Using Media Literacy to Fight Digital Fake News in Later Life: A Mission Impossible?

Abstract

Fake news is a threat to the trustworthiness of digital information sources. Media literacy training that can be used to empower people to fight fake news - understood to refer to any kind of misleading information that could mistakenly be considered accurate, regardless of the mechanisms that led to its propagation [1] - is mostly oriented toward younger people in an educational institutional context. Yet in later life, older people, too, may benefit from such training. Are there appropriate institutions to provide this? In this paper we explore the possibility of enhancing older people’s digital resilience [2] using insights from the field of media literacy to answer the following research questions: 1. To what extent are older people vulnerable to fake news? 2. To what extent are older people able to learn to become digitally resilient? 3. What institutions could play a role in providing media literacy training specifically tailored for older people? Finally, we will present some implications for future research in this field.