Vol. 13 No. 26 (2020): Digital literacy as a communication and educational challenge

Fact checking and critical thinking to fight against false news: Digital literacy as a communication and educational challenge

The recent transformation of social, cultural and technological processes, makes one of the biggest challenges of education to achieve a significant impact on teaching and learning, training people with critical thinking, capable of solving society's problems.
The greatest challenge is to promote digital education and literacy that will enable them to acquire the skills and abilities necessary to make correct use of information. The immense generation of textual and audiovisual content that has arrived with the expansion of the Internet, makes it necessary for users to have tools to verify and contrast information.
In this context, education is positioned as a key tool to train people with a critical spirit. Social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Whatsapp, etc.) are an optimal and easy context for the proliferation of hoaxes, false news or fake news that spread much faster than news coming from traditional media. In view of this context, it is necessary for digital literacy to focus not only on facilitating access to new technologies, but also on educating society to know how to detect the hoaxes or false news that it will face on the Internet. 

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