Nieman Foundation at Harvard
The growing stream of reporting on and data about fake news, misinformation, partisan content, and news literacy is hard to keep up with. This weekly roundup offers the highlights of what you might have missed.
Data & Society released a pair of reports this week — one on fake news, the other on media literacy. Nothing shocking here, but the fake news report does a good job of describing how the two conflicting definitions of “fake news” symbolize a broader schism between scholars/researchers and the right-wing media. On the one hand, that’s kind of a “duh” point; on the other, seeing it put starkly as a right-wing-media-vs.-scholarly-community problem is a good reminder of why this issue is so thorny and complicated.
[The first definition], “fake news” as critique of “mainstream media,” is an extension of existing critiques of the media industry made by conservative leaders or media figures. The second, “fake news” as problematic content, is a position advocated by scholars and media-oriented civil society organizations that seek to differentiate “fake news” from “real news” and classify different types of “fake news,” particularly as it is circulated over social media and search engines…
The interaction between two communities, both using the phrase “fake news” to stake claims of legitimacy of their sources over others, makes uses of the term particularly fraught.
The media literacy report, meanwhile, notes that most media literacy programs center around individual responsibility “rather than the roles of the community, state, institutions, or developers of technology”; varying initiatives also address the problem in very different ways, “which could indicate the vibrancy of the field or risk incoherence.” And though members of both political parties may say they support media literacy initiatives, “Lemish & Lemish (1997), when evaluating media literacy in Israel, reached a conclusion relevant to the current media environment in the U.S., that policymakers saw the media from their ideological perspective and advocated for media literacy education that would align with those ideologies. Challenges of ideology, funding, and national coherence limit the potential of media literacy initiatives in the U.S.”
One open question, the researchers note, is: “What is the political identity of media literacy in the U.S. during a hyperpartisan moment?” It makes me wonder if the concept of media literacy — the act of teaching it — will become partisan in the way the whole concept of fact-checking has, or if media literacy efforts in schools can somehow remain exempt from this. I discussed this a little bit on Twitter with Mike Caulfield, head of the Digital Polarization Initiative of the American Democracy Project, which teaches web literacy to undergrads. He posted a rough outline of how his initiative works in the classroom.
The biggest risk to us right now is that students grow up in a world where they think nothing is trustworthy. And I think we are building trust in the particular way we teach this.
— Mike Caulfield is tired, so tired. (@holden) February 22, 2018
“Changing the narrative around kids to something more positive.” A lot of the fears around the fake news phenomenon do come back to kids: Are they going to be able to distinguish between what’s true and what isn’t, and will they even care? This week, Candice Odgers, a professor at University of California, Irvine, and at Duke, published an article in Nature about how — contrary to popular narrative — smartphone usage isn’t ruining kids’ lives. “Studies so far do not support fears that digital devices are driving the downfall of a generation,” she wrote. “What online activities might be doing, however, is reflecting and even worsening existing vulnerabilities.” Odgers’ research doesn’t focus specifically on adolescents reading news online, but it is an interesting response to the free-floating anxiety over the idea that something is wrong online and that young people are going to be particularly vulnerable to it.
She writes:
In the United States, ownership of mobile phones begins early. My colleagues and I surveyed 2,100 children attending public schools in North Carolina in 2015. In that sample, which is likely to be representative of US adolescents, 48 percent of 11-year-olds told us they owned a mobile phone. Among 14-year-olds, it was 85 percent (unpublished data; see here).
Another survey, done in the same year, indicates that on average, US teens aged 13–18 engage with screen media (from watching television or online videos to reading online and using social media) for more than 6.5 hours each day; mobile devices account for almost half this time. Ownership and usage is also high elsewhere: in a 2014 survey of 9- to 16-year-olds in 7 European countries, 46 percent owned smartphones…
There is also some evidence for an increase in mental-health problems among adolescents. The percentage of US girls aged 12–17 reporting depressive episodes increased by more than 4 percent between 2004 and 2014, to 17.3 percent. The proportion of boys doing so in 2014 was 5.7 percent, a rise of 1.2 percent since 2004. Since 1999, the US suicide rate has also increased for every age group, with the most marked rise among adolescent girls. Similar trends among young girls have been observed elsewhere.
Various commentators have suggested that young people’s rapidly increasing use of digital technologies is accelerating or even driving these behavioral shifts and mental-health trends. In fact, last month, investors released an open letter demanding that technology giant Apple respond to what they see as a “growing body of evidence” detailing the negative consequences of digital devices and social media among young people.
Some of these fears, for instance, are clear in a recent New York Times op-ed, “America’s real digital divide,” by Naomi Schaefer Riley, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Be the Parent, Please: Stop Banning Seesaws and Start Banning Snapchat. “No one is telling poorer parents about the dangers of screen time,” she writes.
Make no mistake: The real digital divide in this country is not between children who have access to the internet and those who don’t. It’s between children whose parents know that they have to restrict screen time and those whose parents have been sold a bill of goods by schools and politicians that more screens are a key to success. It’s time to let everyone in on the secret.
I spoke with Odgers briefly on Thursday about some of her research; our conversation, lightly edited and condensed for clarity, is below.
When you look at people pushing this narrative, look at the data they cite, it’s almost all correlational, or a lot of it is surveys of adults. It’s not completely irrelevant, but the evidence is just not there with kids. We don’t have enough research with kids to tell us about the direction of this effect. Are kids who are depressed more likely to go online and seek out negative information? Or is being online contributing to depression in some way? The reality is, we don’t know, and people who say otherwise are misrepresenting the data and the strength of the evidence. We are missing an opportunity to support kids suffering from serious mental health issues if we just assume that technology is in some way to blame for it.
The concern is that the narrative with the phone is very compelling to a lot of people. It’s something they can easily point to and blame. If we simply focus on restricting screen time, we miss the opportunity to identify the real causes of depression and suicide risk.
But it’s also difficult for adults to determine what is fake news and information. It’s a skill that is having to be developed even among adults. To expect that to be transmitted efficiently, I think, is a big ask right now, given how quickly things are changing.
Absolutely true. In fact, they are the most educated, least violent, and most socially connected generation we have seen https://t.co/YKFpBTB8dl
— Candice Odgers (@candice_odgers) February 22, 2018
Adolescence has always been this amazing time of huge growth intellectually, socially, emotionally, and to see these kids rise up in this way is really part of the power of this period — of them demonstrating incredible resilience, and incredible ability to channel resources and to passionately and eloquently state their case.
Every generation does it — they think the generation that comes after them is flawed in all of these ways and criticizes how they’re using their time. I think there’s been a particularly powerful negative narrative around [this generation of] kids, and part of that is because of kids and phones. But when you look at the objective data today about how kids are doing, they’re objectively doing pretty well, and better than prior generations.
