Almost 60% of secondary school students in public schools identify fake news
More than half of Spain's Compulsory Secondary Education (ESO, in its Spanish acronym) students can distinguish between fake and real news. This is one of the conclusions of a study carried out by researchers from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) which analyses Spanish public school students' approach to the media. The research shows how these students (between 11 and 16) get their information and how they deal with misinformation, among other factors. "A fake headline about Covid-19 was identified as fake news by 58.8% of the students, while 51.8% considered a headline containing fake news about immigration to be true", says one of the authors of the study, Eva Herrero, who published this work in the scientific journal Comunicar together with Leonardo La Rosa, both from the UC3M Communications Department. Regarding discrimination between journalistic genres, 92.1% say that they are able to distinguish between information and opinion, but researchers found that 64.4% confuse an opinion piece with an informative text. In relation to the preferred platforms to get information, the majority do so through social media (55.5%), television (29.1%) and their family and friends groups (7.9%), ahead of digital newspapers (6.5%) or radio (1%). Researchers have studied how teenagers deal with the media from a mixed approach.
