Portugal's secretary of state for cinema, audiovisual and media argued on Wednesday that citizens prepared for the future must be informed and in order for that to happen they need instruments that defend them from the "traps of disinformation" that "undermine democracies", in comments to Lusa.
Nuno Artur Silva was speaking in erlation the launch of the LEME website, which contains media literacy resources that are to be available to all educators.
"Valuing media literacy is fundamental for citizenship and social participation reasons, so that everyone can participate in an informed way," the secretary of state said. "We are all vulnerable when we are on social networks, when we read a news story, when we see a news story on television or information comes to us on the internet: we are vulnerable and we tend to believe the news.
"Nowadays this is fertile ground for voluntary manoeuvres, sometimes involuntary, of disinformation and this undermines democracies, it destroys democracy," he said.
Silva said that there was a gap in the fight against disinformation, as no content aggregator existed such as the one that is now being launched, to help equip students with tools to fight disinformation and 'fake news'.
"What we are doing seems fundamental to the defence of democracy because it is, deep down, to give citizens from a very young age the ability to understand how they should inform themselves, that is, what they have to be alert to in order to understand if the information they receive is correct, if the sources are credible, if they are not being deceived," he explained.
However, he stressed that media companies themselves should also create their own mechanisms to defend themselves against disinformation, even if with the support of and incentives from the government.
"The areas where at the moment the government has the possibility to intervene directly is here at the level of schools," he said. "This is, let's say, part of the government's area of influence, through a series of programmes to encourage media literacy."
The government on Wednesday launches a website called LEME containing media literacy resources, with contributions from several sources, among them Lusa itself.
In a note from the cabinet office, the government recalled that, through the secretary of state for education, João Costa, and Silva himself, it had "decided to promote, in June 2020, the creation of a working group formed by researchers, teachers, trainers, journalists and representatives of public institutions" that was then "mandated to inventory, select and systematise the available resources on media literacy, as well as to propose innovations that contribute to enrich the offer and to fill the gaps detected."
This group's work "originated the creation of a website, called LEME - Media Literacy and Education Online (leme.gov.pt), funded by .PT [which manages the .pt domain] which, in the meantime, has joined the project," the note reads.
The new site is "entirely dedicated to media literacy resources, with the purpose of contributing so that educators and teachers of pre-school, primary and secondary education promote in a more sustained way their pedagogical mission of stimulating in their students, consumers and producers of contents in the digital media more and more frequently, the knowledge, the skills and the critical sense indispensable to an informed and responsible performance," it continues.
LEME is, as of Wednesday, "accessible to the general public [and] free of charge."
Source: https://www.lusa.pt/article/34286380/portugal-new-media-literacy-website-defence-against-fake-news-government