MEDIAWISE wants to focus on countering disinformation and other forms of interference in the democratic debate, empowering citizens to make informed decisions by helping them identify disinformation and promoting media literacy.
Access to smartphones, affordable Internet connectivity and various social media platforms allow users to manipulate false information and rumors. Particularly during this COVID-19 pandemic, the number of fake news has been increasing.
A 2020 study, appeared in the Current Directions in Psychological Science, showed that adults over the age of 65 are more than seven times more likely than younger adults to engage with fake news, a relatively sizable margin. In general, it is possible to say that older people tend to have increasingly smaller social networks as they get older, as well as fewer of what are as “weak ties,” or peripheral acquaintances (think that Facebook friend you went to camp with when you were 14 but haven’t seen in person in 15 years). On the other hand, young adults, who definitely are digital natives, in these hard times, despite being confident of being able to distinguish fake news from real news, are having difficulties to differentiate between verifiable news and fake news that is shared to mislead the readers, making them an easy target for intentional information misuse.
MEDIAWISE target groups are:
In this way, the project by empowering these two important groups of citizens to make informed decisions by helping them identify disinformation and promoting media literacy wants to contribute to reach this call’s priorities and objectives.
The project is implemented in Italy, Cyprus, Greece and Spain.
For more information, please visit https://www.mediawise-project.eu