Disinformation in the shape of “fake news” has attracted public attention on the dual needs for fact-checking and for media literacy (Frau-Meigs, 2018). A number of fact-checking initiatives and tools have emerged as a response from the journalistic profession. Such tools are mostly geared to journalists, not to teachers, students or citizens at large. Research reveals additional gaps: the focus is mostly on text-based “fake news”, much less on visual “fake news”, though these are among the most prominent in social media; building resilience implies to navigate online information in new ways, especially via lateral reading, as professional fact-checkers do (Wineburg & McGrew, 2018). For this, people seem to need a mix of content knowledge and digital skills as underscored by theories of media literacy and civic online reasoning (Nygren & Guath, 2019).
In this context, the Youcheck! project, funded by the EU program “Media Education for all”, was developed to help the general public and the education community tackle online disinformation using the latest advances in visual verification. The aim is to make the professional plug-in InVID-WeVerify usable by non-experts, through a user-friendly interface and a toolkit of pedagogical scenarios and self-paced tutorials. In order to reach these objectives, Youcheck! focused on testing the user-friendliness of InVID-WeVerify plug-in and on issues of credibility of online images, with two main target populations, students and beta testers (volunteers from the public at large).
Using a mix method approach, the pilot study was conducted in four countries (France, Romania, Spain, Sweden), with a total of 200 students (15-18 in 8 classes) and 80 adult beta testers (in 8 focus groups) in February and March 2020. Pre- and post-test questionnaires for students and online questionnaires and focus groups for beta testers were applied. The students were assessed on visual literacy skills associated with (1) awareness of source bias, (2) assessment of the use of evidence, and (3) corroboration via alternate sources. The beta-testers were assessed to (1) further develop the plug-in, and (2) to make the toolkit a useful resource for all. The research focused on the perception of the functionalities of InVID-WeVerify, especially image reverse search, video keyframes automated extraction and image forensics.
The main results are expected to yield insights into the difference between visual and textual literacy. They also will concentrate on lateral thinking skills as well as the ability to judge the credibility of images, using civic online reasoning and visual literacy. This study will thus contribute critical insights to image credibility research as well as feedback to fact-checkers in the field of journalism and guidance for teachers in terms of building students’ critical thinking heuristics. Additionally, this could be a first significant step into developing media literacy skills for the public at large. The implications for media literacy theory, teaching and learning will be discussed to contribute to the current curricula debates about the importance of media literacy to support democratic engagement among young people while finding ways of skilling the adult population as well.