How do children tell if online news is fake? Here’s a slip, slop, slap-up idea

When I was a kid, a big yellow cat with a Cheshire grin taught me how to cross the road. His name was Hector The Cat, and you couldn’t turn on the Saturday morning cartoons without bumping into him.

“Stop at the kerb, look to the right, look to the left, look to the right again,” he sang, in an advertising jingle that is still imprinted on my memory. I learned about skin cancer prevention in much the same way. A roughly hewn cartoon seagull called Sid extolled the virtues of “Slip! Slop! Slap!” in a mantra that millions of Australians still repeat to this day.

At primary school, I remember countless winter mornings heading to the council pool to hurl myself fully clothed into the deep end to retrieve a brick. Why? Because parents, teachers, and governments understood that when it came to saving the next generation from drowning, melanoma and being mowed down by traffic prevention was better than the cure.

It’s a principle that’s worth revisiting as the parliamentary inquiry into social media and Australian society unfurls in our nation’s capital. A panel of our elected representatives is trying to untangle the Gordian knot of how to minimise the impact that prolonged scrolling on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram is having on us. And at its heart are concerns about the mis- and disinformation we’re increasingly exposed to. Fake news that can mislead entire swathes of the population, sway elections and undermine democratic processes.

With Meta deciding to pull out of the News Media Bargaining Code – cutting millions from the bottom line of media companies all over the country and removing credible news from Facebook and Insta feeds – there will definitely be a corresponding uptick in the amount of fake news to which Aussies are exposed. Such has been the experience in Canada. And so the question is: how to combat it?

Age verification on social media sites has been proposed to mitigate the problem, as there are bans for people under 16. And, certainly, regulation must be a part of the solution. But if we’ve learnt anything from Sid and Hector, surely it’s that education has to underpin it all. And very specifically, in this case, media literacy education delivered in a co-ordinated national effort and, crucially, at a young age – before our kids disappear into the social media vortex.

Media literacy means teaching kids to be critical consumers of information. It means teaching them to recognise misinformation when they come across it online. Lessons which common sense dictates should be taught before they have a smartphone in their hands.

As Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant told the parliamentary inquiry on June 28, we don’t send our kids to the beach without teaching them how to swim, so why are we blithely letting them loose in the wild west of the internet without teaching them to think critically about the flood of information they will encounter there?