Combatting Visual Fake News with a Professional Fact-Checking Tool in Education in France, Romania, Spain and Sweden
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Department of Education, Uppsala University, 750 02 Uppsala, Sweden
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Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, 751 42 Uppsala, Sweden
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Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, 751 05 Uppsala, Sweden
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Digital Humanities, University Sorbonne, Nouvelle, 75006 Paris, France
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editor: Katerina Kabassi
Information 2021, 12(5), 201; https://doi.org/10.3390/info12050201
Received: 15 March 2021
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Revised: 28 April 2021
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Accepted: 28 April 2021
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Published: 6 May 2021
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Evaluating Methods and Decision Making)
Educational and technical resources are regarded as central in combating disinformation and safeguarding democracy in an era of ‘fake news’. In this study, we investigated whether a professional fact-checking tool could be utilised in curricular activity to make pupils more skilled in determining the credibility of digital news and to inspire them to use digital tools to further their transliteracy and technocognition. In addition, we explored how pupils’ performance and attitudes regarding digital news and tools varied across four countries (France, Romania, Spain, and Sweden). Our findings showed that a two-hour intervention had a statistically significant impact on teenagers’ abilities to determine the credibility of fake images and videos. We also found that the intervention inspired pupils to use digital tools in information credibility assessments. Importantly, the intervention did not make pupils more sceptical of credible news. The impact of the intervention was greater in Romania and Spain than among pupils in Sweden and France. The greater impact in these two countries, we argue, is due to cultural context and the fact that pupils in Romania and Spain learned to focus less on ’gut feelings’, increased their use of digital tools, and had a more positive attitude toward the use of the fact-checking tool than pupils in Sweden and France.
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Keywords:
fake news; media and information literacy; teaching and learning; fact-checking; lateral reading
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MDPI and ACS Style
Nygren, T.; Guath, M.; Axelsson, C.-A.W.; Frau-Meigs, D. Combatting Visual Fake News with a Professional Fact-Checking Tool in Education in France, Romania, Spain and Sweden. Information 2021, 12, 201. https://doi.org/10.3390/info12050201
AMA Style
Nygren T, Guath M, Axelsson C-AW, Frau-Meigs D. Combatting Visual Fake News with a Professional Fact-Checking Tool in Education in France, Romania, Spain and Sweden. Information. 2021; 12(5):201. https://doi.org/10.3390/info12050201
Chicago/Turabian StyleNygren, Thomas, Mona Guath, Carl-Anton W. Axelsson, and Divina Frau-Meigs. 2021. "Combatting Visual Fake News with a Professional Fact-Checking Tool in Education in France, Romania, Spain and Sweden" Information 12, no. 5: 201. https://doi.org/10.3390/info12050201
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