media literacy

 I found the week 4 reading tasks a lot more manageable than the week 3 reading tasks as the first two opinion pieces really helped me, I found this to be a much better experience than the previous reading week as the opinion-based articles were much easier for me to understand. Some of the things I found interesting from the first opinion piece was some statistics were very surprising to me, I thought there would be a higher percentage of people would say that there was misleading information across the first month of the lockdown as this is when I remember seeing lots of false information on social media mainly and even people denying that the virus was real. Across the first month of the lock-down (48%) of northern Irish people reported seeing misleading information, and even though this is still a very high percentage of people, I thought it would have been higher.

 

After reading the second opinion-based article and comparing the surveys from last year in Northern Ireland to this year in Ireland, you can see there is an increase from (48%) to (62%) of people who are concerned with the growing spread of misinformation online. It's good that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft are trying to act on this problem by implementing the code of practice which allows the sites users access to portals and buttons to report misinformation. After the code of practice was set up, CodeCheck found there was a significant development in the fight against disinformation in Europe. All these actions are being taken to help protect people from misinformation online as it may be easy for a person with better media literacy to decipher between real and fake articles, but for people who are more susceptible to it the code of practice is there to protect them.

 

I have seen some Instagram posts will now have a warning down the bottom letting you know if the post contains false information, and it links to fact-checkers that verify the claims of the post, the concern with this system is that a lot of post get through and are not fact-checked which leads to more misinformation being spread. This system is also on other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, but a report from the journal.ie showed that twitter had made no effort to label posts that might contain misinformation, and it is unclear who is responsible for reviewing these posts and adding the labels.