"Que no te la prenguin! (Don't be taken for a ride!)", an educational proposal to strengthen our pupils' critical capacity

This initiative, championed by the European Parliament Office in Barcelona and the Government of Catalonia, is geared towards almost 700 students in the 3rd, 4th year of ESO and 1st year of Baccalaureate at schools that are part of the European Parliament's Ambassador Schools programme in Catalonia.

In the run-up to the European elections, the goal is to strengthen students' critical capacity, foster media literacy and enhance the tools to identify disinformation in its many forms.

In the workshop run by the Learn to Check association, our students had the chance to learn about processes for contrasting and verifying the information they receive as users on social networks, which are increasingly using content generated with artificial intelligence. The session included examples of disinformation in the context of the European elections, and invited students to reflect on the impact of this content on the results of the elections, as well as on the erosion of institutions and democracy. The speaker guided them to differentiate between fake, manipulated, misleading, deceptive, impostor or AI-generated content and indicated how to detect it. Using the acronym PANTERA[1] we can contrast the information we receive, relying on the tools that browsers offer us such as Fact Check Explorer, Web Archive, Google Images.

About Learn to Check ( https://learntocheck.org/)

Learn to Check is an educational and dissemination project to combat disinformation and to foster critical thinking in the consumption and production of information by citizens. It has trained upwards of 7,800 people in the past five years and has partnered with more than sixty organisations. It also produces materials on media education for several publishing houses and drives projects such as ¡No me los toques!, on disinformation and children's rights, with UNICEF Spain; the project Entre línies: llegint la desinformació (Between the lines: reading disinformation), with the Barcelona Provincial Council Library Management or the Escape Fake project, for vulnerable young people, with the Mobile World Capital Barcelona Foundation, the Exit Foundation and the Banco Sabadell Foundation.

-----

[1] Provenance. Authorship (Who wrote this?). Newness (Is it new or old and has it been re-circulated?). Tone (What tone is used?). Evidence. Replications (Comment). Expand (Contrast it, don't just take the first image).