According to the new skills agenda for Europe close to one fifth of young Europeans struggle with using digital tools and handling information and data in everyday life. The European Commission have said that Media literacy, our capacity to access, have a critical understanding of, and interact with the media has never been as important as in today’s society.

The global relevance of Media and Information Literacy has increased yet more significantly in recent times and in light of the COVID-19 crisis the need for literacy around health and wellness information and misinformation is forefront. In India, the United States and Brazil, fact-checking and media literacy organizations have been training citizens to confront the new coronavirus “infodemic.” Workshops have happened online, many employing a train the trainer model with attendees cascading their new knowledge to peers. Fact checkers in Spain have inadvertently come under fire as WhatsApp limited it’s message forwarding feature to limit the spread of COVID-19 disinfomation through chat groups, prompting a misinformed backlash from the public. At the same time cloned versions of the BBC and CNN news sites originating from Russia are pushing disinformation such as the idea that Ebola and Coronavirus are man-made pathogens.

The approach and content of MIL must change, forced to adapt to the rapidly evolving challenges confronting young people in, among other matters, managing and interpreting the exponentially-growing volumes of information directly targeting them on social media, as well as development in the traditional media sector itself. The scale of the challenge for government institutions and educators is enormous.