Media and Information Literacy Repository – South Asia

Purpose: This study investigates the relationship between media trust and verification behaviours among Malaysian youth in the context of increasing misinformation and digital fragmentation. Design/Methodology/Approach: A mixed-methods approach was employed, including surveys of 200 university students aged 18–25 and focus group interviews, to explore their perceptions of media credibility and verification practices. Findings: Results reveal a gap between media consumption and critical verification. Social media remains the most-used platform, despite being the least trusted. Verification practices are inconsistent, often shaped by peer networks and platform familiarity. Implications: The study suggests the need for structured media literacy education that emphasizes source evaluation and critical thinking, especially within academic and youth-focused institutions.

With individuals increasingly acting as independent agents in the new media landscape, their online behavior has become critical in shaping the information environment. This study employs the Knowledge-Attitude-Practice (KAP) model, a behavioral framework often used in public health communication, to examine how New Media Literacy (NML) influences information verification behavior through risk perception of fake news, using structural equation modeling (SEM). Consistent with the KAP framework, the combination of knowledge (NML) and attitude (risk perception) significantly enhanced individuals’ tendency to verify information. Moreover, within NML, critical consumption skills exerted both direct and indirect effects on information verification through risk perception, whereas critical prosumption skills showed only a direct effect. These findings suggest that media consumption skills may play a comparatively greater role in shaping individuals’ information verification behavior. By adapting a public health communication framework to the context of digital media use, this study contributes to theory-building in media effects research and offers practical insights for designing targeted media literacy interventions in response to the evolving dynamics of new media technologies.

This paper theorizes news verification in Kenyan print journalism as a form of epistemic labour central to the construction of public truth. Drawing on Social Responsibility Theory and interpretive interviews with journalists supplemented by textual analysis of print media outputs, the study uncovers how weak pedagogical foundations, elite-driven news routines, routinized shortcuts, and thin verification cultures undermine accuracy in Kenya’s media ecosystem. The findings reveal that while journalists discursively endorse verification ideals, their ability to enact them is constrained by limited disciplinary literacy, organizational incentives that privilege access over scrutiny, and a misapplication of objectivity that normalizes transcription rather than interpretation. Unlike prevailing research that frames misinformation as a problem of fake content, this paper reframes inaccuracy as the outcome of knowledge-production failures embedded within journalism education, newsroom socialization, and professional identity. It advances a reconceptualization of news verification competence as an embodied disposition cultivated through training, relational capital, interpretive judgement, and exposure to tacit newsroom learning. In doing so, the study contributes a model of news verification as a socio-cognitive practice whose development is essential for the media’s normative responsibility and democratic function in contexts where digital and traditional media intersect.

In Indonesia, social media platforms such as YouTube, WhatsApp, and TikTok have become dominant news sources, surpassing traditional mainstream media. However, this shift has triggered a crisis of verification, further complicated by the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated content, including deepfakes and AI-based news production, which blurs the boundary between fact and fabrication. Methods: This study employed a qualitative approach through library research and reflective theoretical analysis, supported by documentary observations of current phenomena involving viral social media content entering mainstream media channels. Analysis was conducted thematically, critically, and contextually, synthesizing previous scholarly findings with contemporary digital media practices. Findings: The results indicate that the flow of information from social media to mainstream media has dismantled traditional gatekeeping roles, replacing them with a decentralized and algorithm-driven ecosystem. AI technologies, while enhancing efficiency, introduce epistemological challenges by generating credible but potentially inaccurate content without ethical responsibility. Furthermore, the study highlights that traditional verification mechanisms are inadequate against the speed and complexity of digital information flows. Effective information verification today requires collaborative, technology-assisted, and participatory strategies, integrating innovations such as AI-supported fact-checking tools and blockchain verification. Simultaneously, media literacy must evolve to include algorithmic awareness and critical interpretation skills.

This article explores the impact of deepfake technology on photojournalism, highlighting its role in undermining trust in visual media. As deepfakes allow for the creation of highly realistic manipulated content, they pose significant challenges regarding the authenticity of journalistic imagery and erode the authority of visual truthfulness. The widespread use of deepfakes has led to a decline in public confidence in the credibility of news, raising concerns about the future of photojournalism in an era of digital deception. As a solution to regaining viewers’ trust, this article suggests a twofold approach: First, it emphasizes the importance of media literacy in combating disinformation, particularly for younger audiences, fostering critical thinking skills; and promoting media awareness. Educating an informed public, equipped with the tools to identify and question manipulated content, is essential for maintaining trust in media. Second, the article proposes the establishment of elaborate ethical zero-fake tolerance standards to be adopted by professionals in photojournalism so as to enhance resilience against deepfake-driven disinformation, thereby safeguarding the integrity of journalism in the age of artificial intelligence.

