Background:

The United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) recognized media literacy as an educational and cultural area that needed to be addressed, particularly when aiming at building bridges of better understanding between individuals of different religious and cultural backgrounds.  UNAOC sees the field of media literacy as an opportunity for the development of peace building initiatives, addressing polarization that too often provokes identity-based violent confrontations.

The constant exposure of populations to media presents an educational challenge, which has increased in the current electronic and digital age. Evaluating information sources requires skills and critical thinking. Separating fact from opinion, evaluating text and image for bias, and constructing and deconstructing a text based on principles of logic are teachable skills. Media literacy instruction is not widely recognized for its importance as an aspect of civic and peace education and therefore few instructional programmes have been developed as part of basic modern education.

The Report of the High-level Group of the Alliance of Civilizations recommends that “media literacy programmes should be implemented in schools, particularly at the secondary level, to help develop a discerning and critical approach to news coverage by media consumers” and “to promote media awareness and development of Internet literacy to combat misperceptions, prejudices and hate speech.”

Objectives:

The Asia Pacific Institute for Broadcasting Development (AIBD), an inter-governmental international organization aims to create awareness on the issues and impact of Media Literacy and disinformation among the younger generations who are IT savvy and mostly consuming information online via social media platforms.  Partnering with its founding father – ITU and its stakeholder – NBT Bangkok to discuss these issues which is rampant and dangerous with the advent of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT). The training session aims to highlight and address the challenges faced by the younger generations due to various forms of misinformation, disinformation and mal-information particularly during the period of COVID-19 pandemic.

The training session is parts of the activities to mark the 3-month long ITU’s Girls in ICT Day Thailand 2022 which was launched on 28th April in Bangkok.  It is to bridge the digital gender divide and encouraging girls and young women to pursue academic and professional careers in STEM, particularly ICTs with an enhanced knowledge on Media Literacy and how to counter and address disinformation etc.

Project Inputs:

• Three (3) speakers including a Project Manager of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation and experts from NBT who will deliver the 2-day training session in Thai language;
• Each speaker will focus on one topic per day:

(i)      Day 1 – Media Literacy

(ii)     Day 2 – Disinformation

• The session can be a moderated discussion; after the session the participants will be given a n online survey to fill in order to voice out their thoughts on coping with disinformation as the evaluation. Need to generate the Google survey form
• This virtual training session will be conducted via zoom platform hosted from Kuala Lumpur.

Project Outputs:

This projects aims to create awareness by sharing best practices, studying legislation, tools and application already available that address these topics as well as discussing the ideas with the professional consultants on solution based information.

This proposed training session will look at the overall cause and effect of ‘Fake News’ as well as media  information and literacy as a mode to overcome the spread of ‘fake news’.

• Find the best practices from ASEAN countries which have adopted laws on the topic;
• Explore the tools and applications available to the media practitioners to authenticate sources; and
• Discuss with the youths (University, College & High-School Students) on how to use media literacy and information to tackle spread of ‘fake news’.

Participants’ profile:

The training session is open to all media students of Universities, Colleges and High-Schools in Bangkok under the purview of the Ministry of Education (MoE) Thailand besides staff of NBT to enhance their knowledge on Media Literacy and how to counter and address Disinformation etc.