When teens turn to social media for health and wellness information, they often encounter content that pushes diet fads, distorts body image, and encourages them to take risky dares that seem funny but can be dangerous.
We are a health teacher and a librarian in suburban North Salem, N.Y., and these are among the disturbing trends we’ve noticed when we asked students to analyze the health information that they see on their social media feeds.
Paid social media influencers produce much of the content teens find first when seeking information about their well-being. Fueled by personalization algorithms, these posts often pedal false claims, dubious remedies, and even dangerous products.
With the average teen spending nearly five hours a day online, news- and media-literacy instruction should be required in schools. Without critical-thinking skills and the ability to identify reliable sources in a sea of baseless content, teens don’t have the tools to make healthy decisions otherwise.
Students spend hours scanning content passively without really thinking about what they are absorbing. Teaching students news literacy (the ability to determine the credibility of sources) and media literacy (a broader discipline that helps students analyze all types of media messages) can help them learn to slow down.
We have personally seen how empowering it can be when students learn these skills and question claims about how to be well.
Three years ago, North Salem was one of the five districts from around the country to participate in the first cohort of the News Literacy Project District Fellowship Program. The news literacy program, which will soon reach nearly 30 districts across more than 17 states, supports school districts that want to develop and implement districtwide news- and media-literacy education.
Among other initiatives, our North Salem news-literacy cohort—which was led by one of us (Cynthia Sandler)—relied on the program’s news-literacy experts, teaching resources, and a stipend to develop curriculum for our high school students to think critically about the health claims popping up in their own social media feeds.
Integrating media literacy into health class has helped our students see how important it is to have the skills to identify credible information. The message was loud and clear: Who and what we trust online can affect our mental and physical health. Throughout the rest of the course, we will continue to practice these skills, knowledge, and dispositions.
To address this questionable but pervasive online content, we focused on teaching students about how the algorithms that dictate what they see online push them toward more extreme content to keep them engaged. This lesson helped students train their brains to recognize when a claim is backed by evidence versus when they’re being served catchy words that bypass rational thinking. Now, our students know that promises for a “quick remedy,” describing something as “natural,” or even stunning before-and-after photos are all red flags.
We discussed the power of influencers, who present themselves as relatable, trustworthy peers and even friends. We challenged our students to think about why content is so engaging and simple and what specific techniques media creators use to reel us in.
At the start of our project, many students considered large numbers of followers, likes, and shares as markers of an influencer’s credibility. By the end, our teens had developed habits of healthy skepticism when scrolling their feeds by asking: Who’s behind this information?
We taught students to use lateral reading to determine whether a source was trustworthy: When they encountered unfamiliar sources and claims, they learned to open new browser tabs to do a quick online search. Students realized that it often takes just seconds to find that a promised “miracle” cure has been thoroughly debunked.
This project culminated with students creating their own TikTok-style videos in which they analyzed a post on their algorithmic feed, confirmed their findings through credible sources, and identified persuasive appeals. They became the teachers in the room.
We are encouraged by what we’re seeing in this project. Recently, a sophomore came to class saying, “This weekend I saw a post saying that tanning is safer than sunscreen, but I fact-checked, and, let’s just say, I wore sunscreen to my game.”
By the end of our project, our students had evaluated claims they saw on their feeds ranging from the weight-loss properties of chia seeds, the chemical ingredients in makeup products, or the stress-relief potential of humming.
We need to make sure that all students feel empowered to navigate their online world. To grow up healthy in our social media age, young people need a new set of skills to analyze and question the claims that populate their feeds about their health as well as all other areas of their lives. However, too many teens are not learning these skills in school. Last fall, the News Literacy Project released a nationally representative study of more than 1,000 teens that showed 39% haven’t had any media-literacy lessons—despite 94% saying they wanted them.
It’s encouraging that our neighbors in New Jersey and Connecticut have passed legislation that will require all students to learn these skills. In our home state, a coalition called DemocracyReady NY is advocating to do the same by leveraging its research and collective action approach to persuade lawmakers and state education officials. We hope they succeed.
We can and will do our parts to help to integrate news and media literacy. But legislators and school leaders must make it a requirement for students to learn news- and media-literacy skills before they graduate from high school—not just in health class, but across all subject areas. Otherwise, we leave their well-being up to influence seekers and product pushers.
