Breaking "fake news" : attempting to mitigate the spread of false information through media literacy education in adolescents using the inoculation theory.

Recently, the spread of false information has increased with a veracity that the World Economic Forum referred to as a global threat, with multiple scholars confirming this threat (Burmester & Howard, 2022; Howell, 2013; Saling et al., 2021; Salzman, 2022; Shearer & Mitchell,2021; Yaqub et al., 2022). The spread of false information negatively influenced public health, democracy, and education. As the internet and social media gradually become the foremost mass media in the world, those who consume it have yet to acquire the skills necessary to effectively analyze and evaluate the information they encounter. Just as other mass media historically presented opportunities for exploitation before its audience developed those skills, the current media landscape offers copious opportunities for the same. Using the inoculation theory framework, this study sought to investigate how a comprehensive media literacy education program embedded in an elective high school media course influenced adolescents’ belief in conspiracy theories and their media habits. The research design was a mixed methods intervention design. The Adolescent Conspiracy Belief Questionnaire (ACBQ; Jolley et al., 2021) quantitatively measured the participants’ beliefs in conspiracy theories before and after the implementation of the media literacy program. I collected qualitative data through two focus groups that took place before and after the program, through weekly reflection questions throughout the program, and a final reflection at the end of the program. I then analyzed the scores from the ACBQ using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, and the qualitative data coded and analyzed to reveal emergent themes. The results from the ACBQ did not show a statistically significant reduction in mean scores from the beginning of the program to the end indicating that the media literacy education program did not effectively reduce adolescents’ belief in conspiracy theories. However, the participants’ qualitative responses provided qualitative responses that demonstrate the program did influence their habits by reducing habits that left them vulnerable to false information and increasing habits that made them more resistant to false information successfully aligning with the inoculation effect.