Young people are computer savvy but media illiterate.
Since Jan. 1, California schools have been required to integrate “media literacy content into instruction that all pupils receive from kindergarten through grade 12.” Assembly Bill 873, introduced by Assembly Member Marc Berman, D-Menlo Park, cited this statistic from a study I co-authored with my Stanford colleagues: “82 percent of middle school pupils struggled to distinguish advertisements from news stories.”
What AB873 doesn’t say, however, is that it’s not just middle school students who are flailing. We all are.
No one is immune from being taken in by “native ads,” so-called because they’re designed to fade into the surrounding “native” content, using the same fonts, color schemes and style as regular news stories. A study by researchers at Boston University and the University of Georgia presented 738 adults with an article, “America’s Smartphone Obsession Extends to Online Banking.” It came with a label saying that it was created for the Bank of America. But this disclosure was overshadowed by the masthead of the New York Times and the article’s headline. Nine of 10 respondents, representing a range of political beliefs, mistakenly rated it as a news story.
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High school students, digital natives who grew up online, had similar troubles telling an ad from a news story. They compared two pieces of content from the website of the Atlantic — an article from its Science section titled, “Why Solving Climate Change Will Be Like Mobilizing for War” and an infographic on energy usage that came with the statement, “Saving the world from climate change is all about altering the energy mix.” Students had to choose which of the two was a better source for learning about policies to address global warming.
The infographic featured the logo of the Atlantic in the upper corner next to a link to the words “Sponsor Content What’s this?” that hugged a tiny yellow shell, the symbol of Shell Oil. Just 11% of high school students selected the article from the Atlantic’s Science section as more reliable. When the same task was given to college students at Purdue University, 78% were duped.
If only the solution to students’ confusion were as simple as teaching them what “sponsored content” means. It’s become a lot more complicated. A dizzying array of terms — “in association with,” “partner content,” “presented by,” “crafted with,” “hosted by,” “brought to you by” or simply — and enigmatically “with” — have been concocted to satisfy the Federal Trade Commission requirement that ads be labeled. These wiggle words do what they’re intended to do: Mislead.
Why should we be concerned? To start, if students are to become informed citizens, they need to understand that multinational companies are not in the business of helping humanity or the planet. Their goal is to please shareholders by increasing profits. Fossil fuel companies, especially, may want us to think they’re on the right side of history when it comes to climate change. But actions speak louder than ads. Clean energy investments by Big Oil (“renewable resources” as the Shell ad calls them) represent a mere sliver, 1%, of their yearly expenditures, a pittance compared to what they spend exploring and discovering new ways to dredge fossil fuels from the earth and sea. Shell might not be lying outright in its infographic, but we can be sure of one thing: They’re not going to pay good money for something that casts them in a negative light.
The internet is one giant marketing experiment and all of us are its guinea pigs. Handsomely compensated professionals work overtime to figure out how to deceive us without us noticing. This deception is not an aberration or a bug in the system — it’s simply how the game is played. California’s media literacy law is a first step in the right direction. Because if we don’t teach students that they are part of a treacherous game, who will?
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Certainly not Shell Oil.
Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education, Emeritus, at Stanford University.
California wants kids to be media literate. They’re not the only ones who need help
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30.01.2024
Young people are computer savvy but media illiterate.
Since Jan. 1, California schools have been required to integrate “media literacy content into instruction that all pupils receive from kindergarten through grade 12.” Assembly Bill 873, introduced by Assembly Member Marc Berman, D-Menlo Park, cited this statistic from a study I co-authored with my Stanford colleagues: “82 percent of middle school pupils struggled to distinguish advertisements from news stories.”
What AB873 doesn’t say, however, is that it’s not just middle school students who are flailing. We all are.
No one is immune from being taken in by “native ads,” so-called because they’re designed to fade into the surrounding “native” content, using the same fonts, color schemes and style as regular news stories. A study by researchers at Boston University and the University of Georgia presented 738 adults with an article, “America’s Smartphone Obsession Extends to Online Banking.” It came with a label saying that it was created for the Bank........
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