“The goal is active, responsible citizens and voters. Thinking critically, fact-checking, interpreting and evaluating all the information you receive, wherever it appears, is crucial. We’ve made it a core part of what we teach teach, across all subjects.”
Fakery abounds. But it doesn’t have to.
Word that Prince Harry lost his press complaint against the Mail on Sunday that dramatic wildlife pictures the Duke of Sussex took in Africa did not show the fact that the animals were tethered and sedated at the time came just days after another report singled out Finland as a country where media education — the fight against fake news — is now being taught in elementary schools, to children so young they have only just learned how to read.
Finland was recently rated as Europe’s most resistant nation to fake news.
Fake photos, too, one imagines.
And small wonder. Hard as it may be to believe, children as young as seven and eight are learning how to spot the difference between misinformation, disinformation and mal-information.
The Prince Harry photos don’t really fit any of these categories, as the UK Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO) findings show.
The way they were presented, though, was misleading, whether by intent or accident, through error of omission if nothing else.
By cropping out a rope tether around the elephant’s back legs, and by failing to mention that the ele is sedated, the impression given is that the Duke of Sussex is an intrepid, fearless explorer in deepest, darkest Africa, awestruck and unbowed by the mightiest of beasts.
Career conservationists — and probably Harry himself — would be more interested in the actual story behind the photo: The elephant in question was part of a difficult and dangerous relocation of wild elephants and rhinos in the southern African nation of Malawi to a safer part of that country, where they wouldn’t chased and poached for their ivory and horn.
The photos were last April on the Sussexes’ Instagram account, in recognition of Earth Day.
The supposedly offending image itself was taken years earlier, in 2016.
Fakery abounds. But it doesn’t have to.
Word that Prince Harry lost his press complaint against the Mail on Sunday that dramatic wildlife pictures the Duke of Sussex took in Africa did not show the fact that the animals were tethered and sedated at the time came just days after another report singled out Finland as a country where media education — the fight against fake news — is now being taught in elementary schools, to children so young they have only just learned how to read.
Finland was recently rated as Europe’s most resistant nation to fake news.
Fake photos, too, one imagines.
And small wonder. Hard as it may be to believe, children as young as seven and eight are learning how to spot the difference between misinformation, disinformation and mal-information.
The Prince Harry photos don’t really fit any of these categories, as the UK Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO) findings show.
The way they were presented, though, was misleading, whether by intent or accident, through error of omission if nothing else.
By cropping out a rope tether around the elephant’s back legs, and by failing to mention that the ele is sedated, the impression given is that the Duke of Sussex is an intrepid, fearless explorer in deepest, darkest Africa, awestruck and unbowed by the mightiest of beasts.
Career conservationists — and probably Harry himself — would be more interested in the actual story behind the photo: The elephant in question was part of a difficult and dangerous relocation of wild elephants and rhinos in the southern African nation of Malawi to a safer part of that country, where they wouldn’t chased and poached for their ivory and horn.
The photos were last April on the Sussexes’ Instagram account, in recognition of Earth Day.
The supposedly offending image itself was taken years earlier, in 2016.
The rope around the elephant’s back legs was not visible in the frame because of Instagram’s restrictive format, according to papers filed by the complainant, and not because of any deliberate action or deception on the part of the Sussexes in how the picture was edited and presented.
The Mail on Sunday — never an admirer of the royal family — argued before the press council that seeing is believing: The photo is not all that it seems, whether the cropping was by design or forced on the Sussexes by Instagram’s algorithm. (I’ve had personal experience with this on my own Instagram account; Instagram is designed to show an image in a square format, but there’s a button at the bottom of the screen that gives the user the option of posting an image in the original 4x3 aspect ratio favoured by most of today’s SLR cameras. The only catch is that the user has to know the button is there, and then know how to use it.)
In the case of Prince Harry and the ele photo, the Sussexes posted an uncropped version of the photo on the royal family’s website when it was originally taken, in 2016.
The Duke of Sussex’s Instagram post in April included a link to the website of the conservation NGO that hosted Harry; the uncropped version, showing the tether, is clearly posted for anyone and everyone to see.
