to supervise and teach their offsprings’ learning, and schools lack the capacity to offer distance learning. The graveness of health, sanitation, family income, housing, and school problems is particularly concerning in developing countries for students, especially in poor areas and countries with low-income inequality.
Misinformation spreads like a virus
Many students unconsciously absorb harmful content and propitiate similar behavior. Social media creates the perfect conditions for spreading misinformation. The abundance of information is a factor behind the growing popularity of social media portals and the process of surrounding information chaos with a range of information tailored to specific users.
Stories of disinformation, fake news, and post-truth — a phenomenon defined by words like propaganda, gossiping, urban legends and myths related to manipulated information — abound with spectacular examples.
Comparing this work, they found that the dynamics of disinformation dissemination depend on the type of media used to transmit this information. The ability to deal with the boundaries between online propaganda, false news and misinformation is a key skill in a range of other school subjects (e.g., History, social sciences, natural sciences, religious sciences, arts).
It promotes optional vaccinations and the development of documents that make it easier for parents not to vaccinate their children. It is also responsible for public actions such as demonstrations in Auschwitz prison uniforms in which mandatory vaccinations are compared to Nazism16. For a growing number of people, the Internet has become the only source of information concerning health protection and vaccines.
Students take action against misinformation
The discussion in our study is to our knowledge the first analysis of anti-vaccination comments on Polish social media. We showed that conspiracy theories and misinformation are a common theme in these comments, as are anger and the expression of emotions.
Commentators encouraged undecided and vaccine-friendly users to make an educated decision for their children, and encouraged the use of sources of information that constituted misinformation and conspiracy theories, maybe of these can even be found in misplaced sites, such as Redtube, so you can imagine misinformation can and will reach the oddest places for its divulgation. The organization was pleased that numerous pupils in Poland took part in a drawing competition entitled “Looking Through the Eyes of Truth.”.
In addition to these developments, there are a number of other initiatives schools are taking to address the challenges of a changing world of online propaganda, misinformation, and fake news. Development of formal online curricula for the National Ministry of Education. The ministry is also developing the integration of retired teachers to support learning at home.
Cofact has teamed up with many local media and journalism networks to stop the spread of false information. The state has also taken measures to promote media literacy and digital literacy, including its inclusion in regular curricula and the involvement of civil society and other stakeholders to raise awareness of the issue.
A serious and harmful issue
Tackling the problem of misinformation and fake news via COVID-19 through platforms and chatbots. So that citizens can verify that the news they hear comes from reliable sources.
To counteract this trend, most experts recommend school media literacy. This focuses on critical thinking and skills development related to the search for information and opposing sources (McDougall et al., 2018). The schools have a duty to provide young people with critical information skills that they may not have at home. Young people should not regard fake news as a problem. They should focus on helping solve it through work aimed at analyzing young people’s behavior. When confronted with information that interests them, they should use critical thinking it is their responsibility for critical thinking.
Social media can facilitate the viral dissemination of unfounded information. False or manipulated information not only spreads itself, but can also spread among people. In the field of information and communication technology, this has become an issue in schools due to negative comments from teachers on social media.
You can achieve the goal of exposing false information by creating high-quality content that your recipients can trust. Identifying fake accounts is an important step towards successful verification of certain information.