How can we stop our kids from turning into our parents?
It’s another late night and I’m in bed being responsible and tucking myself in at an appropriate hour. After all, I have class tomorrow.
But I do allow myself half an hour of scrolling time, just to unwind. Naturally, I open X. I see the comments on a post and I’m greeted by a familiar sight.
“@grok is this real?”
Two thoughts hit me at once. First: why are people relying on a chatbot to verify information? Second: this has become par for the course. Across breaking news, or viral videos and images, the same comment appears again and again; people ask Grok to legitimize what they’re seeing.
What does digital literacy actually look like right now, and are we keeping up?
Where misinformation thrives, real voices get pushed aside, devalued, and buried in doubt, confusion, and skepticism. Behind the internet’s supply of misinformation and disinformation are faulty fact-checking practices, and content driven by profit. The result is an information ecosystem where falsehoods can feel as credible as truth and already hateful and dangerous ideologies are bolstered. In the realms of media literacy, some Canadian organizations are tackling this problem by targeting students at an early age. For Matthew Johnson, director of education at MediaSmarts, digital media literacy is more than an umbrella term for understanding how media is constructed, but also how different forms of media communicate, the commercial forces behind them, and how audiences interpret meaning. But all of that somehow collapses when AI enters the picture.
Johnson points to chatbots like Grok as an “unusual case,” not because these chatbots are uniquely unreliable, but because of how quickly users trust them. “The chatbots are not neutral,” he says. “We know that they reflect the biases of the data they were trained on. It’s the confidence of their answers, which I think persuades people. But, that is a big part of what limits their accuracy, too.”
In Winnipeg, one publication is taking the right steps to give the next generation of journalists a more solid foundation. And it all starts with education. At the Winnipeg Free Press, education reporter Maggie Macintosh is collaborating on a media literacy program in partnership with a team of teachers in the public school system who designed the initiative. The program includes a digital learning platform and a student publishing tool called PressKid, which allows schools to build their own news publications.
“This website is incredibly versatile and flexible. It’s super user-friendly, and that’s intentional,” says Macintosh. “We want teachers to be able to just hop on the website and easily learn and be able to use it within minutes.”
The resource has already helped several schools in the Winnipeg School Division jumpstart their own newspapers. Not only is this actively helping teachers and students stay on top of their digital literacy, but it’s also giving students a chance to connect with family abroad, something especially meaningful in a city like Winnipeg, with a large Filipino diaspora.
“What we’ve heard through the early feedback is that this is a really cool thing for students who have family overseas,” says Macintosh. “This is a way for them to stay connected with relatives, so they can actually read and see what their family member is up to in Winnipeg through the website.”
MediaSmarts offers a parallel approach. Its resources span kindergarten through Grade 12, covering everything from algorithms and privacy to fact-checking. One interactive game, A Day in the Life of the Jos, was created in collaboration with Carleton University’s Human Oriented Research in Usable Security lab, which studies the interactions between humans and computers. The game places students in everyday online scenarios, asking them to navigate challenges like cyberbullying and misinformation in real time.
“If they are receiving these lessons over the course of their school career, each one is building on what they’ve learned before,” says Johnson.
While MediaSmarts aims to teach young people how to identify a reliable news source and to think critically about the media they consume, they acknowledge other practical gaps.
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Young people aren’t primarily encountering news in classrooms or even on news websites, they’re encountering it through social media feeds. Johnson says the result is a “poor information diet.”
He says that young people are much more likely to consume content through a feed rather than seeking out the information. In delivering content passively, what feels important and what doesn’t, disappears.
Macintosh tries to meet audiences where they are. On TikTok, under the handle @medialitmags, she shares behind-the-scenes glimpses of journalism and explains reporting processes using trends and accessible language.
“I really hope that by making these videos, people will realize that I’m just a girl,” she says. “I’m a big sister, I’m a daughter, I’m a cyclist, I’m a foodie, I’m a vintage fashion collector, I’m a collage artist. I am all of these things simultaneously, as well as a journalist. Journalists are just people, we want to make our society and our communities a better place.”
It’s another late night for me. My phone buzzes. It’s my dad, sending me a video on WeChat. Clearly, it’s AI-generated. I hesitate. As much as I want to break the news to my dad, I feel bad knowing he’s not only fallen for it, but that he was interested enough to share it with me. It’s a familiar scenario, one playing out across families as fake images become more convincing. In this new age of digital media, softwares such as Sora and Google’s Nano Banana are creating hyperrealistic videos that fool anyone. For people without strong digital literacy skills, distinguishing real from fake is becoming increasingly difficult.
Kara Brisson-Boivin, director of research at MediaSmarts, says achieving media literacy is challenging.
“You can be a critical thinker, but sort of lack the technological skills to know how to, for example, use AI. Or you can be very technologically savvy and know how to use AI, but don’t think critically about it,” she says.
She referred me to MediaSmarts’ Break the Fake program. The four-step guide was developed to help people navigate and verify information online. The steps include finding the source, verifying the source, checking other sources, and using other fact-checkers as well.
“Those four steps are really clearly outlined on the website and that program,” says Brisson-Boivin. “And often you only need to do one of those four steps in under a minute to be able to determine if something is true or not.”
To illustrate, consider these headlines:
“Scientists detect unexpected rise in microplastics
in popular bottled water brands”
“National grocery chains investigated for quietly syncing price hikes across provinces”
“New data show remote workers putting in longer hours than before the pandemic”
“Major airline admits ‘glitch’ that sent thousands of passengers’ luggage to the wrong continent”
They sound plausible. They appeal to authority, relatability, and emotion.
They’re also fake.
Titles such as “scientist” or “major airline” may indicate some form of authority. Typically when we think of trustworthy news, we often point towards experts in the field. “Proven research” suggests that there is a body of data that supports a claim, while “popular bottled water,” “grocery chains,” “pandemic,” and “luggage” all appeal to real-life experiences, establishing relatability, which may strengthen trust.
One story that went viral illustrates this point. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, people were wildly sharing a story about dolphins “returning” to Venice’s canals. What seemed to be a feel-good story about marine life taking back what was rightfully theirs, was quickly debunked. The internet’s fun police went to work and found that the videos were actually taken in the port of Cagliari, Sardinia, around 750 kilometres away from Venice.
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Improving digital literacy doesn’t really require formal training.
“The one thing that I would highlight is intellectual humility,” says Johnson. “Being aware of your own biases and the possibility that you might be wrong, and being willing to update your beliefs and opinions in the face of new data.”
For Macintosh, it’s as easy as getting your news from a trustworthy source or news outlet. She references two ends on the spectrum of reputability. On one end is The New York Times. The newspaper has been around for 175 years and counting (and that’s not even mentioning its rigorous fact-checking and editorial process). And at the other end is @WinnipegWildin, an Instagram page that boasts more than a quarter million followers. For a sense of its content, the popular social media account has joked about Winnipeg Jets goalkeeper Connor Hellebuyck being responsible for bombing Iran. The difference is quite clear.
“If it’s this fake content, it’s meant to be entertaining, right? It’s meant to captivate us,” says Macintosh. Especially for those who are of older age and are more vulnerable to misinformation, she suggests a care-based approach when encouraging them to think critically about legitimacy in mainstream media. “I think that we need to be gentle, understanding, and non-judgmental,” she adds.
Macintosh has encouraged me to turn the experience of the AI-generated video that my dad sent me into an educational opportunity. But when I try to imagine this conversation, I can see him turning it back onto me. As I try to guide him, I know he’ll tell me about his worries that this same AI will replace journalists like me in the next 20 years.
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