On Media Literacy
Recently I attended a webinar by C’est vrai ça?, a French organization dedicated to fact-checking and combating misinformation. Their name, translates to “Is that true?”, a question we should be asking constantly but rarely do. They train people to identify cognitive biases, cross-reference sources, and structure their reasoning when evaluating claims they see online. What stayed with me afterward was the deeper question it implied: Why do we now need formal training to distinguish truth from fiction?
We’re in a strange situation right now. A recommendation algorithm here, a generated summary there, an AI assistant polishing our emails or LinkedIn posts until they no longer sound quite like us (and look all the same). We stand at a threshold where the very act of reading requires a kind of vigilance that the previous generation never even needed.
What Media Literacy Actually Means
The term “media literacy” has been with us since at least the 1960s, but its meaning has grown heavier with each passing decade. In its earliest form, it meant: the ability to understand that a newspaper editorial is different from a news report, that advertisements are trying to sell you something, that a documentary filmmaker makes choices about what to include and exclude.
Media Literacy is the ability to critically analyze stories presented in the mass media and to determine their accuracy or credibility.
But media literacy in its contemporary sense requires understanding not only the explicit content of what we consume but also the invisible architecture that delivers it to us. Why did this article appear on my feed? What does the platform gain from my engagement? Who profits when I share this, and who suffers when I don’t question it?
What has gone wrong is both simple and catastrophic: the economics of attention have swallowed up the economics of truth.
Back then reading the news was a daily ritual requiring physical presence, the exchange of coins, the unfolding of pages. That model was never actually perfect though. Newspapers had biases, blind spots, owners with agendas. But there was friction in the system. Publishing something false or misleading carried reputational costs. Corrections appeared. Editors existed. The digital transformation removed most of that friction. Suddenly, anyone (especially with a blue tick) could publish anything, and the criterion for visibility became virality (and sadly not accuracy). What makes something go viral? Emotion. Outrage. The feeling of possessing secret knowledge that “they” don’t want you to have. The platforms discovered, through relentless A/B testing, that their profits increased when users stayed longer, and users stayed longer when they were angry, afraid, or righteously certain. Ouf!
This might seem like a conspiracy but it’s honestly not. It’s something more banal and therefore more dangerous: an optimization function that happens to reward the worst of human nature. The algorithm doesn’t care whether the content is true. It cares whether you click.
And now, generative AI. Sigh!
I have spent enough time with large language models to understand their capabilities and their hollowness. They can produce text that reads like journalism, like sincere human testimony. They can do this at scale, in seconds, in any style you specify. They cannot, however, know whether what they produce is true. They have no relationship to truth in the way a human does, no capacity for verification, no stakes in accuracy.
We are entering an era where the cost of producing convincing text has collapsed to nearly zero. Where a single person with modest technical skills can flood the information environment with content that looks, at first glance and sometimes second glance, like the work of legitimate reporters, concerned citizens, expert analysts. Where the very abundance of (awfully written) text makes careful reading feel impossible, pushing us toward the skimmers and summarizers, the AI assistants that tell us what all this text “really means.”
The snake eating its tail.
I don’t really have a solution. I distrust anyone who claims to. But I have developed certain practices, certain habits of mind that feel, at minimum, like a dignified response to an undignified situation.
The first is slowness. The deliberate refusal to share, comment, or react until the initial emotional charge has dissipated. The information environment is designed to prevent exactly this kind of reflection. Speed is the enemy of discernment.
The second is source interrogation. “Who published this?”, “What is their relationship to the subject? What do they gain? Where did they get their information, and how can I verify it independently?” This is tedious. It is meant to be tedious. The platforms profit from our impatience.
The third is intellectual humility. The recognition that I might be wrong, that the things I believe confidently might be artifacts of my particular information diet, that the people who disagree with me might have access to truths I have been systematically prevented from encountering. It simply means holding my own certainties more lightly.
The Stakes
Media literacy is a precondition for meaningful citizenship, for genuine relationships, for the basic capacity to tell truth from fiction. What happens when a majority of the population cannot distinguish an AI-generated image from a photograph? When political campaigns can manufacture thousands of fake testimonials (or fabricate votes)? When a lie can circle the globe not just before the truth puts on its shoes but before anyone can verify whether shoes even exist?
We lose the shared reality that makes democracy possible. We retreat into information tribes, each convinced of their exclusive access to truth, each dismissing the others as dupes or conspirators. We need to cultivate a willingness to sit with uncertainty, a recognition that understanding is work and that the work is never really finished. The only meaningful response is to become the kind of reader who cannot be so easily overwhelmed. To reclaim slowness as a form of resistance. To remember that the point was never to consume more information but to understand the world well enough to act wisely within it.