Otoo: Young people urgently need media literacy skills

Young people are glued to screens, putting them at risk of exposure to toxic misinformation, Ebonee Otoo, senior vice president of educator engagement, wrote in an op-ed for The Hechinger Report. More states must respond by requiring that media literacy skills be taught in classrooms.

“We need to do away with the myth of the ‘digital native,’” Otoo wrote. “Just because young people have grown up with technology does not mean that they instinctively know how to navigate the challenges of our information landscape.”

As misinformation surges amid federal, state and local elections this year, states must prepare students to be fully informed participants in our democracy, Otoo said. She called students “our next generation of voters.”

“It’s important that we teach young people how to recognize the different types and quality of information they’re bombarded with, or we will leave them vulnerable to information that is unreliable or even intentionally misleading,” Otoo wrote.

Read Otoo’s full piece here.