In a world of rising calls for limits on hate speech, international human rights law provides standards to govern State and company approaches to online expression. In the present report, submitted in accordance with Human Rights Council resolution 34/18, the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression explains how those standards provide a framework for Governments considering regulatory options and companies determining how to respect human rights online. The Special Rapporteur begins with an introduction to the international legal framework, focusing on United Nations treaties and the leading interpretations of provisions related to what is colloquially called “hate speech”. He then highlights key State obligations and addresses how content moderation by companies may ensure respect for the human rights of users and the public. He concludes with recommendations for States and companies.

The article considers the explanation of the necessity of innovations in the processes of forming institutional forms of media education, the problem of the status of scientific knowledge caused by research of social communication. Overview of alternative practices of media education reflects the dynamics of social transformations, connected with the use of media in the field of education, art, media production and communication services.

Minors are active on social media, not only as consumers but also as content creators. This context has allowed kidfluencers—underage content creators prioritizing interacting with their communities of followers—to emerge. The present research seeks to describe and analyze the content prominent Peruvian kidfluencers generated in 2022 and 2023. To this end, the content of 500 Instagram and 500 TikTok posts was analyzed. Results show that kidfluencers base their popularity on showcasing their artistic talents and lifestyle and that their content heavily features brands. It is also relevant to reflect on the role of minors in social network environments because they are highly exposed and create even sexualized content that is not appropriate for their age.

This paper presents the results of e-MEL, a European project aiming at promoting the development, implementation and testing of training scenarios for pre- and in-service teachers’ training in the field of digital and media literacy education. The analysis of the results led the research team to identify the critical and successful aspects of the testing, and to draw some recommendations for the future implementation of teacher training interventions. The final goal is to reflect on sustainable models of media and digital skills training both in terms of teacher education and teachers’ professional development.

This study explores the representation of socio-cognitive components in Indonesian political multimodal news text using the framework of Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA). With the increasing prominence of multimedia in contemporary news production, understanding how socio-cognitive aspects are conveyed through multiple modes becomes essential. Drawing on SF-MDA, which combines systemic functional linguistics and multimodal analysis, the study examines how Indonesian political news texts incorporate social and cognitive elements to shape meaning and influence audience perceptions. This study was undertaken qualitatively involving three online news published by Indonesia’s publishers as the data. The result reveals that the visual and verbal modes merged in the news tend to highlight the good image of the political figures. It means that the meanings of visual and verbal components of the news persuasively work together to create the good impressions among readers to the human actor in the news. As the implication, multimodal resources are strategically employed to shape public opinion and promote specific political ideologies. Ultimately, this research aims to contribute to the development of critical media literacy and foster a more nuanced understanding of the socio-political dynamics in contemporary Indonesia

As the most obvious provision of social media in the individual world, „selfie“ is confronted ata point where self-confidence is increased or lost. Nowadays, the use of social media startsat a very early age, and self efficacy beliefs are also developing at an early age. However, themadness of selfie is becoming more of an „infantilized“ action. Thus, it can be argued thatit functions as a counterfeit of the self and serves as a mirror in the individual’s world. It isalso true that this „new or pseudo mirror“, which shows us both to ourselves and to others,also raises concerns about perceptual development, curiosity and visibility in the era of selfdiscovery throughout the developmental process. The concept of self-reflection and „selfie“in its social media term emerges at a point where the individual’s internal communication isbroken. It brings a „dual-dyadic“ concept on one hand and a „triad theory“ on the other. Thestudy aims to analyze „selfie“ madness in social media, providing examples and assumptionswithin the framework of these theoretical discussions. The study aims to add new dimensionsto the concept of self portrayals of individuals within national and international examples in thelight of current media scrutiny.

Research addressing non-binary identities and experiences across the media landscape—including the representation of non-binary individuals, but also production and reception processes—remains limited. This article aims to reflect on studying non-binary issues across the media while addressing the central challenges inherent in this work. It begins by situating media studies within the broader context of research on non-binary identities and highlighting the place of non-binary issues within LGBTI/Queer and Trans Media Studies. The article then hones into two main challenges when studying non-binary issues: defining non-binary identities, on the one hand, and non-binary or gender-neutral language, on the other. Following this, a comprehensive review of the existing literature provides a current overview of the research that explicitly engages with non-binary identities in media. Concluding remarks synthesize the main aspects of the article, and outline avenues for future research, aimed at consolidating existing efforts, and fostering a sense of cohesion within the scholarly community researching mediated non-binary identities.

