Task of the Week: Premise Data’s Initiative to Promote Media Literacy

Premise is committed to promoting media literacy around the world through providing tasks on building media literacy skills that are both engaging and informative.

By Samantha Hubner, Senior Consultant

Media literacy is an increasingly prevalent issue that impacts how people interpret information and perceive the world around them.

The spread of misinformation on social media in particular has eroded trust in healthcare, government, and other vital institutions.

In today’s world, media literacy affects every field, every person, at every hour of the day. As a technology company with extraordinary reach across the globe, Premise is invested in and committed to the ethical use of its capabilities as a force for good in people’s daily lives.

Promoting and improving online media literacy in the US and around the world is key to building stronger and healthier communities.

That’s why this week’s Task of the Week is about media literacy.

What is this task about?

Media literacy refers to the ability to think critically about information. It is a skill that requires you to analyze information from a variety of viewpoints and make judgments about the credibility, validity, and intentions of the information being presented.

Premise has successfully supported a number of clients around the world by creating tasks that assist in monitoring and identifying misinformation. The nature of these tasks has had a remarkable after effect: training and promoting better media literacy skills for our Contributor networks in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and eastern Europe.

This task is about creating an opportunity for our US Contributors to hone their own skills in media literacy, and in doing so, promote better media literacy practices within their communities.

How can Contributors complete this task?

• The task begins by presenting the Contributor with a few questions about key terminology regarding media literacy.
• After that, the task will transition to show several examples of social media accounts. For each example account, Contributors must identify the profile as either real or fake.
• These profiles come from two leading researchers in fighting disinformation at the Clemson University Media Forensics Lab.

Why should Contributors complete this task?

Premise Contributors actively use our platform to present key decision makers with critical insights on where policy changes, resources, and actions are most needed to make a positive impact on people’s lives. Media literacy is a key tenet of ensuring that positive impact.

Premise’s ongoing work in assessing market price fluctuations, emergency preparedness, media literacy, humanitarian aid delivery, environmental protection, public sentiment, and infrastructure mapping are just some examples of how we are using our platform to address core human security needs.

What we’ve learned so far

Premise has conducted a series of tasks around the world over the past year to understand how information about COVID-19 is messaged, received, and interpreted across different media. In doing so, Premise Contributors helped us uncover a great deal of insights regarding the troubling impacts of misinformation.

For instance, early on we learned that in Nigeria, “only around 30% of respondents had high levels of confidence in the accuracy of information coming from both state and national government and health authorities”. This was especially concerning with accompanying data indicating that 63% of respondents had personally heard a religious leader opposing social distancing as a prevention practice.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, one in every four contributors surveyed (26%) reported encountering misinformation about COVID-19 from April to May 2020, with online media being a leading culprit. Similar patterns were noticed in other survey collections in Yemen, and yet again in a more recent analysis of vaccine hesitancy in Ukraine.

Our efforts to better understand and combat misinformation by promoting media literacy are ongoing. As of July 31, an average of 57% of US Contributors were able to correctly identify the authenticity of one of the four example social media profiles.

By completing this task, we hope that you will have a better understanding of your own media literacy and an improved capacity to spot and stop the spread of misinformation.

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