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Author
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Thomas Nygren, Divina Frau‑Meigs, Nicoleta Corbu, Sonia Santoveña‑Casal
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Year
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2022
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Publisher
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SN Soc Sci
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Abstract
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The current media eco-system has become more and more polluted by the various
avatars of “fake news”. This buzz term has been widely used by academics, experts,
teachers and ordinary people, in an attempt to understand and address the phenomenon of information disorder in the new media environment. However, studies have
rarely questioned what teachers, key stakeholders in the media literacy field, actually understand by “fake news”, and to what extent the new digital tools available
to fact-check are actually viable solutions to fight disinformation actively. In this
context, we conducted focus groups (N=34 people interviewed in 4 focus groups)
with teachers in four countries (France, Romania, Spain and Sweden), in order to
assess their understanding of “fake news”, as well as their perception of possible
measures to combat the phenomenon, with a particular focus on digital tools. The
findings show that the understanding of the concept of “fake news” differs from one
country to the other, but also within the same country, with a common feature across
countries: intention to deceive. Additionally, respondents identified lack of media
and information literacy (MIL) in education as a major gap for combatting information disorders. Furthermore, they find that the use of digital tool for professional
fact-checking needs to be repurposed or followed by pedagogical instructions to fit
into the complexity of educational practices. Our findings highlight possible solutions for MIL in education using a combination of technocognition and transliteracy
as theoretical framework and scaffolded pedagogical design for better adoption of
fact-checking techniques.