Do you trust what you watch or read?

The growing and urgent threat posed to societies by the rise of disinformation and misinformation and the misuse of social media has repeatedly made global headlines in recent years. We see this occurrence in connection with elections, health crises, climate change denial, rising hate speech and misogyny, to name a few.  This is especially a concern in countries where the “Information Revolution” has triggered the most profound shifts in the manner, the modality and the quantity of media people consume.

With its media and information literacy programmes, UNESCO is in the vanguard of global efforts to bring significant changes at the policy or individual level. The ability to verify the source, credibility, accuracy and purpose of stories and information is becoming widely accepted as being as fundamental to any definition of human rights and freedoms, as reading and writing are.

In Kenya, UNESCO has worked during the past three years with Kenyan youth leaders, media professionals, parliamentarians and religious leaders to encourage the government to adopt a Draft MIL Policy and Strategy Document. Specific training sessions were conducted for leaders from Christian, Muslim and Hindu faiths, delivered with the Media Council of Kenya. ‘Religious leaders and media reach many people and a partnership between the two bodies can only be advantageous,’ said Mary Ann Mwangi, from St Paul’s University who attended the webinar for religious leaders.

A gathering was also organized for key legislators from the Parliamentary Committee on Information and Communication and Technology regarding the draft MIL Policy and Strategy Document for Kenya. Professor Levi Obonyo, Dean of the School of Communication and Journalism at Daystar said that ‘such national policies and strategies are fundamental to safeguarding the public interest, as the public will be trained on how to interrogate news and information they come across.”

Ian Ogonji, founder and CEO of the Kenyan website Youthing described the UNESCO training as “super informative and eye opening” and Winnie Wadera from Reducing HIV in Adolescents and Youth said it was “imperative young people were equipped with critical thinking”.

In Nigeria, the UNESCO field office persuaded the National Commission of Colleges of Education to embed media and information literacy as a compulsory component of all teacher trainings. In 2020 alone UNESCO trained teachers from over 100 different institutes in all six of Nigeria’s geopolitical zones. “It’s a huge achievement to get this mainstreamed into their curriculum,” said Yachat Sandra Nuhu, from the UNESCO Office in Abuja.

For many governments, COVID-19 underscored exactly how important media and information literacy could be – with misinformation impeding public health messaging about everything from the origin of the pandemic to the effectiveness of vaccinations and social distancing. These are subjects about which inaccuracies and ambiguity can have fatal consequences.

Mongolia was one country in which the virus encouraged stakeholders to take bolder actions. In 2021 the Mongolian National Commission for UNESCO and the Press Institute of Mongolia gathered professionals in Ulaanbaatar to discuss how media and information literacy can contribute to addressing disinformation and hate speech, especially in times of emergency. The group drew up a national MIL policy and strategy that was later adopted by the government.

As elsewhere, the pandemic resulted in Mongolian schools shifting teaching online. A training programme strengthened the capacities of 188 education, media and civil society professionals on media and information literacy. However, the workshop also highlighted an area of concern, and a need for targeted action.

In many ways, the pandemic has accelerated and aggravated the harm of mis- and disinformation. On the other hand, it has reaffirmed UNESCO’s efforts to expand actions to promote media and information literacy for all.