SUMMARY
- A 2022 memo prepared for the State Department advises rolling out “media literacy” and “digital literacy” lessons in schools to combat disinformation, misinformation, and hate speech.
- The report shows that children’s online safety was not the original motivation of the US federal government’s push for media and digital literacy curricula — it was the prevention of certain types of political speech to prevent “democratic backsliding.”
- Media literacy and “inoculation” techniques are touted as a “demand side” solution to the disinformation — government-backed influence campaigns to pre-bias online audiences against disfavored narratives.
- The author of the report previously worked for Ofcom, the UK internet regulator currently in charge of enforcing the country’s Online Safety Act.
- Although a purportedly nonpartisan expert adivising the State Department, the EU, and the Republic of Ireland on digital policy, the author previously condemned Brexit and the 2016 election as the result of misinformed electorates driven by “fear.”
Today, campaigners for “media literacy” and “digital literacy” in schools often claim that their primary concern is children’s welfare — teaching them safe browsing habits online. But as a 2022 State Department memo unearthed by the Foundation for Freedom Online reveals, the push for media literacy was orchestrated from the top down by the federal government under the previous administration, and its overriding concern was teaching future generations to avoid sources accused of “disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation.”
In the 2022 Media Literacy Design Manual, commissioned by the State Department’s Bureau of Europe and Eurasia, officials made clear that media literacy has far more to do with delegitimizing disfavored political speech than protecting children from harm.
The manual warned that “today’s media ecosystems are more complex and complicated than at any time in human history” and that malign actors use “propaganda, conspiracies, rumors, hoaxes, hyper-partisan content, and various types of manipulated media to influence, persuade, and polarize.”
The most common purpose of media literacy interventions, it noted, was to address problems like “disinformation, online radicalization, or hate speech.
The problem, it concluded, was an “information disorder, a term that encapsulates the phenomena of disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation” that threatened democracy and governance.
Schools, noted the report, were an excellent venue to disseminate media literacy thanks to their “oven-ready” delivery infrastructure.
The report also notes that teachers tend to be trusted. At several points in the report, the importance of mobilizing trusted institutions to disseminate official messaging on disinformation and media literacy is noted. The report also notes the importance of the “captive audience” that classrooms represent.
The report explicitly tied media literacy efforts to shaping political outcomes. It cautioned that these processes could “lead to real-world consequences such as backsliding of democratic norms, contested elections, and violence.”
The EU Boomerang
Foreign censorship laws like the EU’s Digital Services Act and the UK’s Online Safety Act are correctly viewed by the current administration as a threat to American tech companies and American free speech.
But the federal government under previous administrations took precisely the opposite approach: because it, too, saw American free speech as a threat, the arms of US foreign policy soft power worked tirelessly to encourage rather than fight foreign censorship initiatives. As FFO previously revealed, 23 of the 42 organizations responsible for helping enforce the EU’s censorship regime by monitoring online speech (in other words, more than half of them) were funded by the US federal government. Until the current administration. US tax dollars also fed the censorship machine in Brazil, which gone the furthest in punishing American companies over “disinformation.”
The Media Literacy Manual is further evidence of this transatlantic censorship collaboration. It was prepared for the State Department’s Bureau of Europe and Eurasia — the document, then, was meant to guide US statecraft in Europe, at a time when the EU’s censorship regime was in the early stages of development.
The individual who wrote the report, Martina Chapman, has advised the EU on digital policy. She co-wrote a 2017 report commissioned by the EU’s ruling body, the European Commission, on the state of media literacy training in the EU. On both sides of the Atlantic, media literacy guidelines are authored by the same individual.
Despite being trusted as a dispassionate expert in three separate jurisdictions, Chapman has, in interviews, shown signs of partisanship, telling the Times of India in 2017 that lack of “media literacy” was the cause of the success of Brexit in the UK and the first election of Donald Trump:
If we needed a reminder of the importance of media literacy, then surely 2016 has been it. From Brexit to the US presidential elections, we have seen how fear and blind optimism are used as weapons to outgun facts and figures. Reasoned debate loses out to rhetoric and easily tweetable slogans.
Chapman has had deep involvement in the UK’s digital regulation infrastructure too: she spent several years working for Ofcom, the UK’s media and digital regulatory body that is now in charge of enforcing the country’s controversial censorship law, the Online Safety Act.
Chapman also advises on media literacy and counter-disinformation in the Republic of Ireland, which is currently forcing through its National Counter Disinformation Strategy despite major backlash from the public. Chapman was previously the independent chairwoman of the working group that produced the strategy, and frequently advises the country’s parliament.
Media Literacy as “Demand Side” Censorship
On page six of the report, an interesting phrase is used: the “supply and demand sides of the informational equation,” which the report argues must work in tandem to fully contain the threats of dis, mis, and malinformation.
In another State Department document evaluating media literacy efforts in Europe and Eurasia, the term “supply and demand” is again used. That evaluation report also makes numerous references to attempts to “inoculate” audiences against disinformation in Europe and Eurasia.
If attempts to regulate and pressure platforms into changing their content moderation policies target the “supply side” of censorship, then efforts like media literacy and “psychological inoculation” (which FFO has previously exposed as a key technique of the censorship industry, closely tied to media literacy) represent the demand side: manipulating audiences to mistrust and ignore non-establishment approved information before they encounter it.
