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Citizens’ Networks of Digital and Data Literacy

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The Palgrave Handbook of Media Misinformation

Abstract

Dis-/mis-/mal-information are a cause for growing concerns across the world and scholars have been discussing the spread of misinformation around such things as elections, COVID-19 or the climate crisis. They have documented how people across the world are effectively bombarded with misleading messages through various media from social media (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok), private messaging apps (e.g. WhatsApp, WeChat) and broadcast media. This raises the question of how citizens can respond to this? What resources (social, cultural and material) can they draw upon to identify, evaluate and respond to mis-information? This chapter focuses on this question by exploring citizens’ digital and data literacies, especially the social networks (personal and digital) that citizens depend on for support.

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Correspondence to Simeon Yates .

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This ‘Me and my big data—developing citizens’ data literacies’ project was funded by The Nuffield Foundation under grant number FR-000021473. The Nuffield Foundation is an independent charitable trust with a mission to advance social well-being. It funds research that informs social policy, primarily in Education, Welfare and Justice. It also funds student programmes that provide opportunities for young people to develop skills in quantitative and scientific methods. The Nuffield Foundation is the founder and co-funder of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and the Ada Lovelace Institute. The Foundation has funded this project, but the views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily the Foundation.

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Yates, S., Carmi, E. (2023). Citizens’ Networks of Digital and Data Literacy. In: Fowler-Watt, K., McDougall, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Media Misinformation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11976-7_13

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