Don’t Let Media Cheat You
A media-literacy project empowering young people to distinguish between accurate and misleading information.
Our project was funded and implemented by the European Union and the Spanish National Agency (INJUVE).
With the development of technology, phones have become small computers. Social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter have become popular among people with the widespread use of smartphones. However, there are many harms alongside the benefits of smartphones and social media. People can share an event, a photo or anything else with millions of people within seconds. This situation has revealed the concept of citizen journalism. Every individual has become able to share an incident they witness on the street as if they were journalists. Unclear and unchecked news has caused a great deal of information pollution.
According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, in its “Digital News Report 2018”, among 37 countries surveyed, Turkey is the country where people report seeing the most misinformation (49%), followed by Greece (44%), Hungary (42%) and Romania (38%). In our country, the rate of people who say they have seen fake news has reached 30%, and the rate of people who say they do not know whether the news they see on the internet is true or false is 69%.
In this context, we have decided to realise our project because of the increasing fake news in the world and the high level of disinformation in our country. Our general aim is to inform young people about accurate and fake news, to raise awareness about the growing amount of fake news on social media, and to encourage them to question the accuracy of the news they see on the internet.
The objectives of our project are:
- To create awareness of the concept of “fake news”.
- To raise awareness and build a critical attitude against fake news that young people read on the internet or encounter in daily life.
- To show young people how news is written through visits to agencies and local newspapers.
- While teaching the concept of “fake news” to people on the street through various activities, to enable young people to talk about this concept with the people around them.