In the case before the press council, each side accused the other of being deliberately misleading.
In their finding, regulators ruled the complaint was unproven or unprovable: Take your pick. These things often come down to a question of personal interpretation.
Interpretation — knowing how to tell the difference between fake and real, deliberate and accidental, subjective and objective — lies at the heart of the concept of media education.
And that’s what makes the Finland school program so telling, and so interesting to see in action.
Primary schools lay the groundwork, by encouraging seven and eight-year-olds to learn how to separate fake from real.
In fairy tales, for example, foxes are almost always shown to be wily and deceptive, tricksters who prey on unsuspecting victims using sly words.
Children are reminded, though, that in real life foxes don’t speak — at least not in words any other animals, or person, can understand.
Already, the child is learning to understand the use of allegory and metaphor.
By secondary school, information literacy and critical thinking are taught in virtually every class, at every level, whether mathematics, where pupils learn how easy it is to lie using statistics, or history, where they learn about effective propaganda campaigns throughout history.
This is especially pertinent for a country like Finland, which won independence from Russia in 1917 and has faced a relentless disinformation war ever since, a war that has only heated up since Russia annexed Crimea just five years ago and told the world that was a good and righteous deed.
In language class, students are shown the ways different words — and images — can be used to mislead, confuse and deceive.
The media education program has the stamp of approval right up into the upper echelons of Finland’s national government.
Children are taught from a young age that, while the government has a social responsibility to protect them from bad information and lies, the primary responsibility ultimately comes down to the individual.
Interpretation — knowing how to tell the difference between fake and real, deliberate and accidental, subjective and objective — lies at the heart of the concept of media education.
And that’s what makes the Finland school program so telling, and so interesting to see in action.
Primary schools lay the groundwork, by encouraging seven and eight-year-olds to learn how to separate fake from real.
In fairy tales, for example, foxes are almost always shown to be wily and deceptive, tricksters who prey on unsuspecting victims using sly words.
Children are reminded, though, that in real life foxes don’t speak — at least not in words any other animals, or person, can understand.
Already, the child is learning to understand the use of allegory and metaphor.
By secondary school, information literacy and critical thinking are taught in virtually every class, at every level, whether mathematics, where pupils learn how easy it is to lie using statistics, or history, where they learn about effective propaganda campaigns throughout history.
This is especially pertinent for a country like Finland, which won independence from Russia in 1917 and has faced a relentless disinformation war ever since, a war that has only heated up since Russia annexed Crimea just five years ago and told the world that was a good and righteous deed.
In language class, students are shown the ways different words — and images — can be used to mislead, confuse and deceive.
The media education program has the stamp of approval right up into the upper echelons of Finland’s national government.
Children are taught from a young age that, while the government has a social responsibility to protect them from bad information and lies, the primary responsibility ultimately comes down to the individual.
“Kids today . . . don’t look for news,” Kari Kivinen, dean of education and head teacher at the Franco-Finnish Lycée franco-finlandais school in Helsinki explained in an interview this past weekend with the Guardian’s Jon Henley.
“They stumble across it, on WhatsApp, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat . . . or, more precisely, an algorithm selects it, just for them. They must be able to approach it critically. Not cynically — we don’t want them to think everyone lies — but critically.”
The critical way of looking at the photo of Prince Harry and the elephant, then, is to ask: How and where was this taken; what were the circumstances; when was it taken; why was it taken; and who stands to benefit?
Prince Harry comes by his conservation passions honestly by all accounts, and is not in it for photo ops. He would probably be the first to agree that these are good questions.
‘Prince Harry, Intrepid Explorer in Africa,’ while a fun image, is not particularly helpful, for anyone — except, perhaps, a profit-driven newspaper looking to sell copies to curious onlookers at the local newsstand.
On the other hand, the message, ‘Prince Harry wants to save elephants. It’s awe-inspiring work, but hard and dangerous,’ is a message anyone can get behind. Nearly anyone, at any rate.
The trick is in learning how to separate the two, and know fake from real.
©The Australian.co.au