Italian teenagers struggle to recognize reliable news from fake news, despite the fact that in this historical moment, in which most of the information is conveyed by the internet, this is a fundamental skill. This was reported by the OECD (the organization for economic cooperation and development), which in a focus on the latest data (2018) relating to the reading skills of the survey Pisa (Program for International Student Assessment), answered the question: “15-year-olds are prepared to handle fake news and disinformation? “
«54% of students from OECD countries reported having been trained in school on how to recognize if the information is distorted or not ”. In some countries, such as Australia, Canada, Denmark and the United States, in 70% of cases students are taught how to navigate the cauldron of information. In others, such as Israel, Latvia, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Switzerland, on the other hand, less than 45% of adolescents have received this type of training.
Also Italy is at the bottom of the ranking: only 49 out of 100 students claim to have received the tools to distinguish real news from fake news.
Yet “the ability to distinguish good information from bad information is important for preserving democratic values,” they explain from the OECD. “The massive flow of information that characterizes the digital age requires readers to be able to distinguish between facts and opinions and learn strategies for detecting distorted information and malicious content such as emails. phishing or fake news. It has been widely documented that being poorly informed can lead to polarization of politics, to decreased trust in institutions public ea undermine the foundations of democracy».
The OECD has also developed an “index of knowledge of reading strategies to assess the credibility of sources”. The students who obtained a higher index, around 0.21 (and therefore, are equipped with more tools), are those of the United Kingdom, Denmark and Germany. Some countries have a very negative index (for example Mexico -0.40 and Turkey 0.21), and the average is 0.01. The value of Italy is even lower: -0.05. Which becomes -0.08 for 15-year-old boys and -0.24 for students who grew up in disadvantaged socio-economic contexts.
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