Visualization in various aspects requires students to understand the meaning clearly, particularly through the skill of visual perception. This article examines how students' visual perception skills are applied in interpreting advertisements. The research method employed is a descriptive qualitative approach with multimodal analysis (linguistics, visual, audio, gestural, and spatial) to uncover the meanings behind advertisements. The respondents involved in this study are students from two universities in Indonesia. The results indicate that students tend to engage more with digital-based advertisements than non-digital ones, with a clear preference for video ads over static images. Additionally, Indonesian students successfully applied multimodal analyses to various types of advertisements. These findings have practical implications for educational practices, especially in enhancing visual literacy and developing critical skills for understanding and creating media. The significance of visual literacy in global educational contexts is highlighted, providing insight into its potential applications in curriculum development and advertising literacy.

This paper examines a critical approach to analyzing advertising media messages and describes a number of instructional activities meant to enhance students’ reading and discussion skills, enforce their inferential thinking and critical analysis skills. It also considers linguistic, extralinguistic and extracurricular reasons for integrating advertising media messages in the EFL classroom. The focus is on key media education concepts which rely on applying critical questions advertising media messages. Analysis of advertising messages can help EFL teachers encourage sociocultural interpretation of contemporary media texts and raise students’ media literacy in the EFL classroom.

Engaging with influencer posts has become a prevalent practice among adolescents on social media, exposing them to the combined elements of promotional content and entertainment in influencer marketing. However, the versatile and appealing nature of this content may hinder adolescents’ ability to engage in critical thinking and accurately interpret this hybrid form of advertising. This study aims to investigate adolescents’ capacity to critically process persuasive content shared by influencers, utilizing the five components of digital critical thinking outlined by Van Laar (2019): clarification, evaluation, justification, linking of ideas, and novelty. To analyze minors’ online experiences, a qualitative approach was employed involving twelve discussion groups with a total of 62 children and adolescents aged 11 to 17 in Spain. The findings indicate that the exercise of critical thinking in response to influencer marketing is closely associated with the cognitive and affective dimensions of advertising literacy in adolescents, while wamong them.

This study explores early adolescents’ understanding of and perceptions about the digital advertising system and the types of responses they feel are available as they engage with digital advertising, particularly personalized online ads and influencer marketing, two forms of digital advertising that introduce unique challenges as users must navigate platform dynamics and processes of datafication. To answer these questions, we facilitated an advertising literacy program for 11- and 12-year-old students. We designed the program using what we call the EASY (Ethics of Actors in SYstems) approach, which engages students in role-play activities and reflective discussion, whereby creating an opportunity for students to grapple with the range of actors and the ethical dilemmas that are introduced by and embedded within the multiple components of the digital advertising system. Here we present findings from this program, including how participating students articulated their understandings of and strategies for negotiating the digital advertising system, as well as their ideas for how the system could work more ethically. This research can inform the further development of advertising literacy education that helps adolescents explore how various actors might work toward a transformed digital advertising system.

This paper questions the notion of digital advertising literacy. We first propose a theoretical positioning that tries to think of self-taught literacy, not necessarily linked to education and state intervention, by a daily company with advertising. We will explore the French case, since the nineteenth century, to understand how people developed advertising literacy through different means. In this respect, how can we think of an active receiver, controlling codes instead of manipulated crowds? We will then explore contemporary forms of advertising digital literacy such as online conversation on social networks, algorithmic advertising, and advertising culture

The aim of the conducted study is to reveal the effects of the media literacy course taken by social studies teacher candidates on solving advertising messages they come across. This study is a qualitative study in the pattern of action research. The research group of the study constitutes 48 teacher candidates who are studying in the Department of Social Studies Teaching at Van Yüzüncü Yıl University and took Media Literacy course as a selective course in the 2016-2017 academic year. In the study, the results obtained from the interviews with the students was analyzed using content analysis method. When the findings obtained in this study are evaluated in generally, it is seen that, before giving any information about the media literacy course to the students in the department of social studies teaching, students interpreted detergents, cigarettes, telephone operators, razors, burgers and cakes advertisements as they saw on the screen and without questioning such as "detergent advertisements, cake advertisements, razor advertisements, etc."; after ten weeks of training related to media literacy, the same group of students have approached the same ads text more critically and questionably and have entered into an attitude that reveals the secret information contained in the ads text.

The study explores possible methods of assessing the level of advertising literacy by examining it in juxtaposition with artificial intelligence (AI) and human judgement. The ability to understand advertisements is an important part of being able to correctly interpret information in the media, which helps people recognize techniques in advertising and make decisions based on recognition. Traditional approaches to testing advertising literacy, such as surveys, tests, and qualitative techniques, are important, but have limited scope and granularity of analysis. New technologies that incorporate artificial intelligence allow for deeper exploration of behavior and emotion using hybrid models that combine the accuracy of artificial intelligence with human understanding. The present exploration assesses the possibilities and includes attributes such as effectiveness, benefits and barriers of AI-driven tools and combined technologies. The results suggest the necessity to develop tools for specific target groups and propose methods for combining technological advances with human aspects in order to improve the assessment of advertising literacy. The study highlights the potential of using flexible and easily scalable methods to cope with the increasing complexity of advertising in the current digital age.

