Rethinking Media Literacy 2025

A socio-ecological model to tackle disinformation 3 Combating disinformation requires a whole-of-society approach, not just a focus on individuals and content. These two strategies, monitoring and analysis, should operate on a feedback loop – exposing the anatomy of deception can help strengthen education and bolster overall resilience to such methods over time. However, they also risk underplaying the systems that enable disinformation or the malign incentives therein. Both routes have arguably placed too much onus on individuals and civil society while obscuring the larger structures at play. This includes the role of social media platforms, publishers, advertisers, digital service providers, governments and others in shaping our ecosystems at a fundamental level. If accountability is the goal, the burden cannot be shouldered only by those seeking information but must also include the intermediaries, hosts and brokers of information online and offline. The need for a more holistic view is clearly defined in the UN’s Global Principles for Information Integrity,31 published in July 2024 and expanding on the Our Common Agenda32 report launched for the body’s 75th anniversary. These agendas look to reframe the public debate and articulate how policy can address the behaviours and systems that drive disinformation at scale. They also stress that “strengthening the good” cannot be the sole priority if recent trends are to be reversed; it is also critical to “weaken the bad” and create an environment where information integrity is both viable and self-sustaining. Research has continually shown that disinformation outpaces facts or evidence, since this content helps drive the attention economy and systems optimized for engagement. As such, interventions that make wilful deceit harder to produce, riskier and less profitable are key. The playing field must be levelled so that credible information has a fighting chance. And, above all, disinformation must be undermined at every stage, from its design and distribution to its consumption and impact. The information resilience mapping model in Figure 1 has been developed to support work under the Global Coalition for Digital Safety. It aims to strengthen a whole-of-society response by: –Unpacking the life cycle of disinformation (x-axis). The model outlines all stages where disinformation could be discouraged, intercepted, weakened, challenged and countered at scale. This includes potential points of entry before content enters the public domain or starts gaining traction as opposed to a purely reactive approach. Debate and interventions tend to focus on the tail end of this pipeline, by which point mitigation is often more costly and must contend with a wider array of factors. –Identifying all stakeholders necessary for response (y-axis). The model explores the role played by different groups and how their specific contributions interrelate. These are not intended 3.1 Towards a whole-of-society strategyTo date, efforts to tackle disinformation have generally focused on consumers and content. The former includes a spectrum of MIL interventions, as outlined in Section 1 of this report, aiming to change individual habits and mitigate harms that may occur when disinformation is encountered “in the wild”. The latter attempts to counter falsehoods via an arsenal of reactive fact-checks and debunking mechanisms, alongside ongoing research into the narrative and tactical playbooks used by malign actors. Monitoring may help surface threats before they reach a critical mass of exposure or engagement, while analysis can reveal the common techniques of disinformers and their apparent motivations (commercial, political, ideological, personal and so on). Rethinking Media Literacy: A New Ecosystem Model for Information Integrity 15