We can eliminate fake news by adding a fourth R to Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic: Reporting…
For generations, we’ve taught our children the 3 R’s — Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic.
But for our modern, digital age where content can come in any medium and some to be trusted more than others, there’s a now a new, pressing requirement.
We need our kids to understand how the distribution medium itself has shaped the content they are consuming.
We need to teach them a fourth R — Reporting!
At the most basic level, it’s common sense, we all know a graffiti message is different from a road sign. You wouldn’t use a graffiti sign to navigate with!
But with the internet and digital media, this common sense discernment process becomes much, much trickier and often nuanced.
For instance, reading a Medium.com post is different from reading a newspaper article yet to the untrained eye, they might look and feel the same:
Similar fonts, good design, decent writing, make it that much harder to tell the difference.
Indeed, this medium post, which you are reading now, was written by a single author (me), there was no editorial oversight and no editorial policy that judged whether it was fit for publication.
While this ability for anyone to publish is exhilarating and play-field-levelling there is a flip side that has inherent dangers for individuals and for our societies as a whole. When one person’s personal interpretation of events, can be read with the same impact as that of an editorial team, we all need to be much more aware of what we are reading.
A child, or untrained adult for that matter, who has not learnt the key skills of Reporting - how to dissect content, taking into account the author and the medium, discerning its veracity, the angle, the provenance of a point of view — is in danger of being manipulated.
This manipulation can then lead to terrible, real world consequences, where blood boils over and actions are taken based on misinformation.
For instance:
- Lynch mobs have killed in India over alleged kidnappings shared on WhatsApp — Another Woman Lynched in India After WhatsApp Rumours
- A pattern we see repeated in Nigeria — Like. Share. Kill. Police say false information shared on Facebook is killing people.
- Not to mention an entire genocide catalysed by hate spread via the internet — A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military.
While there is of course a role for moderators, in particular those employed by centralised platforms like Medium, Facebook— they can’t accurately police every piece of content in every society all the time. In particular, they can’t moderate messages on secure person to person, instant messaging platforms like WhatsApp. To do so would require breaking encryption rules and adding the listening apparatus and paranoia of the former East German state. A return to the Stasi? No thank you.
A much better approach is to educate.
If our kids understand that when they read an article on the internet, whether that’s via a browser, social media or instant messenger, how to discern its truth, they will be much better at avoiding misinformation now and when they grow up to be adults.
To achieve this, we need to invest now in universal media literacy — every one of the 7+ billion inhabitants of the planet needs the skill of “Reporting”. It needs to be taught at primary level, alongside the other three R’s.
To do otherwise risks continued repeats of internet rage boiling over into genocide.