This study documents how a high school ESL teacher working with new immigrants ages 14–20 supported the development of their critical thinking and English language skills by using advertising analysis activities. The article examines the use of key critical questions for analyzing media messages and documents instructional activities designed to strengthen students’ vocabulary, reading, and discussion skills to build inferential thinking and critical analysis skills. The researchers focus on four instructional practices used by the participating teacher, which rely on strategies for applying critical questions to analyze advertising: the cloze technique, the question generation approach, practice in analyzing ads using critical questions in class discussion, and a collaborative online writing activity resulting in the creation of a multiparagraph multimedia document. These activities provided a meaningful opportunity for students to practice speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills in English while supporting the development of abstract thinking, balancing the learning of new academic language and cultural knowledge, and connecting with students’ prior knowledge, home cultures, and everyday experience

Recent research has called on scholars to develop pedagogical interventions to address issues of media literacy. This teaching note answers that call by describing a media literacy project designed for use in social problems classes. The project acquaints students to the constructionist approach to social problems and the method of content analysis. Guided by the principles of scaffolding, the note discusses how students are guided through a series of readings, assignments, and activities that enables them to analyze how social problems are portrayed in news media. Analysis of student papers and comments reveals an increased understanding of the rhetorical strategies that are commonplace in media coverage of social problems. While designed for social problems, the project can be adjusted and modified for use in other sociology courses.

In the analysis of scientific and pedagogical approaches to news literacy, two fundamentally different areas of research have been identified: practice-oriented and comprehensive. The origins, essence, subject field, and crucial concepts of library and information approach to news literacy are elaborated. The institutionalization patterns of news literacy within the framework of library and information activities have been identified and discussed. The experience of designing an educational discipline on the analysis of news is characterized, and original analytical technology for deconstructing news messages is presented.

Critical thinking in the post-truth era demands that news users develop and maintain a skeptical way of knowing, and cultivate the ability to discern evidence-based and unbiased information to make sound judgments. While adolescents are becoming the most dedicated social media news consumers, the literature is yet to catch up with empirical research on whether adolescents are able to apply critical thinking to make sense of real-life news. We investigated the relationships between social media news consumption, news media literacy, and critical thinking of 1505 adolescents between 12 and 18 years of age. Multivariate analyses suggested an internal news-seeking motivation, a cautious perception towards social media personalized news algorithms, and a reported habit of news-source tracking each independently predicted skills in thinking critically about a real-life news report. Hierarchical regression analysis further indicated the unique and combined variances of news consumption and news media literacy in predicting critical thinking in news. Insights for preparing our youth to become news-literate critical thinkers are discussed.

In our interconnected world, people are witnessing a dramatic increase in access to information and communication. Nevertheless, discerning trustworthy sources, validating information, distinguishing between fact and opinion, determining what content to share, and navigating other related challenges have become increasingly complex. Therefore, people should acquire the knowledge, skill, belief, and behavior to consume and create news informedly and ethically. As young individuals transition into adulthood, they begin to take charge of their life decisions. At this juncture, they must acquire news literacy skills. Thus, the au-thors developed an intervention to enhance news literacy among this age group in a College of Science and Technology employing the student's media competence (SuMeC) framework. Following a three-month training period, the participants' literacy proficiency was assessed through assignments using the Structure of the Observed Learning Outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy. The study adds new dimensions to the existing research pool by focusing on how and to what extent college students apply the competencies in everyday life. The findings demonstrate that the intervention effectively integrates news literacy skills among them and the intervention sets an example of how to generate news literacy skills among students in Indian settings.

Purpose This study explores social studies preservice teacher’s orientation toward teaching news media literacy in the era of fake news. Previous literature indicates that many social studies teachers express a desire to maintain neutrality in the classroom. As such, this study focuses on the preservice teachers’ articulated pedagogical practices around news media literacy, as well as the described forces and factors that influence their described stances. Design/methodology/approach This study uses work from the field of political communication to analyze course assignments, semi-structured interviews and survey responses in order to consider the ways 39 preservice social studies teachers articulated their anticipated and enacted pedagogical practices around news media literacy. Findings Findings suggest a prevalent desire among the participants to pursue neutrality by presenting “both sides,” echoing traditional journalistic pursuits of objectivity. The possible consequences of this desire are also explored. Additionally, the study suggests that parents, administrators and the content standards are viewed as forces, which will constrain their practices. Practical implications Using theorizing about the civil sphere, this paper considers implications for teacher educators. The civil sphere may provide a lens with which to analyze news media and may help preservice teachers adopt practices they view as risky. Originality/value This study aims to extend conversations around the teaching of news media, controversial political and social issues and the preparation of social studies teachers in the current social and political ecology by working to align the field with growing conversations in the field of political communication and journalism.