Written evidence submitted by IREX

IREX’s Learn to Discern Approach

Misinformation and Trusted Voices Written Evidence

Summary: Learn to Discern (L2D) helps individuals recognize disinformation and think critically about sources, contributing to community resilience to disinformation and hate speech and promoting better decision-making based on quality information. It is grounded in a well-established body of evidence on the efficacy of media literacy interventions, combined with an approach that has successfully adapted the intervention in more than 20 country contexts. Learn to Discern goes beyond traditional media literacy by drawing upon insights from cognitive reflection, emotional regulation, empathy-building, and related fields to confront the challenge of maniplative information in a diverse and holistic manner. 

Description of the Learn to Discern Approach: Learn to Discern (L2D) builds resilience to manipulative information by empowering those who engage with media and information to navigate it in a safe, critical, responsible, healthy, and empathy-driven way. It empowers individuals, communities, and institutions, including school systems, to increase awarness, gain knowlegde, and develop skills and behaviors for participating in the digital space without harm to their own and others’ wellbeing, dignity, and humanity. It teaches participants to identify and use good quality information to make decisions, recognize and mitigate the impact of manipulative information, and curb the spread of such information to others.

L2D is a human-centered response to various manifestations of manipulative information across today’s information sources, such as disinformation, hate speech, and propaganda. It has been effective in building resilience to state-sponsored disinformation, inoculating communities against public health misinformation, promoting inclusive communities by empowering their members to recognize and reject divisive narratives and hate speech, improving individuals’ ability to navigate increasingly polluted online spaces, and enabling leaders to shape decisions based on facts and quality information.

L2D recognizes the roots of vulnerability to disinformation and hate speech in the human brain and in the media and information infrastructure. It builds emotional control and cognitive reflection, critical and analytic thinking, empathy, and other mental habits to overcome intuitive yet addictive and highly manipulative features of today’s informational ecosystem, before building technical skills such as cross-checking information and verification techniques. It also provides techniques for overcoming social incentives for negative information engagement, such as desire for validation or belonging.

Since L2D’s launch in 2015, it has been co-adapted with local partners and audiences in over 20 countries in all regions of the world to be delivered through formats as diverse as its audiences, offering multiple pathways to long-term resilience and addressing immediate threats to information integrity. This includes in-person and virtual peer-to peer workshops, blended and self-directed online learning, integration into secondary and higher education, gamification and play-based methods, and broadcast and social media “inoculation” campaigns. 

How the Learn to Discern Approach Works: Learn to Discern draws upon media literacy and other fields to create and iterate an approach based on continuous review of internal and external best practices, evidence, and research around human vulnerability to manipulative information and behavior change. The L2D approach is constantly evolving to incorporate these lessons from research and external evidence, as well as findings from L2D implementation. 

External evidence that informed approach design and ongoing adaptation:

Learn to Discern is based on a strong foundation of evidence from a variety of relevant fields, including media and information literacy, psychology, and behavioral science. Many aspects of L2D – from its human-focused nature to the competencies that it builds—are informed by what has been proven effective when building resilience to manipulative influence. To illustrate:

