This Local Action implemented by Agora 7 and its partners, reacts to low media literacy in the Czech population and its elderly citizens' vulnerability to disinformation, chain emails, fake news and conspiracy theories.
It combines the elements of media education for elderly people and empowerment, which is currently an important topic for educational "Centre Přístav 7" (in this particular case, it involves the dissemination of a manual among the elderly and the training of several of them to act as so-called black sheep among their peers in the fight against disinformation).
Through a simple flipchart test the basic indicators of disinformation messages are presented. To do this a specific example of a message that has actually circulated as a chain email is used. At the beginning of the test, the respondent is put in a real situation where the message reaches them through someone close to them and during the test they learn when it is safe to share the information further and where the person close to them made a mistake and did not detect the fake message themselves. The test is supplemented with info boxes that put the indicators into deeper context. The creation of the manual was based on available research outputs and data on the media literacy of the elderly, their needs and Agora's personal experience with the target group. For this reason, it was also decided to keep the test as simple as possible and to make the message easy to understand.
The project also builds on our ongoing educational activities in the field of media literacy (mainly lectures and discussions), as well as on upcoming projects such as "elderly as fake news hunters".
Get inspired and help the senior citizens fight the infodemic of misinformation with our free, self-paced course on Countering Disinformation:
