States begin to address media literacy through legislation

Teenagers spend an average of seven hours a day on their phones during their free time. TikTok has fast become one of Gen Z’s primary sources for information despite the site's major misinformation problem.

Governing
How does one define a problem like media literacy? As W. James Potter notes in his 2010 essay “The State of Media Literacy,” the term means many different things to different people depending on where they stand on or how they use digital media. Scholars, educators, activists and people of different ages all view media literacy differently and their understanding of the term shapes how valuable they see it, especially when it comes to education and legislation.

At its simplest, the National Association for Media Literacy Education defines media literacy as, “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create and act using all forms of communication.” Media literacy ranges from reading a book and discussing the author’s point of view to questioning whether a recent article about a political issue was written by an unbiased source, and what their bias is or how it shaped the piece.

Until recently, media literacy has not been a priority for the majority of the country. Only 18 states have some legislative solutions in place for addressing media literacy education. But with generative AI on the rise and increasingly used in everyday digital media — from “fake news” taken seriously to social media posts that make use of generated images to tell a story — states are coming to grips with providing the most vulnerable populations with the tools necessary to help them avoid being misinformed. MORE