ISSN: 2222-6990
Open access
The penetration of social media into common practice of lifestyle in this digital era has drastically affected the modes and methods of information acquisition and assimilation of the individuals, especially that of the students. Media literacy is the key to surviving the current sea of information. This research sheds light on how media literacy impacts social media use and how that unduly influences the way a student processes information through his or her own worldview. A cross-sectional survey was carried out among 241 students to shed light on their media literacy skills and awareness about social media as a pathway for information dissemination as well as the influence of social media on their pattern of information consumption. Our study suggests that there is a clear and consistent association between high levels of media literacy and more responsible information behaviour. Students with advanced media literacy skills are also better equipped to independently fact-check and critically analyse biases in the content they consume. Further strong support comes from the regression analysis, which shows that media literacy is a significant predictor of each of these more responsible behaviours (? = 0.45, p < 0.001). Let this be a lesson learned for all of us about the nature of social media, the same platform without which this study would not have been possible: social media is equally a source of information and a source of misinformation. While students use social media more often than any other source for news and current events, they do so with a high degree of caution regarding the accuracy of the content they encounter on these platforms. Our results have implications for national curriculum inclusion of extensive media literacy education programmes. By learning what it is that has the effect of turning these advertising and mechanisms of propaganda around, of supporting these enterprises, social media platforms can help hone users' judgment. This way we can improve the quality of public discourse, with people less prone to spreading fake news. This study adds a lot to them and deepens our understanding of how important media literacy is in our society. It underscores the necessity of ongoing efforts to educate ourselves in order to consume information well and thoughtfully. We need more research on the lasting influence of media literacy interventions on information consumption behaviours We could if we wanted to make more extensive statements, to superimpose those inferential generalizations to more diverse demographic groups. Focusing on media literacy can give people the tools to navigate the digital information environment in a responsible and effective way.
Boczkowski, P. J., Mitchelstein, E., & Matassi, M. (2018). News comes across when I'm in a moment of leisure: Understanding the practices of incidental news consumption on social media. New Media & Society, 20(10), 3523-3539.
Bulger, M., & Davison, P. (2021). The Promises, Challenges, and Futures of Media Literacy. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 13(1), 1-23.
Chen, Y., & Wu, S. (2019). The impact of media literacy on adolescents’ social media use: A meta-analysis. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 11(2), 38-51.
Cinelli, M., Morales, G. D. F., Galeazzi, A., Quattrociocchi, W., & Starnini, M. (2020). The echo chamber effect on social media. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(9), 2761-2766.
Guess, A. M., Nagler, J., & Tucker, J. A. (2019). Less than you think: Prevalence and predictors of fake news dissemination on Facebook. Science Advances, 5(1), eaau4586.
Hobbs, R. (2017). Create to learn: Introduction to digital literacy. John Wiley & Sons.
Hobbs, R. (2020). Media Literacy in Action: Questioning the Media. Rowman & Littlefield.
Jones-Jang, S. M., Mortensen, T., & Liu, J. (2019). Does media literacy help identification of fake news? Information literacy helps, but other literacies don't. American Behavioral Scientist, 65(2), 371-388.
Kahne, J., & Bowyer, B. (2017). Educating for democracy in a partisan age: Confronting the challenges of motivated reasoning and misinformation. American Educational Research Journal, 54(1), 3-34.
Koltay, T. (2020). Media and information literacy in the era of information disorder. Libri, 70(2), 113-124.
Livingstone, S., & Helsper, E. J. (2020). Balancing opportunities and risks in teenagers' use of the internet: The role of online skills and internet self-efficacy. New Media & Society, 22(8), 1478-1497.
Livingstone, S., Stoilova, M., & Kelly, A. (2022). The model of media literacy: Understanding digital and media literacy in the digital age. New Media & Society, 24(3), 646-664.
Mihailidis, P., & Viotty, S. (2017). Spreadable spectacle in digital culture: Civic expression, fake news, and the role of media literacies in "post-fact" society. American Behavioral Scientist, 61(4), 441-454.
Park, S. (2020). Youth and digital media: From credibility to information quality. Communication Research, 47(5), 723-745.
Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2021). The Implied Truth Effect: Attaching Warnings to a Subset of Fake News Stories Increases Perceived Accuracy of Stories without Warnings. Management Science, 67(1), 22-36.
Rasi, P., Vuojärvi, H., & Ruokamo, H. (2019). Media literacy education for all ages. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 11(2), 1-19.
Ruggiero, T. E. (2017). Uses and Gratifications Theory in the 21st Century. Mass Communication & Society, 3(1), 3-37.
Schunk, D. H., & Usher, E. L. (2019). Social cognitive theory and motivation. In R. M. Ryan (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of human motivation (2nd ed., pp. 11–26). Oxford University Press.
Shao, C., Ciampaglia, G. L., Flammini, A., & Menczer, F. (2018). The spread of low-credibility content by social bots. Nature Communications, 9(1), 1-9.
Tamboer, S., Kleemans, M., & Daalmans, S. (2020). Adolescents' news consumption and news literacy: The role of family communication patterns. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 12(3), 53-64.
Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146-1151.
(Latif et al., 2024)
Latif, A. S. S. S. @ A., Latiff, D. I. A., Zambri, W. A. A. M., Bakar, M. N. A., Razak, M. A., & Kamal, S. (2024). Youth and Media Literacy: Understanding Social Media’s Influence on Information Consumption. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 14(6), 1199–1211.
Copyright: © 2024 The Author(s)
Published by HRMARS (www.hrmars.com)
This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this license may be seenavc at: http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/legalcode