Americans need truth in age of misinformation

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The past several years have seen a massive, sometimes malicious, assault on our sense of shared reality. The combination of social media and conspiracy theories has increased the reach and velocity of destructive lies. As a result, both the physical and political health of our country have been placed at risk.

On public health, the dissemination of misinformation about COVID-19 and the safety of vaccines has been responsible for thousands of avoidable deaths. Public benefit from the miraculous development of vaccines was partially squandered. Some politicians even echoed fraudulent information for political benefit – riding a wave of falsehoods with casualties when it crashes to the shore.

On America’s civic health, the tribalization of information is a serious threat to democracy. Many Americans live in ideological bubbles where their main sources of information gain profit by feeding fear and anger. In some cases, it has encouraged the self-radicalization that led to the Jan. 6 insurrection and other violence.

A new Public Agenda/USA TODAY Hidden Common Ground report found that half of Americans say partisan divisiveness has made it harder to solve problems in their communities, and a rising number of Americans are concerned that we no longer know how to disagree constructively as a nation.

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Americans have always had strong disagreements about policy, an assumption of our constitutional order. Leaders and experts have proposed very different paths up the mountain. But now it seems they are climbing entirely different mountains of news and truth.

It both undermines the possibility of productive agreement and makes productive disagreement more difficult. Democratic discourse becomes nearly impossible when people no longer inhabit the same reality.

Any American with a smartphone has access to an almost infinite supply of information. But smartphones are not equipped with editors to sort reliable from dodgy information, persuasion from manipulation, and the urgent from the absurd. This requires every consumer to be their own editor – a skill not broadly taught in America.

This seems true for young people. A 2016 survey by the Stanford History Education group found less than one-third of Advanced Placement students could identify a biased Tweet as slanted. Nearly all students failed to complete basic tasks like evaluating the source of a video, distinguishing between news stories and advertisements, and assessing the credibility of a website.

Public attention is currently focused on the dangers of social media for developing minds. Greater oversight is clearly in the public interest. But given the multiplication of misinformation outside social media, challenges of effective regulation and proliferation of new technologies, it will be difficult to restrict false and damaging material from the supply side.

When the flow of misinformation is hard to stop, it is the filter that matters most – young minds with critical skills to determine truth from falsehood. Our nation is failing to foster critical thinking, media literacy and an ability to understand other perspectives. Just as young people should be taught coding, they must be taught the decoding of news and information as a prerequisite of informed citizenship.

Invest in civic education

We need to upgrade our expectations for civic education. Students should be exposed to America’s core values, the difficult history of implementing those ideals, and the shared language and culture that enable us to communicate and find common ground. And they need skills to navigate the era of alternative facts and false narratives in this misinformation age.

The demand for modern civic education needs to come from parents, school leaders and state officials. It is time for concerned parents to engage at school board meetings with a positive, nonpartisan agenda of critical thinking and responsible citizenship. This is the ultimate answer to irrationality and bitterness in our common life.

There is also a legitimate federal role. The federal government should not dictate a common curriculum, which would invite disastrous political discord, but can provide resources for school districts to choose a curriculum of their own.

The Civics Secures Democracy Act – itself a model of civic cooperation with bipartisan sponsorship from both houses of Congress – would establish the priority of civic education in American education and devote $1 billion each year for schools to afford quality resources.

Learning media literacy can help

One example would be material from the News Literacy Project, a nonprofit dedicated to making students smart, active consumers of news and information. These programs teach the importance of accurate and vetted information and strengthen students’ mental immune system against deception.

This type of education is important for students themselves. What parent wants his or her child to be gullible and easily led? What’s more, informed citizens can engage in informed discourse, which is the basis of self-government, and make rational choices on everything from public debt to public health.

Young people need to be instructed in the values of democracy – equality, freedom and mutual respect. But they also need to be instructed in the methods of democracy – critical thinking and respect for truth. This is the way to reestablish our common bonds in a shared reality.

Margaret Spellings was former U.S. secretary of Education and is president of Texas 2036. John Bridgeland was former director of the White House Domestic Policy Council and is CEO of the COVID Collaborative. Both are members of the Partnership for American Democracy.