OPINION: More states should require teaching kids how to read the news and spot what’s true and what’s not

Photo by: Daria Nepriakhina 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

The Hechinger Report
If you worry about your own screen time, just think about the young people in your life.

The amount of time they spend consuming media and scrolling through content might alarm you. Teens are glued to screens for more than eight hours a day, reports show. So much screen time could pose risks for adolescents — including exposure to toxic misinformation.

With millions of Americans voting in federal, state and local elections this year, misinformation poses grave challenges to our democratic processes.

Standards-based news organizations carefully fact-check information with an eye toward fairness and a dedication to accuracy. Yet much of what populates our social media feeds is user-generated, unvetted and of varying reliability.

Too often, it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction in the onslaught of information we face. Many students — our next generation of voters — have no idea how to tell the difference between what’s meant to inform them and what’s meant to entertain them, sell them something or even mislead them. Luckily, a growing number of states are tackling this problem by helping students become more media literate. More states must follow. MORE