News literacy for a responsible online news experience against harmful messages: implications for political engagement of Egyptian and Spanish youth.

Abstract

This exploratory study has the main goal of positioning news literacy as a mediating factor toward fostering political engagement, by investigating its role in enhancing youth's online news experience preparing them against harmful content. News literacy is defined as a multi-structural construct with three main constituents; motivation, knowledge and skills. The study is applied on a sample of young people from Egypt and a sample of young people from Spain, based on which comparative analysis is conducted. The study's main goal is accomplished through delving into youth's online news experience, assessing their level of news literacy and inferring implications for political engagement. In that sense, the notion of harmful content emerges with focus on fake news and hate speech as two main types of misleading content encountered on the internet in general and on social media in specific. This calls to question whether citizens are 'responsible' when it comes to their online news behavior. Accordingly, correlations between news literacy and other variables are tested. Findings reveal a positive correlation between news literacy and: the ability to identify fake news, the ability to identify hate speech, engagement to news, caring about veracity of content before sharing, motivation to seek news and political engagement

Date of Award	25 Sept 2019
Original language	English
Supervisor	Cristina Pulido Rodriguez (Director), Jose Manuel Perez Tornero (Director), Jose Manuel Perez Tornero (Tutor) & Laura Cervi (Director)