• When designing L2D in Ukraine in 2014-2015, IREX quickly recognized that there are multiple ways to tackle the problems of disinformation, propaganda, and malign influence – from strengthening the supply of and access to credible content, to attacking malign narratives, to engaging the technology sector in AI and media literacy solutions. IREX focused on empowering individuals and communities, based on a review of human-centered approaches to building resilience to information manipulation and on the gap in human knowledge and skills that was revealed in project design stage. Since then, IREX has collected additional evidence that media literacy is effective across different contexts as a response to disinformation (Huguet et al. 2019). Many democracies that have integrated media literacy into school curricula have found diverse positive effects, ranging from resilience to disinformation to improved critical thinking skills (Charlton 2019; Forsman 2019; Helmus and Kepe 2021; Huguet et al. 2019; Helmus et al. 2020; Duran et al. 2008; Vraga et al. 2012; Jeong, Cho, and Hwang 2012; Kahne and Bowyer 2017). Moreover, multiple studies confirm that the effects of media literacy interventions persist over time (Bergstrom, Flynn, and Craig 2018) and that training remains effective when delivered in different ways and by different groups (Kong, 2014; Kong et al. 2012). In Europe, critical media literacy has emerged as one of the top policy recommendations for addressing disinformation alongside designing a better information ecosystem, strengthening democratic resilience, and improving platform regulation (Bayer et al. 2021). 
• After deciding upon a human-centered approach, IREX reviewed evidence from related fields, including cognitive science and behavioral economics, to inform the competencies that L2D would seek to build in participants. Researchers[1] have found that a range of cognitive, social, and affective factors influence the formation of false beliefs—including factors like lack of analytical thinking, emotional state, and personal world views (Ecker et al. 2022). Other studies have found similarly that excessive reliance on emotion promotes belief in false narratives, leading researchers to advise that counter-disinformation interventions incorporate strategies to make the public less emotional consumers of news media (Preston et al. 2021; Martel et al. 2020). Other researchers have found that approaches which incorporate emotional regulation and identification through empathy can be used to counteract fake news (Joachim et al. 2021). Cognitive reflection skills have been found to be critical, too— several studies have found that those who practice these skills are more discerning in their use of social media (including in the types of accounts followed and the reliability of news shared) (Pennycook and Rand, 2019; Stecula and Pickup, 2021; Mosleh et al. 2021). Other factors, including stress response, mental health, strength of personal identity, and more, have also been associated by researchers with ability to inoculate oneself from manipulative narratives (Bermes 2021; Chang et al. 2019; Ecker et al. 2022). Given the wealth of this evidence that propensity to believe and share manipulative information goes beyond fact checking ability or knowledge of news media, IREX intentionally integrated disciplines beyond traditional media literacy into the learn to discern approach to create a more comprehensive, holistic, and impactful response to the threat of manipulative information.

IREX Evidence of Efficacy and Impact: Across more than 20 diverse geographies, contexts, and participant demographics, IREX continues to see positive impact of L2D initiatives. IREX has adapted the approach to different operational environments and has evidence of impact along three streams of work – resilience building through education systems, leveraging community-based trust networks, and providing rapid response to threats to information integrity.

Building long term resilience through education systems: IREX has worked with schools – integrating L2D into instruction; with universities, enriching existing and creating new courses; by adding high quality extracurricular options; and through a combination and online and blended learning courses. Across all these methods of engagement, positive impact is evident.

• Formal secondary education: In Ukraine, IREX continues to work with the Ministry of Education and Science to integrate L2D competencies into the instruction of history, language, and other subjects in over 1,500 schools and among more than 84,000 high school students. The most recent cohort increased their ability to analyze and engage with media and information critically by 70%.
• Higher education: In the Baltics, IREX worked with 13 universities to integrate information resilience skills and competencies into the curriculum and train 951 journalism students. The most recent cohort increased their likelihood to crosscheck information by 51% and their confidence in recognizing information by 46%.
• Extracurricular activities: In Jordan, IREX integrated information resilience into extracurricular activities and trained 230 students in 10 underprivileged Jordanian schools. They increased their information behavior, knowledge of the media landscape, analysis skills, and sense control over their information environment by 42%.
• Online learning: In Kosovo, self-learners who have used IREX’s online course on media literacy, Very Verified, increased their awareness and knowledge of media and information structures by 27%. In North Macedonia, Very Verified self-learners increased their understanding of their news media environment by 21%. And in Albania, supplemented with practical workshops led by a facilitator, Very Verified learners increased their ability to analyze and evaluate information by 24%.

Peer-to peer training through community-based trust networks: To reach out of school audiences (youth and adults), IREX works with local community networks to build skills through peer-to-peer formats.

• Youth: In Jordan, through IREX’s youth-led peer-training model for Learn to Discern skill-building, young people improved their skills and abilities to analyze information in their traditional and social media streams by 97% and their confidence and sense of control in navigating these spaces by 41%. In Tunisia, youth participating in a similar training model improved their information behaviors by 32% and their sense of control of media influence and consumption by 35%.
• Adults: In Ukraine, IREX’s local key influencer-led trainings reached over 90,000 people in nine months. An assessment 1.5 years after the trainings demonstrated that Learn to Discern has imparted a long-lasting ability to recognize disinformation among participants—participants continued to be 25 percent more likely to check multiple news sources and 13 percent more likely to discern between disinformation and a piece of objective reporting (Murrock et al. 2018).

