Opinion: Teaching fact-checking won’t be enough in the battle against fake news

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Our approach to combating fake news is wrong.

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When I was a teacher, people often said to me, “We have this great media literacy program” or “We just need to teach people the facts and how to find them” or “If only we could help our students think critically about what read online.” And I keep hearing similar comments now that I’m a media scholar.

I applaud the optimism of those who think these programs will succeed. The problem is that this approach overlooks how individual our interpretations of the world are.

Media literacy has been in provincial educational curricula for more than two decades, and yet fake news and misinformation are flourishing. Recently, a report came out showing that 44 percent of Canadians believe in a conspiracy theory.. That’s almost half of our population.

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But the problem is not just the conspiracy theory. More broadly, public concern over fake news has consistently led to calls to defund the CBC, about which certain members of the Conservative Party like Pierre Poilievre have been outspoken. The harassment of journalists trying to report on the Freedom Convoy protests last February also appeared to be evidence of a growing lack of trust in the Canadian media.

This lack of confidence is not necessarily spontaneous. It can also be the result of actions designed to do just that. For example, the Canadian government has shown concern about Russian disinformation, where false information can have a global impact.

This can be scary, and when we ask what can be done, a common answer is media literacy, which has to do with our ability to understand the accuracy of a news story. How do we look for bias? How do we know what information is correct or incorrect? Who should we trust?

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Our current approach to media literacy seems logical. We teach people how to fact-check content, offer resources, and encourage citizens to think critically about media. However, this approach is based on a flawed premise: If you teach people what steps to take, how the process will work, and how they should think, they will all come to the same conclusion. But we know that this is not the case. Already in 1938 when Orson Welles’ radio show about aliens invading the United States led to some public hysteria that it was actually happening, we knew that people interpret information differently. We see this in discussions with family or friends where, no matter what information you provide, opinions are established, beliefs are solidified, and it will take more than a ranting cousin to change a perspective.

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We can offer the facts and the tools to verify them; but none of this changes the core problem that people interpret information based on their worldview. Recently, a study on conspiracy theorists showed that they used fact-checking practices similar to those being taught to prove their point.

Right now, critical thinking and media literacy are focused on content, but we need programs and research that include a focus on people. We should encourage people to question themselves as well as the content. Our media diets must be diverse and our own beliefs open to expansion.

We must not stop teaching fact-checking skills, but we must also teach people to have an open and self-reflective dialogue with the information they find. Asking why we believe certain things, why others seem to trust something different than us: these habits can help us discover our own biases and interpretations of content. I am not saying that we ignore our beliefs, but rather that we keep them flexible.

I hope that media literacy programs start to focus on understanding our own beliefs rather than primarily fact-checking skills. And I encourage Canadians to do the same.

Scott DeJong is a doctoral student in communications at Concordia University and a Concordia Public Scholar.