25 signatures reached
To: UK Education Secretaries
Fake news consequences - Educate UK teens
Social media platforms are being bombarded with fake news, causing chaos and riots around the world. Impacting massively on children's mental health they need our help to call out the education secretaries to provide the digital literacy skills in their curriculum to identify what is fake news and what is real.
Why is this important?
Just check your social media feed - it won't take long..........
Fake news is becoming a regular occurrence in everyone's social media feeds. However, youngsters in the UK are the first generation to be exposed to this radical fake news whilst being at their most impressionable age.
According to the National Literacy Trust (2021a) only 2% of children and young people in the UK have the critical literacy skills they need to tell if a news story is real or fake. Moreover half (49.9%) are worried about not being able to spot fake news (National Literacy Trust, 2021b).
Fake news not only increases anxiety among teens and damages their self esteem, they can also reduce teens trust in formal news. All this can have far-reaching and dangerous consequences, such as when teens lose the fear of dangerous diseases, start to exclude and separate on the basis of political propaganda or trivialise radical groups and to the extent they can be brainwashed into becoming members.
This is never more important, with the government delaying the online harm bill until 2022, we need to act now to protect our children's mental health and futures. Please help by signing our petition and united, we can spread our message across the length and breadth of the UK.
Fake news is becoming a regular occurrence in everyone's social media feeds. However, youngsters in the UK are the first generation to be exposed to this radical fake news whilst being at their most impressionable age.
According to the National Literacy Trust (2021a) only 2% of children and young people in the UK have the critical literacy skills they need to tell if a news story is real or fake. Moreover half (49.9%) are worried about not being able to spot fake news (National Literacy Trust, 2021b).
Fake news not only increases anxiety among teens and damages their self esteem, they can also reduce teens trust in formal news. All this can have far-reaching and dangerous consequences, such as when teens lose the fear of dangerous diseases, start to exclude and separate on the basis of political propaganda or trivialise radical groups and to the extent they can be brainwashed into becoming members.
This is never more important, with the government delaying the online harm bill until 2022, we need to act now to protect our children's mental health and futures. Please help by signing our petition and united, we can spread our message across the length and breadth of the UK.