Rapid and at-scale campaigns to curb the spread of manipulative information and trigger resilience habits: When the threats to information space are immediate and the time to address them is short, IREX found that online campaigns are an effective way to quickly reach audiences at scale. IREX has utilized them to curb the spread of manipulative content in Serbia, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. In addition, a 2020 randomized control trial conducted by the RAND Corporation tested IREX’s media literacy social media materials in the U.S. and found them to be effective in reducing engagement with Kremlin propaganda by even the most partisan news consumers (Helmus et al. 2020).

References:

Bayer, J., Holznagel, D. B., Katarzyna, L., Adela, P., Josephine, B. S., Szakács, J., & Uszkiewicz, E. (2021). Disinformation and propaganda: impact on the functioning of the rule of law and democratic processes in the EU and its Member States: 2021 update.

Bergstrom, A. M., Flynn, M., & Craig, C. (2018). Deconstructing media in the college classroom: A longitudinal critical media literacy intervention. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 10(3), 113-131.

Bermes, A. (2021). Information overload and fake news sharing: A transactional stress perspective exploring the mitigating role of consumers’ resilience during COVID-19. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 61, 102555.

Chang, E. P., Ecker, U. K., & Page, A. C. (2019). Not wallowing in misery–retractions of negative misinformation are effective in depressive rumination. Cognition and Emotion, 33(5), 991-1005.

Duran, R. L., Yousman, B., Walsh, K. M., & Longshore, M. A. (2008). Holistic media education: An assessment of the effectiveness of a college course in media literacy. Communication quarterly, 56(1), 49-68.

Ecker, U. K., Lewandowsky, S., Cook, J., Schmid, P., Fazio, L. K., Brashier, N., ... & Amazeen, M. A. (2022). The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance to correction. Nature Reviews Psychology, 1(1), 13-29.

Helmus, T. C., Marrone, J. V., Posard, M., & Schlang, D. (2020). Russian propaganda hits its mark: Experimentally testing the impact of Russian propaganda and counter-interventions. RAND Corporation.

Helmus, T. C., & Kepe, M. (2021). A Compendium of Recommendations for Countering Russian and Other State-sponsored Propaganda. RAND.

Huguet, A., Kavanagh, J., Baker, G., & Blumenthal, M. S. (2019). Exploring media literacy education as a tool for mitigating truth decay. RAND Corporation.

Joachim, M., Castelló, I., & Parry, G. Emotional regulation and institutional maintenance: debunking fake news with emotions. In European Group for Organization Studies 37th Colloquium (EGOS 2021).

Kahne, J., & Bowyer, B. (2017). Educating for democracy in a partisan age: Confronting the challenges of motivated reasoning and misinformation. American educational research journal, 54(1), 3-34.

Klenk, M. (2020). Digital well-being and manipulation online. In Ethics of Digital Well-Being (pp. 81-100). Springer, Cham.

Martel, C., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2020). Reliance on emotion promotes belief in fake news. Cognitive research: principles and implications, 5(1), 1-20.

Mosleh, M., Pennycook, G., Arechar, A. A., & Rand, D. G. (2021). Cognitive reflection correlates with behavior on Twitter. Nature communications, 12(1), 1-10.

Murrock, E., Amulya, J., Druckman, M., & Liubyva, T. (2018). Winning the war on state-sponsored propaganda: Results from an impact study of a Ukrainian news media and information literacy program. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 10(2), 53-85.

Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2019). Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning. Cognition, 188, 39-50.

Preston, S., Anderson, A., Robertson, D. J., Shephard, M. P., & Huhe, N. (2021). Detecting fake news on Facebook: The role of emotional intelligence. Plos one, 16(3), e0246757.

Stecula, D. A., & Pickup, M. (2021). Social media, cognitive reflection, and conspiracy beliefs. Frontiers in Political Science, 3, 647957.

Vraga, E. K., Tully, M., Akin, H., & Rojas, H. (2012). Modifying perceptions of hostility and credibility of news coverage of an environmental controversy through media literacy. Journalism, 13(7), 942-959.