James Laughlin argues schools should teach media literacy as a subject. If it started around 2000, a generation trained to distrust disinformation could have changed everything. Without it, elections stay vulnerable.
There's a discussion. Do we need a new subject in class, in schools? Do we need something that talks about media and the use of media? And that has been debated for over decades, but it never happened. And I think if we would have started something like this in 2000, we had 20 years of educating children that they should not believe everything they see in the Internet, that there's a lot of disinformation and bullshit out there, but we didn' and I think it is going to reflect in the elections. And so it is in the interest of politicians to also think about democracy and to protect democracy, because then they are protecting their own seats.
