There’s a new campaign to teach Irish kids about fake news

It's the biggest media phenomenon in years.

The term 'fake news' just one of the things that we have US president Donald Trump to thank for, but in the age of digital technology, it is a fact that information can be deliberately misrepresented or just plain made up and circulated easily. We'd like to think we're all pretty wise to what's real and what's not, but the same can't be said of kids. Research has shown that children tend to believe what they see and hear, as they don't have the skills to distinguish what's true and what's not. They've been shown to have difficulty understanding the difference between content and marketing messages too, so a new campaign is out to help them become more media-savvy. Safefood has launched MediaWise, an 8 week primary school programme to help children makes sense of the media world around them and the many messages that they are exposed to.

“The rapid evolution of technology and our appetite for it, means Ireland is a very media-centric environment, and media, in its many forms, plays an important role in our children’s lives," said media specialist Sheena Horgan at the launch the campaign. "Because of this ubiquity, media literacy is an important and necessary contemporary life skill for children growing up in today’s Information Age." "Children are very media and technology savvy but less aware of why the media sends them these messages," added Geared McCauley, a teacher at St Senan’s Primary School in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford. "As children believe what they see and hear, I feel it’s really important we give children the opportunity to understand what’s coming at them from the media and how they process that information.”

MediaWise was developed with teachers and an expert group drawn from education, advertising, media and regulation. Primary schools can access the programme online from this September at Mediawise.ie.